As I noted before, despite the satirical concept - a superhero with the power of being, well, dead- Deadman's adventures took place in a grittier milieu than virtually any of his contemporaries. It's a series, like Bixby's The Incredible Hulk, based upon the tv hit The Fugitive. Deadman also has something of a Marvel flavour: his carny background, hepcat dialogue and hair-trigger emotions, combined with his globetrotting abilities and isolation are almost a blend of Hawkeye and the Silver Surfer. The character he most resembles at DC is Drake's slightly unhinged Robotman.
However, something about Boston never quite clicked with the DC audience. He was revived first by a dutiful but dubious Kirby in the pages of Forever People. It seems the King didn't appreciate the black comedy inherent in the character. Then, as we saw, Brand gained the body of Batman's brother for a short while before guest-starring with the Phantom Stranger and in the late 70s, with the Challengers of the Unknown.
I picked up this volume of Deadman in Elgin's Waterstone's because I'd never read some of the strips before.
The first Brave and Bold team-up with Batman is a moody noir, with Coleridge references. Here, Adams' Batman is still in the mould of tv's Caped Crusader. "To Haunt a Killer" is probably my favourite story, in which a jealous and embittered Deadman unwittingly occupies the body of a hitman. It leads to the material I had read in 80s reprints: the Eastern mysticism and psychedelia of Deadman's journey to Nanda Parbat , DC's Shangri-La. This is also the sequence that introduces The League of Assassins. I used panels from these final issues of Strange Adventures two weeks ago to teach S1 about the potential of panel design in sequential storytelling.
The Nanda Parbat sequence ends in another B&B team-up, where we see a more familiar Adams Batman- and a more animalistic one. You can clearly see here how Bats begins to ascend to pole position as DC 's most dynamic hero, leaving poor Superman far, far behind.
The last third of the collection features the material that was new to me: psychedelic backups from Aquaman and a Challs story. The former are pretty whacky, with Ocean Master, the alien Id-Men and the freaked-out, rat/cat creature Tatsinda, who transforms into a groovy mod chick- like Grell's Shakira in April Dancer's wardrobe. These stories completely lack the pathos and drama of Deadman's original series but it is quite entertaining to see the panels featuring Aparo's Aquaman.
There's a similar experience with the George Tuska Challengers story. The fantastic four have sleek new jumpsuits (instead of the campy red/yellow outfits I first knew) and are starring in an early Bronze Age Weird Mystery comic. This is an interesting new direction for the Challs and they have a witchy new female member called Corinna Stark. Deadman appears for eight Adams-pencilled pages hunting down the Challs' antagonist- a circus magic-act turned black magician.
I've often wondered if Boston would have had a higher profile taking the Red Tornado's spot in the Bronze Age JLA. His inability to communicate directly with the living would have been a hindrance but he would have been useful in occult storylines. The kitschy Silver Age sci-fi pastiche of the 70s wouldn't have suited Boston, however.
His sleek look would have worked well with other Adams favourites, like Batman and Green Arrow. In the 90s, Deadman had a skeletal, zombie-like appearance that completely missed the subversion of the superhero in his original elegant and sexy design. However, one interesting innovation in the 90s took place in the all-ages Batman titles: Boston became an act in the Graysons' circus:
In the New 52, Deadman is a member of Justice League Dark, DC's horror- team title
As part of an occasional "Summer on Earth-2" series, next time I'll be looking at another ghostly guardian, the Ace of Shades known as the Spectre!
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