(Spoiler alert: This piece discusses significant plot elements of Invincible #63. If this is on your still-to-read pile, then run away!)

This isn’t new territory by any stretch, but just for fun let’s count some superhero resurrections (nope, not an inclusive list). On the DC side: Superman; Barry Allen/Flash; Hal Jordan/Green Lantern (though he never really went away); Supergirl; Green Arrow; Jason Todd; Batman (in process). On the Marvel side: Jean Grey; Captain America (in process); Bucky; Hawkeye. There are likely examples to be found in Image and Dark Horse too, though I’m not as well versed in those particular realities. That’s death in the comics — we all have come to accept and even expect it. Enter Invincible #63.

Robert Kirkrman’s strong stories and characters have earned a well-deserved devoted readership. And he’s earned something else from that group: respect. Invincible #63 ends with the gleefully murderous Viltrumite named Conquest delivering a lethal blow to beloved heroine (and Invincible’s on-again love interest) Atom Eve. Fast forward to the letters page in Invincible #65, which Mr. Kirkman answers himself. Nearly every letter was dripping with anger or grief. One warned Kirkman that he would regret Eve’s death in the years to come when she wouldn’t be available for future stories. One declared that he’d stop reading after #64. Nowhere was a letter that said, “When do you think she’ll be back?” or “Bah, heroes never die. Nothing to see here, move along.” This was a huge deal and a complete surprise to readers, and clearly Robert Kirkman has given his readers the impression that not only is he capable of killing major characters, but any such deaths will be permanent. He doesn’t have to live or write by that rule himself; the important part is that we, the readers, believe that’s the rule he lives by. Seems to me this makes Mr. Kirkman darn powerful. And with great power…

Like a live-action apparition of the grabbag aesthetic we’re all enjoying each week in DC’s Wednesday Comics (all of us with expendable income and surplus retro-cheek, anyway), Vampire Cowboys’ Saturday Night Saloon Series offers six serialized plays for five monthly installments that plumb every possibility of layaway narrative.

Dustin Chinn’s “Let’s Ninja Science Ranger Team Get!” intercepts infinite-chapter Japanese monster & robot kids’ shows in a seamfull spectacular of un-slick production that feels like the fourth-tier local staging of some skating cartoon-character revue; it stinks on ice, and means every giant, marvelous mistake. In “Hack,” Crystal Skillman (who alert readers reaching the end of this sentence will know is married to Spidey/She-Hulk scribe Fred Van Lente) tunes in over-trendy season-long story-arc TV as the enchantingly unlikable IT guys in a workplace thriller gird for ill-defined viral catastrophes and Real World-ish personality wars.

An in-person movie-serial staged like a set of old production stills, Brent Cox’s “Jack O’Hanrahan and the Troubulation of Doom” has a superlatively calibrated cast of stereotypes (stuffy professor, prim gal-next-door, continental MILF and template everytoughguy) facing the best elliptical offstage menace this side of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. If you knew what was going on, it wouldn’t be mystifying, now would it?

Some will keep you watching longer than others; Mac Rogers’ “Mother Sacramento” mixes soap opera, domestic noir and Dan Brown passion-play skillfully but in too slow motion; for James Comtois’ “Entrenched” the tale of a man traveling back to WWI to change history stretches five minutes of story to 20 that feel like twice that in a time-bending trick no one was hoping for.

But it’s all leading up to a last-minute rescue from Jeff Lewonczyk’s “Lady Cryptozoologist: Season 2,” which crashes through the soundstages of several genres with its story of an erstwhile monster-safari party now marking time in the purgatorial performance venues of local police beat, lurid wildlife-channel show and terrorized middle-school biology classroom. Fate is about to force them back together on a new urban-myth hunt, in a poignant portrait of characters (and writers?) who thrive best in fantasy, delivered with flopsweat and brimstone by the Piper McKenzie troupe’s peerless farceurs.

There are four more of these sextuple features, on 10/10, 11/14, 12/12 and 1/9 at the Vampire Cowboys company’s Brooklyn bunker. They’ve got free tickets and $5 all-you-can-drink beer, so come crazy early to grab a seat while you can still stand. The bottled spirits and distilled thrills will keep you on the proverbial edge of it.

[www.vampirecowboys.com/events.htm]

The lessons of history are funny things — when we compare notes, most of us seem to have been sitting in different classrooms. It’s axiomatic that the Democrats in Congress are wary of “the lesson of ‘94,” by which they mean the backlash that supplanted Bill Clinton as president with Newt Gingrich as prime minister for four off-season years in the middle of Clinton’s ostensible two terms. Many Dems see this as a parable of going father than the American people are prepared to, with consequences for one party’s political supremacy. To most ordinary people, though, it never seems that the powers that be go far enough beyond the Beltway bubble to change ordinary lives for the better. Bill Clinton was elected decisively, and it was his own appearance of indecisiveness that made most voters try their luck with opponents who seemed to have a clearer sense of purpose. He didn’t fail, he flailed, and thus his agenda was swept away — until, tellingly, he stood up to the same opponents during the government shutdown and, despite the personal scandal and, yes, impeachable gestures toward obstruction of justice that also came out of that period, found himself reinstated and Gingrich routed by the same voters.

A little conviction goes a long way — especially since we see so little of it. By many accounts, President Obama will be dropping his promotion of a public option in healthcare reform when he addresses Congress tonight — the only element that makes reform more than rhetorical. This is in the name of “consensus” that seems like unilateral capitulation, and will cost him the commitment of an entire generation that entered political activity because of him to begin with (and others who saw him as the first chance for the system to work in a very long time). People need to know that the 77 percent of possible voters who still support a public option carry at least as much weight as a handful of industry lobbyists’ and town hall bullies’ volume. It would also be nice to think that if the stimulus/recovery bill, which seems to have worked though it chiefly did so by putting much more of our money in bankers’ pockets, was important enough to pass without one Republican vote, then maybe everyone’s life and death is equally urgent.

Scores of House members have vowed to vote against any bill without a public option, and even Senator Baucus, who has been footdragging in deference to Republicans on his committee who insist on a compromise they show no interest in making, is now saying he will schedule a vote no matter what (though he too is “warning” that a public option “will never pass”). It’s uncertain, therefore, which members of his historic majority President Obama is making ready to bring in line tonight — the ones who’ve been acting like an opposition party in their own self-interest, or the ones who are siding with the public option — and thus the public — regardless of what it means to their electoral fortunes. Since the president’s address is widely seen as a reassertion of executive control over the health-reform process from an unproductive legislature, maybe members of Congress will belatedly solidify around something resembling the president’s original ambitious plan, in the name of retaining their authority — which would make his timing masterful, as long as he intends to abide by its results.

But it’s not looking good. A recent post on Politico quotes an unnamed White House aide as stating “We have been saying *all along* [my emphasis] that the most important part of this debate is not the public option” — a revision of the immediate past that is one of several signs that there hasn’t been quite the course-change from the previous imperial administration that everyone wants to believe there’s been. Later in the same post, an anonymous “top Senate Democratic leadership aide” says that it will be good that Obama is “rolling up his sleeves and entering the fray,” though “the [lack of a] public option [Politico's interjection] certainly makes it a harder sell.” — whether that’s a huge leak of a fait-accompli on the aide’s part, or an unveiled threat to Obama to un-accompli it, is the six-hundred-billion-dollar question (and in any case, Politico watches the lead rush past without comment).

Either way, we’re at a turning point. Not in healthcare as such — the status quo of the world’s richest country enjoying fiftieth place in life expectancy has apparently been acceptable for years and, barring steadfastness by Obama, will persist that way for another decade or two until, mark my words, some strong-willed Republican president rams through complete nationalization to dislodge us from the crisis. It’s a turning point in whether the citizenry will matter, or even show up. If business-as-usual must go on after all, even when you have a solid mandate from the electorate and an unbeatable majority in government, why be involved at all? This can take more people out of the process than even an assassin’s bullet — Lyndon Johnson got John Kennedy’s civil rights laws passed with a sense of intensified purpose, but what might have happened if Kennedy had already turned a deaf ear to Martin Luther King’s movement and forfeited the hope that had been placed in him? Of course, and in fairness to the current president, this is more than an abstract question. The guys showing up heavily armed to town halls are making an open assassination threat. Fair or not, though, it falls to Obama to demonstrate that this intimidation can’t work.

It should be helpful to remember that that isn’t the only way in which history could repeat itself. Presidents Kennedy and Johnson also faced many defiant Democrats in getting civil rights legislation passed, but they pressed on and it’s one reason Obama could even run or be elected. But then, Obama is a tenacious intellect and indomitable optimist who “owes” no one. And that may be part of the problem. Kennedy and Johnson were each deeply flawed people, and on some level they must have known this (because on some levels I think they were proud of it). Their public service was a shot at redemption and posterity. As a person, Obama seems to suffer from none of their flaws, or the many others we’ve grown used to in our leaders. And a paradox may apply. Richard Nixon, to name just one, was surely the worst man to ever be president, but in the full sweep of history seems far from the worst president. Obama is possibly the best man to ever be president — but whether his presidency itself ends up making any significant difference is something I’ll be wondering about, for at least one more night.

Appearing, as befits its forgotten-history theme, at my comic shop in the last few weeks after having debuted all the way back at SDCC, Archaia’s Days Missing was all the more refreshing a surprise. Co-produced with those keeping the Star Trek creator’s name alive at Roddenberry Productions, this is an utterly original reinterpretation (by creator Trevor Roth) of the secular/sci-fi guardian-angel theme Gene Roddenberry himself often returned to with characters like Questor and Gary Seven. In the bargain-priced introductory issue we meet a strange figure who appears as the most anonymous stranger at pivotal points in human history, reweaving strands of event that would otherwise unravel into the kinds of apocalypse we all feel on the edge of in times of war, epidemic and other crisis. The subtlety of his approach suggests the tenuousness of human survival and the impact that single, unsung individuals can have when they put others first and refuse to give up; the toll these rescues take on the main character, a kind of quantum chained Prometheus bestowing life on our lower species and maintaining an endless involuntary vigil as a seemingly personified appendage of the universe, gives a biblical sense of tragic weight. The ear for contemporary politics, real-life disaster planning and the human personalities, both grand and abject, at the center of them, is keen and never slips into jargon or schematic plot-advancement; the poetry of the protagonist’s parable-like understanding of history and his position in it is poignant without ever being melodramatic. If the next four issues of this mini live up to writer Phil Hester and artist Frazer Irving’s debut segment, you don’t want to miss one new-comic day.

History collides with comics in interesting ways, and sometimes the ones which swerve to avoid a pileup are the ones which turn out worst. Captain America #601 was living history on one level, with a beautiful art job by silver-age maestro Gene Colan in the modern method by which his pure, painterly pencils can be transferred directly to the published page and filled out in an equally watercolorish way by the sensitive computer chroma of Dean White. But enough midcentury alliteration; this issue, a landmark by visual standards, shows how averse to making a historical mark this book is no matter how many statistics it adds to the Eisners each year. When we hear, in a flashback set up by a melancholy grownup Bucky and Nick Fury during the “Civil War,” that, for Bucky, this kind of conflict “wasn’t the only time I saw our own people turned against themselves,” he’s not in fact talking about the segregated armed forces pre-Truman, the rout of the Bonus Army by their fellow troops, etc. — but a plague of vampires in the WWII ranks! It’s an example of how this book under Ed Brubaker (a true literary writer whose Criminal has to be in the top five comics of the decade) avoids social issues at every twist and turn. This is surely by editorial preference, though I remain puzzled as to why; Marvel has been imaginatively and unflinchingly political across the line, for the whole 2000s — from X-Force’s stinging satire of the Elian Gonzalez affair to the interrogation of unrestrained imperial power in The Ultimates to a direct confrontation with the architects of the Darfur genocide in Squadron Supreme, and not just the (very interestingly handled) 9/11-era Cap stories with him unmasking for terrorists and serving on military tribunals — so why does the one book about a guy whose tights are sewn from the flag have to not only be the least political book Marvel puts out, but practically the only unpolitical one?

Much better for following the tragedy-to-farce historical arc is the debut of Marvel Zombies Return. Fred Van Lente’s been doing even better EC Comics stories in Marvel Zombies 3 and 4 than he does on the licensed-EC Tales From the Crypt franchise, but that poker face has fallen away, along with an eyeball and partial lobe or two, with the leadoff issue in the MZ Return event. In the mid-’70s after a relaxation of the then-inescapable Comics Code, geek pundits used to see the resultant overrun of Marvel’s universe by vampires, werewolves, sundry other monsters and “sons, daughters and second cousins of Satan” (in Joe Brancatelli’s memorable phrase) as tragedy; it had a hefty component of farce in heedless ad-copy promising things like “walking-dead wonderment,” and Van Lente expands this to its logical capacity in a tale where the MZ-universe Spider-Man is banished at random to a version of swingin’-’60s Marvel. Spidey means well but quickly devolves to the demands of his undead nature — and, we infer, the obligations of a blood & guts genre — in making a mess (and a meal) of things. The audience-addressing narration and self-recapping dialogue of the Stan era is exalted to a level at which it takes on a beat-poetry life of its own in Van Lente’s ever-evolving salon of snark, and Nick Dragotta’s pop-art sunniness has all the charm to re-immerse us in that era and all the sarcastic shorthand to set up the sick joke. We all know the sadistic ’70s and steroidal ’80s and ’90s are waiting to collide with this cheery ben-day dream, and the creative team, erm, cannibalizes the historical record with connoisseurial insight. I know at least one prominent writer-artist who boycotts Marvel specifically because of this franchise, but four more issues — three by established zombie-fiction novelists and a wrap-up by Van Lente — promise a revelatory heroic trial showing why time must move on but also why the essential appeal of classic Marvel can (you know it’s coming) never die.