WC #1 – Deadman
“This Dearly Departed Detective, Part I: Portents and Symbols”
By Dave Bullock & Vinton Heuck
Colors – Dave Stewart
Letters – Jared K. Fletcher
Edits – Mark Chiarello
Heyyy, another Action Comics Daily mainstay making it’s Wednesday Comics debut! For those of you who have been with me for awhile, you’ll probably remember the two weird takes on Boston Brand that we checked in on during ACW.
The first was a (mostly) straightforward story with very clean and comicbooky Dan Jurgens art… the second had more of a horror bent with the more stylized Kelley Jones work.
This WC strip doesn’t seem like either one of those takes! Let’s see what it has in store for us, yes?
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We open at a crime scene, where a woman and man have been brutally murdered. Deadman is here while the police and CSI folk take it all in. Boston comments that the officers seem to be disconnected from all this, though only says so to emphasize how “dulled” your senses can be to even the most traumatic of sights if you see them enough. He also uses this to remind us all that he’s… ya know, dead.
We then get the quick ‘n dirty on Boston Brand himself… how he died, what a selfish human he was, the boring Rama Kushna stuff… you know the deal.
From here, we take it straight home… Deadman flies outside, hears a scream… then happens across, perhaps the killer culprit behind this current rash of murders!
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Not a whole lot to say about this one. In a few ways, it’s not unlike the Kamandi story we looked at earlier. Deadman, like the Last Boy on Earth, is definitely more of a “niche” character (relative to the more mainstream JLAers, of course), and so – it would be to the story’s benefit to provide a fair amount of exposition and introduction to him and his world. This was accomplished pretty well here… despite the fact that anytime I see the words “Rama Kushna” I almost instinctively fall asleep. It’s right up there with “K’un L’un” on my bored-o-meter.
That said, this was quite well done. We have our sorta-kinda mystery… we get introduced to our protagonist… and we get a cliffhanger ending. What more could we ask out of a single-page Sunday Funnies format strip?
Let’s talk art. I’m a bit torn on it, as I really liked how it looked… but, I have this weird knee jerk dislike for the DC “Animated Series” look. Definitely a “Chris-problem”, as I know a whole generation (plus) worth of fans absolutely adore it. I just never really did. That said, without my weird bias – I did like how this looked. As much as it pains me to admit, I feel the Animated Series look is a good fit for Deadman.
Overall – very nice first outing!
