Hitting the Wall VII: Deadman

Deadman, since not long after his very first appearances with the potent Bob Haney - Neal Adams team creating his adventures, has led a troubled career as a superhero. Unfortunately, his concept included a particular finite mission. Circus acrobat Boston Brand returned from the dead for a second chance to track down his killer and bring him to justice.

Where you give a superhero a mission that he could (theoretically) accomplish in a single issue of a comic book, one of two things must happen: He must eventually achieve his aim, or the reader must tire of waiting for him to complete a mission that all involved with the comic - producers and consumers - know will render him obsolescent.

DC still keeps Deadman among its stable of heroes, but someone who sought a character who outlived his original concept would very likely come across Deadman's name in the top three heroes rendered devoid of purpose.

The Original Concept

Arnold Drake and Carmine Infantino created the first Deadman story back in the sixties, though Neal Adams and Bob Haney would become associated with the character to the point that many would assume they (and not Drake and Infantino) originated him.

The spirit Rama Kushna took the murdered Boston Brand and gave him a spirit existence with the power to inhabit and control human bodies for the purpose of avenging his death. While the some potential attached to the character, his lack of a physical form (and the consequent inability of normal humans to perceive him) limited him considerably. The real, damaging limitation attached to his mission: Give a hero a mission (like avenging a murder) too central to his core concept and he becomes obsolescent with the resolution of his task.

However, in the first string of Deadman stories, equivalent to a run of less than two years (had it appeared in a single ongoing monthly rather than in multiple books), Deadman and his mission did enjoy a few compelling moments and a few interesting twists.

The Ever-Receding Horizon

If, in a moment of poor judgment, you decided to walk to the horizon, and had an indefinite amount of time and energy to pursue this folly, you would note that you never actually reach the horizon. Fourteen miles (or thereabouts) into this self-proclaimed death march, you might stand at the point that appeared on the original horizon; but straight ahead a new horizon would occupy the place where the old one stood. Owing to the curvature of the planet, you could walk until you reached the sea.

Deadman's quest to find his killer became something like this. He followed various leads to a figure he called 'Hook' - a theoretically recognizable man slayer with a prosthetic arm, perhaps inspired by a similar killer in television's "The Fugitive." At first he went through a series of false alarms, including (unlikely) ringer hoodlums with artificial limbs.

It seems like Adams and Haney intended Deadman eventually to find his real killer, after going through the baggage of false leads and following the man back to the League of Assassins, a body whose existence in the center of Deadman's mission effectively expanded the scope of his quest to fighting their goals the same way that (say) Captain America strove against HYDRA.

DC - as represented by someone with the power to make such editorial decisions - seems to have axed the idea of allowing Deadman to complete his mission. So, then, occasionally when a story went the wrong way and Deadman might actually find the right man, a subsequent story had to explain why Deadman had found the wrong one.

Decades and Decades of What?

DC should have allowed Adams and Haney to finish Deadman's quest - in the process, allowing him either to die or to achieve some kind of improbable (and, in that day, rare) resurrection. However, to a publisher of superhero comics, killing off a superhero involves tossing out inventory; and DC Comics, as late as 1985, seemed bent upon acquiring and collecting as many superhero properties as it could, without ever successfully answering the question of what they would do with so many superheroes.

By 1970, Deadman had gone through the business of fulfilling his essential mission. Nonetheless, DC didn't let him move on; instead, they sought to continue the character through the unlikely device of inserting him in Jack Kirby's Fourth World books. That Kirby had no particular vision for the character, nor the right visual approach to make him work, didn't seem to matter; and if Kirby's treatment of the character fell flat, this perhaps comes from having the character thrust upon him.

From there, Deadman tended to crop up here and there. One might see him in a Batman book, particularly Brave and the Bold, the place where stranded superheroes could come out for airing.

In the pages of Detective Comics, however, sometime in the late #400s of that book, Deadman would finally get to the core of his mission. The League of Assassins, and its leader Sensei, would play an ongoing role in the Batman franchise; and in this book, the revelation would arise that Sensei hosted a previous deadman, a spirit named Joseph whom Rama Kushna had assigned to a mission like Deadman's, but who had gone bad. Note, if you will, the similarity of this plot twist to another revelation concerning Eclipso as a previous version of the Spectre, similarly corrupted.

Joseph and Rama Kushna engaged in their final confrontation - though little beyond the death of Bucky Barnes remains final in superhero comics - and seemingly destroyed one another, at which point Deadman confronted a choice between moving on (to death) or remaining in his current undead state. Deadman chose to continue.

Can we credit this decision as wise, given the very limited success of the character? While his original run of Haney - Adams stories merit reprinting, we can't necessarily say the same of later appearances, such as his run in Action Comics Weekly as an independent feature. Nor does anything particularly compel in his occasional guest appearances in other books. His trivial cameo in Kingdom Come, furthermore, pointed out the core of the Deadman problem - you could see the character there, but nothing in the story suggested any particular point to his presence.

What Makes the Character So Hard to Use?

Detach Deadman from his original mission of vengeance - as DC should have done in the early seventies, since they planned to continue to use the character past the resolution of that particular story arc - and you have a character who can work. The problem seems to lie in the context.

Deadman doesn't fit particularly well in a shared DC universe. DC, particularly in the sixties, resonated with comic book science fiction themes, (sometimes forced) optimism, and tones that didn't mesh well with the Deadman concept. Deadman, in short, did not seem to fit into the context into which DC ownership forced him. Had DC pursued more supernatural themed characters, as it would accumulate through subsequent decades, it might have had a place for Deadman. However, DC has never really had much of a suitable milieu for him; the closest thing I've seen in comics appeared in Marvel titles like the Colan-era Doctor Strange book, where Deadman would have fit in very well.

Perhaps, though, the problem lies more with the prevailing editorial models than with the character himself. For a finite stretch of stories - meaning a series that has a beginning, a middle, and an end - a character like Deadman can work, assuming that writers complete the process of resolving the action and actually ending the story. The problem, as far as it concerns this character, centers around an environment in which stories sometimes have a beginning, and always have a middle, but never seem to have an ending.