One of the worst-kept secrets of director Zack Snyder's Justice League is that Superman returns from the grave, following his sacrifice in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. Comics fans are accustomed to superheroes coming back from the dead, so it's no big surprise, but how he comes back is still a mystery. Of course, the Man of Steel also famously died in comic books 25 years ago, so we thought it would be worthwhile to revisit Superman's resurrection in the comics, to see whethre any of the same machinations of his return will also occur in the film.
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After Superman died fighting against the horrific monster known as Doomsday, DC Comics' Superman titles quickly began to address how the world reacted to his death with "Funeral for a Friend." It was a depressing series of issues, made even more so because it ended with Superman's adopted father, Jonathan Kent, collapsing of a heart attack, right before the books then took a three-month hiatus, leaving Pa Kent's fate a mystery. The story then picked up in Adventures of Superman #500 (the last issue written by Jerry Ordway, who was the sole remaining creator from the reboot of the Man of Steel in 1986). Pa Kent is in some version of the afterlife, where he encounters his adopted son and decides that rather than head back to his own life, he will instead risk everything to save his son. Jonathan then travels through a series of encounters with the horrors of his past (fighting in the war as a young man) and Kryptonian demons before ultimately getting Superman to agree to fight to live again. The two men then choose to forgo "going into the light" and instead try to return to the land of the living together.
Jonathan then awakens in a hospital, having seemingly been shocked back to life, with his experience chalked to a dream. However, he is convincing enough that Lois Lane flies back to Metropolis and checks out Superman's tomb ... and discovers that his body is not there!
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That, of course, then led into the storyline known as the "Reign of the Supermen," in which three of four new characters arrived, claiming they were a returned Superman, in a fashion (one of them, John Henry Irons, only claimed he was carrying on Superman's legacy as a superhero. One of them claimed to be a cyborg version of Superman, as his original body had been too badly damaged by Doomsday. Another claimed to be a clone of the original Superman. The final one claimed that he had been changed by death into becoming more of a ruthless vigilante.
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Over time, it was revealed the Cyborg Superman was actually a villain. The other three Supermen stood against him, but things looked pretty bad for them. However, circumstances began to turn around when what appeared to be a Kryptonian robot escaped from the Fortress of Solitude and traveled to Metropolis, where the heroes were arguing about getting ready to protect the city from the incoming invasion by the Cyborg Superman. The mention of Metropolis in danger forced the inhabitant of the walking armor to reveal himself: It was Superman!!
Superman, though, returned without his powers, so he had to use weapons to help the other Supermen take on Cyborg Superman. In the fight, the Cyborg Superman badly injured the "Eradicator" version of Superman. The Eradicator then seemingly sacrificed itself by sending Superman back his powers. As it turned out, the reason Superman's body was missing was because the Eradicator had taken it out of the tomb and later drained enough of its life force so as to power up the Eradicator with Superman's powers.
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After the now re-powered Superman defeated Cyborg Superman (and the alien invaders who were working alongside him), he got the chance to re-establish his life on Earth with Lois Lane (there was a shapeshifting alien known as Matrix who was operating as Supergirl at the time - she used her powers to shapeshift into Superman and therefore allow Clark Kent to be miraculously found alive, living in the wreckage of Superman's fight against Doomsday). They were then visited by the mysterious Doctor Occult, who earlier revealed how all of the previous events had worked out so that Superman could return from the dead.
The first step is to note that, even as Superman's soul began to leave, his physical body was still being powered by Earth's sun (and received a significant jolt of energy when the secretive scientific group known as Cadmus had used a super-charged defibrillator to try to shock Superman's heart back to life). So Superman's unique Kryptonian body was able to continue to barely function even after it was separated from his soul. However, without the soul, and trapped in a tomb without any new energy to power it, eventually the body would have expired, as well. Superman's soul was naturally top prey for demons and that was what we saw happening in Adventures of Superman #500, where Jonathan Kent luckily was able to fight off the demons and then get his son to agree to try to return to the land of the living. So Superman's soul re-entered his body at the same time that Jonathan Kent's soul was returning to his body back in Smallville.
At the same time, the Eradicator, the Kryptonian machine designed to keep Krypton alive by any means, had entered the tomb and inadvertently copied Superman's body and became corporeal. Now with a body that looked like Superman, the Eradicator took Superman's corpse (which had just been reunited with his soul, but was only slightly functional) and returned to the Fortress of Solitude (being a Kryptonian being, the Eradicator was able to get into the Fortress) where it then placed Superman's body into a regeneration matrix to heal. The Eradicator then borrowed some energy from Superman while he was in the regeneration matrix to power himself up. This why, when Superman ultimately emerged from the Kryptonian regeneration matrix (which was housed in the suit of armor), he did not have his powers - the Eradicator had temporarily stolen them.
In a nutshell, then, what happened was that the Eradicator, dedicated to protecting Kryptonian life, tried to regenerate Superman's body - his body was only able to remain sort of functional because it received a large bolt of energy right after "death." Jonathan Kent managed to bring his soul back to the body just as the Eradicator was regenerating it. It was an absolutely unique set of circumstances that would unlikely to ever be able to occur again, as someone would have to be having a near death experience right at the same time that Superman's body was put into a regeneration matrix (which was destroyed in the story, so no longer even existed).
How much of that will make it into the film is anyone's guess, but since Eradicator doesn't exist and Jonathan Kent got himself killed in a tornado, it seems unlikely that any of it will (perhaps a Kryptonian regeneration matrix will be involved, at least).