In Death is not the End, we spotlight the outlandish explanations for comic book characters (mostly super-villains) surviving seeming certain death. Today, we see how Ant Man survived Avengers Disassembled, which involved him, you know, EXPLODING.

Oddly enough, despite helping the team a number of times over the years, including an extended sequence during the classic "Under Siege" storyline where he helped the Wasp defeat the Absorbing Man and Titania (after which, the Wasp then decided to form a new Avengers team to rescue the old one, but didn't bother to ask the guy who had JUST HELPED HER defeat the Absorbing Man and Titania!), the Scott Lang version of Ant-Man never actually joined the Avengers for whatever reason. For a time there, he basically DID join the Fantastic Four, but even there, it was more a case of him being extra help for an extended period of time. It was almost as if he was NEVER going to join a superhero team! Then, however, Geoff Johns finally got him to join the Avengers during his very good (if relatively brief) run on the series. Johns set up a rivalry between Ant-Man and another new Avenger who joined during Johns' run, Jack of Hearts. Jack of Hearts tragically ended up dying at the end of Johns' run. He went off into outer space and just died.

Anyhow, less than a year after Johns left the book, Brian Michael Bendis took over the writing reins on the Avengers and, along with artists David Finch and Danny Miki, Bendis launched "Avengers Disassembled." In that story, the Scarlet With became unhinged and used her powers to tear the Avengers apart. She re-animated the dead Jack of Hearts and had him explode, killing Scott...

Scott's daughter, Cassie, took up superheroing in honor of her late father and became the size-changing hero known as Stature as a member of the Young Avengers.

All well and good, right? People move on. Leaves fall, snow falls, time moves on. However, it was not that simple. You see, Scott was about to come back to life!

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In 2011, the Young Avengers starred in a mini-series called Avengers: The Children's Crusade (written by Allan Heinberg, drawn by Jim Cheung and Mark Morales), where Cassie's teammates, Wiccan and Speed, the sons of the Scarlet Witch, try to bring their mother back. One of their plans involved going back in time and preventing Wanda from causing the events of Avengers Disassembled. They fail to do so in the most general sense, but they do at least manage to avoid ONE of the deaths of the event, when they managed to bring Scott Lang back from the past before he is killed...

In the following issue, the other Avengers see Scott's return...

Sadly, Scott's return caused a bit of a karmic imbalance, which led to tragedy later in the series. We'll feature that some other day!

Okay, that's it for this installment! If there are any other superhero (or supervillain) resurrections that you're curious about, feel free to drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com!