Comics Fondle

There’s something very genial and inoffensive about Deadman #1. Even with the bad dialogue–mostly when the main character is talking to himself, so I get it… needs to exposition, right?–the issue is a bit of a goof. Not a bad goof, but a good goof. It spins the reader around and around and stops he or she for a minute, then just grabs onto the shoulders and spins again. There’s very little content, but a lot of narrative tricks (for cutting between scenes) and some great art.

Another problem is the setting. London. I can’t imagine Jones’s London-based characters (the cops, the hospital staff) with British accents. It seems like LA. London might give it a reserved but still mildly exotic flair–and Watkiss is English–but Jones doesn’t use it. At the beginning, when the story’s centered around the American pilots (brothers, signaling a “Wings” reference?), so London is a fine cityscape… but at the end, with the nurses and the armed guards? Seems like LA. Especially when the guy gets outside and it’s sunny. The sunny sky, however, being on Watkiss.

Without Watkiss, Deadman wouldn’t work. Jones compresses and expands the wrong details. He barely gives the character any establishing backstory, which the character definitely needs. He doesn’t give much detail into the character’s situation. But then he turns and draws out a simple thing–the guy dies and rejects the light (which was in that Robin Williams movie too, I think)–into three-quarters of the issue. If he’s teasing future events, he could have just done it with a page. Instead, he takes the issue’s coolest moment–the dead guy visiting his ex-girlfriend–and only gives it a page.

Also problematic are the brothers. They’ve got different haircuts and one’s bad and one’s good, but there’s little else to define them. That aspect and a few other little things make the issue read like Jones wrote it as a script treatment first… which is not a feeling I’m comfortable getting from a big two book.

On the other hand, just give me the Watkiss art and I can put up with almost anything.

C+

Recommend on Mahalo