Deadman
42 years ago - Boston Brand is born in Gotham City.
26 years ago - 16-year-old Boston leaves home to travel with Haley's Circus and train as an acrobat under the flying Graysons. He meets the newborn Dick Grayson.
18 years ago - 24-year-old Boston leaves Haley's Circus to begin his own act, Deadman.
15 years ago - 27-year-old Boston meets mentalist Kharma Singh, who predicts that he has a role to play with the goddess Rama-Kushna. When he is mysteriously murdered, the Goddess keeps him on earth Earth as a ghost as he tries to solve his own murder at the hands of the mysterious Hook.
13 years ago - Boston helps Alec Holland navigate the realm of the dead as he searches for Abigail Cable's soul.
9 years ago - Boston uncovers the reason for his murder; he was sacrificed by the one-handed Hook to join the Scavenger Cult, dedicated to oppose Rama-Kushna. He disrupts the cult and brings his killer to justice, but still isn't permitted to move on.
7 years ago - Boston find his way to Nanda Parbat, the lost city of Rama-Kushna. He is able to be seen here, and learns about his patron goddess, learning that he still has a purpose.
3 years ago - Boston is summoned to the Oblivion by James Rook to help the Shadowpact stop Felix Faust. He remains with them.
1 year ago - Deadman participates in the 5th Shadowpact, forging the spells that allowed Mageddon to manifest in our reality where he can be stopped by the collected heroes of Earth. He returns to Nanda Parbat, and his service to Rama-Kushna.
Deadman is an extremely well-established part of the storytelling tapestry of DC, and with good reason. While he has never had a definitive, must-read story of his own, he's just an example of really stellar design and a great, crunchy bit of story execution. He's a ghost story, and a murder mystery, told through the lens of a superhero. There have been other ghostly superheroes, but I just don't think anyone ever quite managed to nail everything in the concept quite so thoroughly. He's a mainstay in practically every version of DC you've ever seen, and I think he absolutely earns that.
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Deadman's Comic HistoryDeadman appeared for the first time in 1967, in he anthology series Strange Adventures #205, an invention of writer & Doom Patrol creator Arthur Drake and artist & Silver Age architect Carmine Infantino. Deadman was circus acrobat Boston Brand, who was murdered in his first appearance, only to find that his is an invisible, immaterial spectre observing the world, but only able to interact with it by possessing people.
This book happens square in the midst of the Comic Code, which included the rule "Scenes dealing with, or instruments associated with walking dead, torture, vampires and vampirism, ghouls, cannibalism, and werewolfism are prohibited." You'd think this would mean Deadman, who is notably a ghost, would have violated this rule, but they sidestepped it by making references to Hinduism and eastern mysticism, which were seeing a surge in interest at the time. Deadman would continue to appear in his particularly stylistic stories in Strange Adventures, particularly when legendary artist Neal Adams took over the series. We eventually find out why the assassin Hook killed Deadman (to join the League of Assassins, sort of?) within the original Strange Adventures anthology stories, before the book was cancelled in 1973. |
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Deadman went on to have a very interesting role in DC. He became an extremely prolific guess character, and his features started to appear in other anthology books like Adventure Comics and Action Comics. In particular, he had several appearances in the Brave and the Bold, where Batman eventually became so familiar with him that he's practically unfazed when he shows up. Deadman was a very high concept character and a very cool piece of worldbuilding lore, and so he was regularly part of the tapestry of DC, but his own story had really kind of been told.
In the post-crisis, Deadman had his own small miniseries, and while it introduced some new wrinkles in Boston's relationship with Rama-Kushna, it didn't really advance his story in a meaningful way. It really just seemed to be Deadman's main role to be an outside observer in the world without evolving on his own in a meaningful way The New 52 actually at least found a role for him to play when they added him to the book Justice League Dark as a regular team member... where he was returned to life for a time, as well as being in a relationship with Dove from Hawk & Dove? I don't really know what was going on there. |
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Our Deadman StoryThere's a particular tone you want to strike with Deadman. He's a very visual-first character, all atmosphere and Neal Adams design. He's a uniquely comic character, in that I don't think anyone in-world ever actually SEES the guy, so his costume and visual design are entirely for our benefit, so it's very much left up to artistic license just how you want to interpret him.
I think more importantly, his status as a long-standing anthology character has left him in a sort of perpetual state of in media res, always lingering at the cusp of the mystery at hand. It kind of flies in the face of the way stories want to be told, because they do eventually want to resolve. To that end, we wanted to make sure he always has something he's trying to solve, whether that's his own murder or the reason he's still on Earth. Also, because we wanted to infuse him with a little bit more direct connection to his roots in mysticism, we specifically named the mentalist who predicted his death. Kharma Singh COULD be the daughter of Randu? |
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