2 out of 5

I want to like Kelley Jones.  I want to get my Mike Baron-bearings outside of Badger and Nexus.  But Jones’ Wrightson-y, Corben-y grotesqueries never connect with me due to the artist’s off-timed panels, and Baron has maybe just been too prolific to know where to begin.  Perhaps not with Deadman.  Though I admittedly had some expectations for this, as most things I’d read about it pitched it as a surprisingly emotional affair, appearing in that pre-Vertigo DC era where mature books existing on the fringes of canon could come out stamped with the publisher’s label; I’m familiar with loving writers outside of the big two but being disappointed by their non-indie works, but I hadn’t yet set that scrutiny with Baron.

Outside of that, the other thing to consider was the format: prestige.  I don’t know what it is about prestiges, but the majority of the ones I’ve read – from any publisher – suck.  Perhaps it’s how it sits as a compromise between a regular book and a graphic novel, giving the creator the sense that they should / can expand on their story, but being an unusual length, making their usual sense of pacing go awry.  That’s certainly the case here, as Baron struggles to transition his dour tale from Deadman’s wandering reminisces into a drama, and finally an action story, and it moves in the oddest of hiccups, plot directions coming up out of nowhere and robbing the decisions that result of consequence.

Boston Brand reads about a house that may be haunted by another trapeze artist, and, investigating, he finds Ann of the Colby Circus, perpetually dressed in lingerie and gifted with the ability to actually give her ghostly touch weight.  The lead-in to this has our creative team at their best: Baron writes Brand with a self-deprecating voice that off-handedly muses over his past while longing for a connection, and Jones draws Deadman with delightfully disgusting elongated muscles and endless ribs and bony protusions.  We take our time floating around the haunted house, then observing Ann as she swings from her trapeze and falls – with a jolt to Brand – through his ghostly form.  It’s all poetic and internal, and that was the story I wanted, maybe drifting down a path that questions why Brand’s sought connection must have a sexual undertone.  But some comic mandate demands something more immediate, and so Ann has been ghostified by her demanding husband Byron (or maybe A spirit man named Brazia – the backstory is unnecessarily complex) and asks Deadman to save her and her circus friends by taking on a physical form and confronting her captor/s.  This ropes in an undercooked plot thread with Brand inhabiting the body of a paraplegic, then dragging the man’s wife along back to the house…

There are ghostly confrontations, confusing confessions of love for either Ann or the man’s wife, lots of guilt, some out-of-the-blue slut shaming that gives the book a very dated feel, and an ununderstood balance between the “freaks” that are dedicated to Byron / Brazia or Ann.  Jones’ work, panel by panel always looks amazing, and colorist Les Dorscheid gives the series a perfect hue of blues and grays and purples.  But Jones’ style is so pantomimed as to over-sell any given scene, and so Baron’s already melodramatic script gets edged into scene-chewing, and there’s no sense of adapting to those different moods outlined above.

I’d hate to promote a stereotype, but were comic readers of the era so unaccustomed to topics outside of brawls that this supernatural soap opera seemed “deep?”  There is a good tale of loneliness and loss hinted at in those first pages, but it gets lost behind over-plotting and, unfortunately, a very male gaze.