Unsung Superheroes: Deadman

 

Unsung Superheroes

Sometimes, all it takes to turn a selfish cynic into an idealistic hero is a change of heart. But when is it too late for this kind of change to take place? What if that change only comes once the cynic's soul has shuffled off this mortal coil?

I give you the case of one Boston Brand, also known as Deadman.

Deadman

Boston Brand was a trapeze artist with Hills Circus, and a more cynical person is hard to find. He thinks little of his fellow circus performers and possibly less of his audience. By his own admission, he thinks that the one “trick” that audiences are really coming to see is the day he doesn't nail the trick at all and falls to his death. This is probably what inspired his performing persona. A red suit and white corpse makeup. Boston Brand's stage name: “Deadman”. There are only two who seem to see something existing beneath Boston's cynical tough guy exterior. One is Boston's girlfriend Lorna who is now the owner of the circus after her father, the previous owner, died. The other is Vashnu, the circus's fortune teller/character analyst, who claims that the goddess Rama Kushna has plans for Boston Brand. Boston is more than a little skeptical. But fate is awaiting Boston Brand. Because one night as Boston Brand is performing on the trapeze, a shot rings out. A shot fired by a man with a hook for a hand. Boston Brand falls to his death. But death isn't the end for Boston Brand. Returning to the world of the living as a free-roaming spirit, Boston Brand has been charged by the goddess Rama Kushna with bringing about justice by finding his killer. Now, Boston Brand floats through the world invisible and intangible, unable to be seen or heard and only able to impact the world by taking possession of the bodies of the living. But now, seeing the human condition as an observer, from the outside looking in, a heroic spark might ignite in the soul of Boston Brand. Maybe even a Deadman can change.

Strange Adventures #205

Deadman was created by Arnold Drake and Carmine Infantino in 1967. By this point, DC had gotten over the hesitance to explore supernatural motifs that it had held since the '50s when they had decided that their focus would be themes of science and science fiction. With the title Strange Adventures trending towards cancellation, editor Jack Miller was on the lookout for a new hero and a new feature to boost sales. For this, he turned to writer Arnold Drake. Drake was one of the more unconventional writers at DC during that era. He's most famous for creating the Doom Patrol for the DC series My Greatest Adventure (a team I will probably talk about at a different time). He was also one of two writers at DC who was not dismissive of Marvel's more humanistic approach to creating superheroes (the other was Bob Haney, who created Metamorpho and also took a more tongue-in-cheek approach to writing superheroes than Drake did). What Drake wanted to do was reflect the zeitgeist of what was happening then in 1967. And in 1967, there was a trend toward young people and counter-culture people looking to Eastern mysticism to find enlightenment. This was the era when Americans started to discover things like meditation and yoga. This was one year before the Beatles took their famed trip to India to visit the ashram of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. So, Drake knew that he wanted to create a supernatural character, and settled on a hero who was a dead man (and he fought for the title “Deadman”, because Miller was afraid the Comics Code Authority wouldn't let it pass). In the end, he settled on that dead man being Boston Brand, a circus aerialist who'd been on his own since the age of 12 and had done every down-and-dirty job in the circus by the age of 14. But then one night Brand is killed and found himself in the roles of both reluctant ghost and reluctant hero. One thing Drake was good at was creating superheroes whose natures had as many down sides as up sides. While being weightless, invisible and intangible are great superpowers in many ways, they're not so great when you can't be anything but weightless, invisible and intangible. On top of that, the only power Deadman has to influence the world around him is possessing the bodies of the living. Generally speaking, spiritual possession is not considered a positive thing. As for Drake's command of Eastern mysticism . . . it was more surface level than anything. Let's not make any bones about it, the goddess Rama Kushna is made up. From everything I've looked at, there is no goddess in Hinduism or any other South Asian religion named Rama Kushna. If anything, it sounds like they combined the god Rama with the god Krishna, and somehow mixed the name of the Hindu Kush mountain range in there somewhere. This might have been to the series advantage, though. Drake and other writers avoided seriously misrepresenting the god of an active religion. This was aided by the fact that the exact attributes and nature of Rama Kushna remained kind of vague and mysterious throughout Deadman's run.

Strange Adventures #207

Drake and Infantino didn't stay on Deadman long, though. As writer, Drake was soon replaced by the editor Jack Miller and Infantino was replaced by the popular and prolific Neal Adams. Though, other writers and artists also would try their hand. Eventually, Boston Brand's search for his killer would get tied into lore that Neal Adams and writer Dennis O'Neal were developing in Batman and Detective Comics about the Batman villain Ra's al Ghul (for those who can remember, Liam Neeson's character in Batman Begins), The League of Assassins and the lost city of Nanda Parbat. And eventually Brand's killer does seemingly get his comeuppance, but not from Deadman himself.

Deadman miniseries (1986), issue 1

And all of this is well and good. It certainly doesn't hurt to get a bump from being connected to major Batman lore. But in a way, it kind of feels like all the stuff about hunting his killer and the League of Assassins almost feels unnecessary at times. Because some of the best Deadman stories, at least in my opinion, are the ones where he's dealing with regular people who are facing more mundane evils. In those times when he's acting less like a vengeful ghost and more like a guardian angel. Granted, he's something of a flawed angel. I mean, there have been a couple times when Deadman's loneliness has led him to possess people just so he can experience being alive again, and that's after he's gained a more idealistic outlook.

Even after Strange Adventures inevitably did get cancelled, Deadman still hung around. At one point, they tried to get Jack Kirby to revamp him. That involved revealing that Brand's killer was really someone else and giving him a robot body to inhabit. It didn't last long (Kirby wasn't really a good fit to work on Deadman). He joined a team of supernatural heroes called Justice League Dark for a while. In 2016, Deadman had a miniseries titled Deadman: Dark Mansion of Forbidden Love, which sounds like a silly title but was actually a pretty good supernatural mystery. It had a pretty good summation of Deadman's character in one line too. It was along the lines of “A spirit who questions his existence but not his purpose”. And right now Deadman has a new miniseries titled The Deadman, which reimagines Deadman as a sort of “custodian of life and death” and Rama Kushna as both an aspect of the greater universe and also a child priestess. It remains to be seen whether any of these new takes will stick.

The Deadman, issue 1

But if you like supernatural heroes and you like stories of flawed people getting second chances, I can't recommend the original stories of Deadman enough. A good place to find them now would probably be the recent DC Finest: Deadman trade paperback.

DC Finest: Deadman

Oh, and Happy Halloween!