All throughout December, we will be examining comic book stories and ideas that were not only abandoned, but also had the stories/plots specifically "overturned" by a later writer (as if they were a legal precedent). Click here for an archive of all the previous editions of The Abandoned An' Forsaked. Feel free to e-mail me at bcronin@comicbookresources.com if you have any suggestions for future editions of this feature.

Today we look at one of the more unconvincing and yet long-lasting comic book "deaths"...

Namora was introduced in the late 1940s as part of Marvel's attempt at the time to try to make more female superheroes (I wrote about this movement in an old Comic Book Legends Revealed here).

She was pretty much forgotten entirely for years until well after her cousin, Namor, returned during the Silver Age. She made an appearance in his ongoing comic sometime around his 30th issue.

Well, roughly 20 issues later, Namora suffered one of the worst deaths that comic book characters CAN suffer - an off-panel death!

In #50 (written/drawn by Namor creator Bill Everett, Namor comes across a dead Namora in a coffin...

Her daughter, Namorita (who made her debut in #50) explains her mother's passing in Sub-Mariner #51...

You'd think that this would be easy to overturn, but no one bothered for decades until a few years back, when Jeff Parker brought Namora back in Agents of the Atlas.

Here, the group visits her grave from the Sub-Mariner issue...

but the next issue, we discover that all is not as it seems...

Yes, Namora was actually in suspended animation - not dead! And she's been back ever since!