'Resurrection Man: Quantum Karma': Two Homegrown Creators Have Revived A 1997 DC Comic

In Indian philosophy, the concept of Samsara refers to the endless cycle of birth, death, and rebirth — a loop where the soul traverses through lifetimes, collecting experiences, operating on the basis of karma. It is a realm shaped by cause and effect, where liberation lies not in escaping life, but in transcending its repetitions. Each life is a lesson. Each death, a doorway.

A DC Comics story from yesteryear was inspired by this very concept. Mitch Shelley aka The Resurrection Man is a character created by Andy Lanning, Dan Abnett, and Jackson Guice in 1997. Now, DC Comics’ Black Label imprint, reunites Eisner Award-winning writer Ram V with visionary artist Anand RK for Quantum Karma, a six-issue limited series on the same.

Mitch Shelley, is a man cursed; or perhaps blessed, who returns from the dead each time he dies, gaining a new power shaped by the nature of his demise. Mitch has lived thousands of lives. He has died just as many times. But this time, there’s something different in this resurrection. He’s no longer drifting through existence. He’s been summoned by the universe itself, called upon to correct a rift in the order of things. His mission is to stop a dark mirror of himself — Gashadokuro, a sadistic WWII internment camp captain who has inherited a twisted, malevolent form of Shelley’s gift.

Anand RK, who previously collaborated with Ram V on Blue in Green, brings a distinctive visual language to Quantum Karma, one that navigates between surreal abstraction and hyper-detailed realism. When asked how he approached the visual challenge of representing resurrection and the metaphysical burden of memory, Anand describes his process as an interplay between two stylistic branches: "line-heavy (dominated by outlines, ‘cartooned’ shape design) or tonal value-heavy (basically using a wide value range, something painted for example). Usually I mix and match these two branches and settle on something that works best for the tone of the project,” he explains. “Which is why a lot of this project has some areas of detailed line art but also places when I let loose a bit and let value define shapes. Lucky that this mixing and matching suits the story and trippy qualities of the script!”

The fragmented identity of Mitch Shelley, shaped and reshaped through countless deaths and rebirths, is given a visual echo in Anand’s handling of memory which is interpretive and even poetic, reflecting how memory distorts, merges, and reshapes over time. “A person who has died countless times would suffer from memory merging and evolving and shifting and melding so that he will never quite be sure of how well he could rely on his own memories. You can see this reflected in places later on as the story progresses.”

The comic explores what it means to carry unresolved histories within oneself, and whether true redemption is possible when each life is shaped by the last. This cyclical nature also finds visual expression in the comic’s recurring motifs. Anand reveals that the flowers seen in the opening pages were consciously designed to mirror the clockwork gear shapes later associated with Samsara.

One of the core visual symbols in the story is the karmic knot tattooed on Mitch’s chest, which appears throughout the narrative. “That’s something Ram had in the script from the beginning,” Anand shares. “One thing I improvised on was that Gashadokuro’s final galactic form is essentially him growing into a massive unending knot, just like the karmic knot on Mitch’s chest.” These recurring motifs not only deepen the symbolic world of Quantum Karma but also anchor its more abstract philosophical themes within tangible visual cues.

The metaphysical setting of Samsara — DC’s reinterpretation of a timeless, cosmic space, presented further creative opportunities. Anand recalls contributing to a moment that reshaped the story’s visual tone: “Because this space is meant to be outside time, there isn’t really an up or down just like in outer space. So I knew I wanted to play with gravity. You’ll see characters essentially floating there, gravity is unreliable in a place like this unless you’re Shesha and know exactly how it works.” This play with physical laws extends the idea of Samsara as a liminal realm unbound by linear time.

The collaboration between Ram V and Anand RK is also deeply intuitive. “Because Ram and I have worked together and we wrote this script knowing that I would be drawing it, that narrative shift isn’t as obvious,” Anand explains. Their shared language allows for subtle interplays between image and text, where even artistic preferences become part of the narrative fabric. “For example, he knows I have a thing for hands. I just love drawing them and I think hands are underrated as a medium of human expression in acting, second only to the face. You’ll find many close-ups of hands in this series haha!” This affection for visual details have often been a part of their work together, "Most of our projects usually have a healthy sprinkling of stuff I love drawing like mech, body horror, tentacles lol".

Beyond style, the spiritual framework of the comic is inseparable from its visual architecture. “The idea of karma and the cyclical nature of the universe and its reflection within Indic scriptures was something that Ram had in mind early on,” he says. “Just even in issue 1 that is pretty obvious, there are many motifs and ideas later on in the series as well.”

Resurrection Man is a story about the weight of choices and their consequences that ripple across time. Mitch's encounters across eras and his battle with Gashadokuro — a monstrous embodiment of violence preserved and recycled, also question the cyclical nature of harm and justice not as punishment but as balance. Through "a reluctant hero who'd rather be chilling with his family than saving the universe", as Anand puts it, Quantum Karma becomes a meditation on the burden of memory and the hope of transformation in the machinery of fate.

Follow Anand here, Ram here, and get the first edition of the comic here.

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