In Death is not the End, we spotlight the outlandish explanations for comic book characters (mostly super-villains) surviving seeming certain death.

Reader Fred O. wanted to know how Nightcrawler recovered from a rather permanent death during the crossover "Second Coming."

The concept of "Second Coming" was that Bastion and his evil allies decided that they needed to kill Hope Summers, the so-called "mutant messiah" (who actually DID end up eventually becoming precisely that, as Hope ended up jumpstarting the mutant race a few years later at the end of Avengers vs. X-Men). Their plan was pretty clever. They surrounded the entire general area of where the X-Men lived with a force field (to keep outside heroes from showing up to rescue the X-Men) and then targeted all of the X-Men's teleporters to prevent them from taking Hope away.

As Bastion then personally began to hunt her (using his new technology that merged Archangel abilities into his already powerful Prime-Sentinel abilities), with Nightcrawler and Rogue working as her bodyguards. In the end, the heroes seemed to have failed and Hope was about to be murdered when Nightcrawler made a fateful decision...

With his dying breath, he teleported her to the rest of the X-Men, where she was safe (for the moment) and he died in front of his friends. Very sad stuff.

Okay, so that was it. He was dead. He was CLEARLY dead. He was buried.

And yet...

A few years later, Jason Aaron and Ed McGuinness debuted Amazing X-Men, a fun new take on the X-Men. It opened with some bad guys serving Azazel (Nightcrawler's father) who had broken into heaven to steal as many souls as they could get. Sure enough, they were stopped in their tracks by one of the denizens of heaven - Nightcrawler!!

Nightcrawler then used a few of these "Bamf" creatures to come up with a transformation system that took his friends to the Afterlife to help him in his fight against his father, who planned on becoming a new god by collection billions of souls of dead people.

In the end, Nightcrawler had to cut a deal with the Bamfs. They would reverse his place in the afterlife with his father to trap Azazel and save the billions of souls. Nightcrawler was now bound to Earth, as shown in Amazing X-Men #5 (by Aaron and McGuinness), but the price he had to pay to get the deal done was high indeed...

So now, when Nightcrawler dies again, he will not get to go to Heaven because his sold has been sold to another.

Dark stuff, but the end result was the return of the awesome blue elf!

Thanks for the suggestion, Fred! Everyone else, if YOU have a suggestion for a superhero (or supervillain) resurrection that you'd like to see explained here, drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com