He’s Deadman, Jim

My first encounter with Deadman was the splash page on his second story. It’s kind of weird.

I didn’t think so at the time. A ghost talking with a trio of owls, to my nine-year-old self that was no different than fairytales. Only later did it sink in that it was odd, though in a good way. And the story that followed (hunting his killer, Deadman clears a shady young man of a murder frame-up) was good enough I wanted the next issue — but with Adventure Comics, Atom, Flash, Green Lantern and House of Mystery (the Robby Reed years) to buy that month, I didn’t have the cash. I don’t think I read another Deadman story until he crossed over into Forever People several years later.

I did reread the one story I had, however, and as I grew older it struck me the “ghost who talks with owls” thing needed an explanation. It wasn’t until I finally read the first issue I learned that was normal in Boston Brand’s world.

What’s really striking about the first issue is how unsympathetic creator Arnold Drake writes his protagonist.

Boston Brand is not a nice guy. He’s not even a particularly sympathetic guy, despite being murdered. He’s cold hard, surly to the point of meanness. He’s Ben Grimm without the excuse of suffering through tragedy and quite unlike anyone else I remember from comics of the time. After this first issue other writers took over. Deadman’s personality became more conventional. He’s snarky, cynical and tough, but under that crusty exterior beats a heart of pure gold.

Drake co-created Boston with Carmine Infantino. I’d have loved to see Drake continue writing Brand in that unsympathetic vein and I’m really curious about his ideas for the finish (“There were baddies in heaven just as there were on earth.”). Instead he walked away when DC didn’t deliver on promises of a higher pay rate. As DC would soon axe Drake from the staff, I guess it wouldn’t have mattered if he’d stuck around. Then again, maybe if he’d gotten the higher rate, he wouldn’t have been among the creatives pushing DC for a better deal.

Don’t get me wrong, I do enjoy the series as it stands. Boston’s hunt for his killer and his efforts to help people along the way are familiar — he’s a wandering TV hero in the same vein as The Fugitive or The Hulk — but having a cynical ghost as the protagonist made it stand out, as did Neal Adams’ art. The overall story arc was erratic, which may reflect that writing responsibilities shifted from Drake to Carmine Infantino to Jack Miller to Neal Adams over the run of the book.

And it’s hard to top the big reveal, that the killing was nothing personal.

The wrap up of the arc also introduces us to the killer’s assassin sensei.

Not, you’ll notice the Sensei, as he’d later become. The Hook’s simply calling his teacher “teacher.” And while his sensei does lead a Society of Assassins, there’s no connection yet to the League of Assassins, which wouldn’t appear for another year (I’ll discuss them and the Sensei in later posts).

Deadman fails to punish his killer — the sensei executes him for failure — and decides in the last issue that he’s not willing to rest in peace, not when there’s so much injustice and imbalance out in the world. That would have set him up for ongoing adventures but good as the series was, sales were not, as they say, number one with a bullet. Boston Brand departed Strange Adventures with #216, replaced by an old and familiar face —

The new format was Adam Strange reprints, backed up by standalone stories from former SA editor Julius Schwartz’ old SF comics and Atomic Knights reprints. It proved more successful than Deadman or any of Jack Miller’s heroes, running in this format for 28 issues before cancellation in 1973 and prompting a second reprint book, From Beyond the Unknown, that lasted roughly as long.

Part of that, I’m sure, was the cheaper costs of reprint stories, as royalties for creators weren’t a thing back then. Reading the first couple of issues though, I don’t think that’s all there is to it. When Adam Strange began, he was one of several non-superhero adventures and science fiction series. Now, with comics so much changed, his old-school adventures feel novel, like a breath of fresh air. I wouldn’t encounter the reprint series for several more years but I think I’d have been hooked just as much if I’d met Adam for the first time in ’69.

#SFWApro. Art top to bottom by Neal Adams, Infantino x2, Adams x3 and Joe Kubert.