#FreeWillyFriday: Willy Returns

 We had four perfectly good movies (well, posters for non-existent movies) featuring Willy's son. So why did I feel the need to do this?

I blame comics.

It's a cliché, of course, that nobody stays dead in comics. For a while, that was true of everybody except Bucky, the second Robin (Jason Todd) and Uncle Ben. The first two are back, and variations of Uncle Ben have popped up in multiple multiversal stories, but he's still dead. For now.

Captain Marvel (Mar-Vell) seems to be safely six feet under, although his return has been teased and undone so many times I'm not sure if he still counts. DC even brought back Superman's biological father for a bit during “Rebirth.”

Comic book afterlives seem to be pretty lonely places, although Marvel likes sending Wolverine to Hell every few years for some reason.

This shouldn't annoy me, but sometimes it does. Even though I was fine with Kyle Rayner being Green Lantern, having met him through the Overpower card game and Grant Morrison's JLA, I know some people never let go of Hal Jordan. So him coming back made some sense.

But for most of my life, Wally West was the Flash and Barry Allen was the (kind of boring) patron saint of the DC Universe. I never understood why they felt the need to bring him back in Flash: Rebirth. Was anybody really clamoring for his return?

Here's the thing, though: I'm a hypocrite when it comes to comic book returns. If the argument is a superhero has a perfectly acceptable, established successor, then I should have been miffed when Oliver Queen returned to take the mantle of Green Arrow from his son, Connor Hawke. But I really liked Ollie, plus Kevin Smith was writing it, so I was totally on board.

(At that point, I probably knew more and had read more about Connor than his dad, but Ollie had the Van Dyke and those trick arrows, so he was my guy!)

I also would not protest the return of Lagoon Boy.

We all know a character who dies is coming back, but I at least appreciate it when the death lasts a little while. Wolverine stayed dead way longer than I expected, although they made up for it with almost as many issues tying into his return as he would have appeared in while he was away. Superior Spider-Man kept Peter Parker off the board for quite a while, although not long enough in my opinion. (Peter's great, but Dan Slott wrote plenty of good stories about him. I needed more Otto Octavius trying and failing to be a hero!)

But Marvel's Fear Itself crossover took not one but two major players off the board – only to reveal their returns in the epilogue issues of the series. I knew they weren't gone, but let me think the death had consequences for a little while.

(Covers: Flash Rebirth #1 by Ethan Van Sciver, Green Arrow Vol. 3 #10 by Matt Wagner, Superior Spider-Man Vol. 1 #1 by Ryan Stegman)