Original
Mitch Shelley grows up in (the fictional) Viceroy, South Carolina, raised by lawyer Preston Shelley. While Mitch finds his father to be harsh and judgmental, he is comforted with love and empathy from the housekeeper Conchita. As a child, Mitch seems to have dreams and visions of information and events he shouldn't know "as if he could access the memories of other people". Conchita believes this means Mitch is remembering past lives he's lived. Believing his child needs stricter discipline and should not have his dreams and "flights of fancy" encouraged, Preston sends Mitch to a boarding school at age eight. This begins a rift between the two that extends into Mitch's adulthood. Later becoming a lawyer himself, Mitch works with organized crime and helps bring legitimacy to the businesses of crime lords, partially as an act of defiance to his father. Later deciding he no longer wishes to be involved with criminals, Shelley gathers evidence to give to the FBI in exchange for entering the witness protection program. His wife Paula and his business partner Richard Bessly, secretly lovers, decide to take over Shelley's business and continue working for organized crime. As a show of good faith, they hire corrupt police detective Keach to kill Mitch Shelley. A gas main explosion destroys Shelley's office while he is inside.[11]
Miraculously, Mitch survives, brain-damaged and amnesiac, wandering the streets as a homeless man. Months later, he is kidnapped by a clandestine organization simply called "the Lab". Along with many other homeless people, Shelley is forced to be a test subject of Hooker, director of the Lab. Suffering from an inoperable brain tumor, Hooker is determined to achieve immortality through a form of nano-technology called "tektites", sub-atomic robots that can heal and rebuild the body, defeating death. All of the test subjects are injected with tektites and then killed, but only Shelley ("sample 268") actually resurrects. Unable to determine what makes Shelley special, a desperate Director Hooker takes a sample of Mitch's blood and injects it into himself. Rather than duplicating Shelley's full resurrection, Hooker becomes invincible to death but is unable to heal from wounds, losing his sanity in the process. In a rage, he attacks the Lab personnel, causing enough chaos that Shelley escapes. Once again living on the streets, a confused and still amnesiac Shelley discovers he can fly. Meanwhile, Hooker escapes, in pursuit of Shelley, able to sense him due to the tektites in their respective bloodstreams. His subordinates "Mr. Fancy" and Cliff DeWitt take over the tektite experiments. They send the Body Doubles to retrieve Shelley, wishing to know why he gained a resurrection ability not seen in any other test subject, and also hoping to understand why he gained super-powers, as the Lab's tektite technology should not have been able to grant superhuman abilities.[12]
Two years later after surviving the gas main explosion, Shelley is killed while trying to protect people from criminals. He resurrects and discovers his flight has been replaced with a new power. The shock of his resurrection brings back concrete memories, leading him to learn from a newspaper article that he is Mitchell "Mitch" Shelley, a lawyer believed to have died. Pursued by the bounty hunters known as the Body Doubles, Mitch begins investigating what happened to him two years ago that left him amnesiac and unable to die. As he travels, he involves himself in new adventures, helping those he can. During some of his subsequent deaths and resurrections, more memories return. Returning home to Viceroy, he reveals himself to his wife Paula and his business partner Richard Bessly, only to be shocked when they try to kill him. Shelley joins forces with investigator Kim Rebecki and is then confronted by Hooker. Their meeting triggers more memories and Shelley recalls his life in Viceroy, while also realizing that Paula and Richard betrayed him. He arranges for his killers to be caught, leading to Keach and Paula's arrest and indirectly causing Richard's death. Following this, crime lord Lucky Falcone targets Shelley.[13]
While investigating his past, Shelley and Rebecki form a romantic interest in each other. The two find the Lab and learn about its tektite experiments from Mr. Fancy. Hooker then attacks, causing the Lab's nuclear reactor to become unstable. Rebecki, Fancy, and others escape, but Shelley and Hooker are caught in the nuclear explosion. Shelley survives for weeks as a living shadow before regaining his body, while Hooker is now a sentient skull. Following this incident, and while battling a parasitic creature called the Rider, Mitch once again has visions of past lives, recalling being a boy in Ancient Egypt, a knight in medieval times who encountered the demon Etrigan, and a soldier during World War I. With each of these memories, Shelley also recalls the experience of dying.[14] Soon afterward, he is confronted by Lament, who claims to be an angel who has seen Mitch die many times but has never been able to collect his soul. Following this, Shelley teams up with the centuries-old mystic known as the Phantom Stranger. The Phantom Stranger calls Mitch one of his oldest friends and says they have fought together during many lifetimes because each time Shelley has died he has later reincarnated, the same soul and mind reborn. The Phantom Stranger is surprised to learn that Mitch now has the power to literally resurrect rather than reincarnate. He also mentions that Shelley used to have a single super-power in his different lives, indicating this is the reason he exhibits superhuman abilities while no other tektite test subject does. Before they part ways, the Phantom Stranger warns Mitch that his life has a great purpose and reminds him that in many lives he has been an enemy to the immortal villain Vandal Savage.[15]
The villain Skism causes reality to warp around Mitch, outfitting him in a superhero costume and temporarily convincing him he is a masked hero. Mitch then formally meets Superman, who has met a future version of the Resurrection Man in the 853rd century (during the crossover DC One Million) and invites him to join the Justice League. Working with the team for a short time, Shelley decides a superhero life is overwhelming and not right for him, then leaves with Batman's blessing.[16] Mitch later teams up with the Forgotten Heroes, a team originally formed by the heroic Immortal Man to fight his arch-enemy Vandal Savage. Before recorded history, Savage and his longtime enemy the Immortal Man gained their forms of immortality via exposure to a seemingly radioactive meteorite. This made Savage ageless and nearly invincible to injury, while the Immortal Man was able to die but each time would instantly reappear elsewhere on Earth in a new body and with his full memories intact. Cave Carson of the Forgotten Heroes explains to Shelley that the meteorite exposed the two men to tektites of unknown (possibly alien) origin, causing their immortal abilities. Savage then funded the Lab, hoping DeWitt (his son) and the other scientists could replicate the tektites in his own body. These replicated tektites were then injected into Shelley, giving him his resurrection power and slowly undoing the brain-damage he suffered from the gas main explosion, restoring his memories.[17]
Cave Carson initially believes that Shelley is actually Immortal Man, who was believed to have finally died during the Crisis on Infinite Earths (an event in 1985-86 where DC Comics decided to both celebrate its 50th anniversary and reboot its fictional continuity where all DC stories would take place henceforth) and hasn't been seen since. Later, Savage confirms that the Resurrection Man and the Immortal Man are separate people, and reveals that the Immortal Man has been his prisoner for years. Shelley, Savage, the Immortal Man, and the Forgotten Heroes then join forces against a creature that emerges along with a second tektite meteorite. This creature, a "Warp Child", alters time and reality. To save the day, the Immortal Man melds his tektite field with the creature's own, overloading it. This destroys them both while restoring reality in the process. Following the battle, Mitch decides to leave adventures behind for a while so he can pursue a relationship with Kim Rebecki.[18]
New 52
Much of the DC Universe has its history changed as a result of the New 52 timeline. In this version of events, Mitch Shelley is born in the late 20th century but has no memories of any past lives and there is no indication he has ever lived past lives. An amnesiac Mitch Shelley wanders America, gaining different powers with each death, encountering the angel Suriel, who targets Mitchell because she insists that his soul is overdue to enter the afterlife.[19] Shelley is also pursued by the Body Doubles, hired by Hooker, and private investigator Kim Rebecki, who has been hired by Amanda Waller, director of Task Force X (also known as the Suicide Squad). Initially believing Mitchell to be a villain, Rebecki's view changes after meeting him.[20]
Eventually, Mitch Shelley is captured by Hooker, who explains that the two of them, as well as the Body Doubles, are all empowered by tektites that have reacted to them in different ways (Hooker became immortal but with no healing ability, while the Body Doubles became superhumanly strong). The director of the Lab then reveals himself to be the real, original Mitch Shelley, a cold-hearted and amoral scientist. Five years before, the original Shelley experimented on fallen and fatally injured soldiers in Iraq, attempting to perfect his "tektite solution". Shelley then lost his arm during an attack on their base and received a tektite injection. Rather than allow him to re-attach his arm, the tektites grew a new arm. The lost arm was burned but later grew into a copy of Mitch Shelley with no memories and a different morality, a Resurrection Man who has a different super-power each time he returns from death.
