📝This archived post is originally from my old comics focused Wordpress blog from 2011-2019. That site was a space to publicly commit to learning the art and craft of cartooning and self-publishing. These posts are full of a naive enthusiasm that though at times embarrassing, I'm proud of. I hope you find them useful in some way.❤️

Thanks to Phantom of The Attic Comics in Pittsburgh, I’ve gotten the pleasure to experience the 1986 mini-series put together by Andrew Helfer and Jose Luís García-López. They were kind enough to bundle the 4 part series and to sell it at the ever reasonable cover price of 75cents a pop.

If you’ve read this blog, you’ve probably picked up that I’m not too huge a superhero fan. Nevertheless, these Deadman stories have really caught my fancy. They’re fun, extremely well drawn and have a great sense of page design. I’ll scan some pages to show you what I mean real soon.

For the uninitiated, this was at a time when DC was reinventing its characters. The story is intended to follow directly on the heels of the events in original series (at that point just recently reprinted in a 7 issue mini-series)…thereby ignoring and negating most of the other Deadman stories published in the ’70s and early ’80s.

Helfer’s Letter in the first issue was interesting and particularly helpful in contextualizing the 4 part story arc in the history of the Deadman character. It’s a weird story that evidences the narrative puzzles that the idea of continuity poses to the hundreds of different illustrators and writers playing together in the DC and Marvel sandbox. This aspect of the DC and Marvel Universe is one that is odd, and that Grant Morrison rightly expands upon in his Animal Man series.

I’ll keep you posted on more of my reading and how the editorial shift of Deadman’s character evolves away from mystery towards a consistent style and reality of essentially no more than a superhero.