In this case, however, I tend to agree insofar as the recent series have shown no understanding or insight into the character of Boston Brand. As originally written by Arnold Drake, he was a fully-fleshed out character; a good man doing the hard work of keeping the circus he's in alive. It's been left in the hands of the woman he loves and she's doing the best she can, but she's not nearly corrupt enough to command the respect of the roustabouts and criminals in her employ. Boston sees to it that everyone knows that they'll answer to him for any transgressions against the community outside of their petty, expected acts of larceny. He's arrogant as hell about his abilities and he's clearly hooked on the adulation of the crowd, but the circus does need him to be that good and to bring in the rubes. He's hard-edged and cynical about what he's doing, but he is doing it for everyone's benefit, most especially the woman he loves and largely keeps at arm's length for her own good.

Somehow, in the recent Brightest Day comics and his own title, that translated to the writers as him being a self-involved naif with no understanding of the world except that he's really good on the trapeze. Somehow the fine-tuning of his being a hard man in a truly corrupt world became him simply being a jerk and a half with everything to learn; A less worthwhile Firestorm with Rama Kushna as his Martin Stein.

The original Deadman suffered greatly for his supposed faults and questioned his fate of becoming a tool in the hands of a capricious diety to work her will upon the Earth, because through it all, he really had lived as a good man. And Rama knew it, yet did this to him anyway. This new version, not so much so. He's just a dim-witted punk. What the hell?

He's hardly been underutilized in the past ten years. Brightest Day relied heavily upon the character, getting it wrong throughout. Once again, I'm left wondering if it isn't the whole shared universe trope dragging everyone down again. In his own book or in his adventures alongside the Batman, Deadman could play the full, broad range of emotion available to a tragic hero. Now, he's just one guy in a crowd of dozens, with a few tin-eared character notes to play.

The evocative and effective portrait of Deadman JB's shared with us here makes me ache inside a little for what we've lost in the passage of time with these characters. They used to be the centers of fascinating, imaginative worlds and not simply costume designs in a field of similar costume designs. Deadman worked well alongside the Batman. Both were tinged with darkness and similar film-noir sensibilities. Batman's world was broad enough to allow for ghost stories, and Deadman's certainly respected men of tremendous athletic accomplishment set by tragic forces outside their control upon missions of righteousness. Even there, a little went a long way. There were ill-considered attempts to shoehorn Deadman into various series here and there such as the Challengers, the Forever People, and the Phantom Stranger reportedly because Carmine Infantino, who originated the character with Drake, knew he had something good here if he could just get the readers to see it. Those were some unfortunate comics, but they didn't ruin the character. Rewriting his history with the first Deadman mini-series didn't either since it kept every bit of the original, seeking to eliminate everything after and replace it with, well, some amazing Garcia-Lopez art and a backdated, Black Adam-style continuity-implant. Eh. Nothing much. 

Since then, we've had a Bruce Jones series that tried to give us an entirely new origin and identity; a Deadman in appearance only, a well-intentioned short-lived solo book, and a mini-series that tried to tie him even more closely to the larger DCU, taking its cue from a brief off-model guest-appearance in Moore's Swamp Thing that set him up as a guide through the afterlife for wayward souls. The Nu52 version is a know-nothing putz who completely has a miserable afterlife coming to him. 

It's not that DC doesn't try to bring back Deadman. It's that he's an awkward fit in a super-heroic context. Left to his own devices in stories all his own, he's among the best concepts modern comics have given us. As one more suit in a field of suits, he's literally insubstantial and a discordant ghost of what he once was.

I do love this drawing of him... It's like seeing an old friend, back from the dead. :-)

And an awesome graveyard to go with them. Very atmospheric piece.

Love the viewpoint.