In Death is Not the End, we spotlight the outlandish explanations for comic book characters (mostly super-villains) surviving seeming certain death.
This week, it is a bit of a different story, as the explanation behind Sharon Carter's survival of her seeming death is not really the outlandish part - the outlandish part is more how Captain America believed that Sharon was dead in the first place!
In "Captain America" #217 (art by John Buscema and Pablo Marcos), Sharon Carter was written out of the book by Roy Thomas, through Steve Rogers going on a search for his past mixed with a misunderstanding on Sharon's part...
(the woman who kisses Cap was a bad guy whose job was to get close to Cap in a plot that really didn't end up going anywhere)
The next we hear about Sharon is in #231 (during Roger McKenzie's stint on the book - art by Sal Buscema and Don perlin) where we learn that she was brainwashed by some neo-Nazis...
In #232 we see her in action...
In #233, we discover that the Neo-Nazis come with self-destructive incendiary devices, so Cap doesn't know if Sharon was one of the agents who self-combusted...
Cap goes looking for Sharon. He discovers that the bad guys have made a robot copy of her...
This is an important point to note. THEY MADE AN EXACT ROBOT COPY OF HER, PEOPLE!!
So Cap eventually stops the bad guys (as it turned out, Dr. Faustus, the evil expert in psychological warfare, was behind the Neo-Nazis), but then gets some bad news the following issue (#237 with a script by McKenzie and a plot by Chris Claremont) - Sharon WAS one of the brainwashed people who set themselves on fire...
So he sees on videotape Sharon burn up - when he has seen a robot copy of her from the same bad guys, who happen to be run by an expert in psychological warfare!!! And he just accepts it? Lame!! How in the world did Cap just accept that as the truth?
And this lasted for YEARS!
Anyhow, over 200 issues later, in "Captain America" #445 (by Mark Waid, Ron Garney and Scott Koblish), Cap meets a familiar face...
Later, we learn that SHIELD faked her death to cover up an undercover mission that she was on, but then SHIELD "burned" her afterwards. Eventually we learn that Nick Fury thought that she had died on the undercover mission, so he figured that it was better to have Cap think that she was dead from the first thing rather than tell him that they had faked THAT death but then she died ANYways (which actually does make sense).
Thank goodness for her return! And I can't believe it took that long to happen.
If you have a good "return from the dead" comic book story that you'd like to see featured in this column, drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com!