Skribulous said: Then again, you may have something there, since mainstream Kitty is currently shot into space and Ultimate Kitty is dating Spider-Man .
Gotta correct you there on both parts. 616 Kitty's back on Earth, and Ult. Kitty broke up with him.
One of the Marvel TTRPGs, back in the late '90s or early '00s, had an expansion that was built around an in-world newspaper column where Reed Richards (Mister Fantastic of the Fantastic Four) answered reader questions, and then there were game rules related to that topic. A lot of it was comic book science stuff, but among the questions was a kind of wrenching one from a kid with a dead dad, asking what it was like when Reed was dead, and how he managed to come back.
Reed went on to explain that he didn't think he'd ever actually been dead, just lost in time or something, and how that kind of misunderstanding was the case for most supposed resurrections — and that was what the gaming bit was about, setting up that sort of retcon in your campaign — but it included the golden line, "Everybody thought the X-Men died, but it turned out they were in Australia."
(Of course, it's not like DC is any better at letting characters stay dead — they brought back even Jason Todd and Barry Allen, after all, leaving Uncle Ben as the sole unrevivable.)