I just finished reading Dan Slott, Michael Allred, and Laura Allred’s Silver Surfer series, and I unabashedly want Dawn Greenwood back.

Many readers and reviewers have compared the Slott/Allred/Allred Surfer run to Doctor Who. In keeping with that comparison, I found myself feeling the same way about Dawn’s ending as I did Amy Pond‘s in Who. It was designed to give the character the “happy” ending she deserved, while also explaining why she would never, ever, under any circumstances show up again.

In attempting to balance these competing interests, Dawn’s send-off landed squarely in bittersweet territory. Dawn’s story is absolutely complete, and the creative team gave her a fittingly momentous send-off. But Dawn also had a ton of stories left in her, and the Marvel Universe would be a better place for bringing her back.

Dawn Is One of Marvel’s Most Optimistic Characters

No other character I’ve read about experienced the Marvel Universe, and particularly the Marvel cosmos, quite like Dawn. In Dawn’s Marvel Universe, the Silver Surfer spent his time chasing down the universe’s best ice cream and rescuing children from moon mazes, rather than pining morosely among the stars. Which is not to say everything in Dawn’s world was a bed of roses. She was still the protagonist of a superhero comic; she regularly got involved in meaningful conflicts.

But when conflicts occurred in Silver Surfer, Dawn sought to solve them via empathy, optimism, and clever thinking. Dawn was not a fighter, but she WAS a gutsy problem solver. That is, until her story reached its conclusion, and she was written out of the Marvel Universe.

I understand Slott and the Allreds’ inclination to take Dawn off the table. After all, they created the character. And “love interests” (let’s all agree right now that Dawn is more than just a love interest) who stick around past their initial appearances are often misused and mistreated by subsequent creative teams. Dawn has appeared, primarily, in one near-perfect series. For most characters, that would be good enough.

But Dawn offered a unique perspective on the Marvel Universe, and more importantly, had story threads of her own that hadn’t quite wrapped up. There’s so much more left for Dawn to DO, and it seems sad to let a character who literally represented the near-infinite possibilities of the Marvel Universe be confined to one dead future.

So, Could Dawn Come Back?

Now, I believe the Silver Surfer creative team left a variety of options open for returning Dawn to the Marvel Universe, should they or anyone else want to do so. The Surfer brought bits of Dawn back to our universe after she died in another, and a Holo-Dawn already exists elsewhere in Marvel space. An Al Ewing or a Tini Howard or, heck, even a Dan Slott could easily justify bringing Dawn back – they just have to have a story to tell with her.

So will a creator hit upon the perfect Dawn story and bring her back? I sure hope so. Because I’m not even a week out from finishing Slott and the Allreds’ Silver Surfer, and I already miss that wacky Earthgirl.

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