Alas Neal Adams despite being an ace artist, is a somewhat middle-of-the-road scripter and it hurts the overall impact of Deadman. The stories become weirder, but not necessarily better as the chase to find The Hook gets snarled up with a secret Society of Assassins. Adams becomes distracted by the ability to perform artistic gymnastics at the cost of some story clarity. The neat edge of a basic detective story which makes the early Deadman stories so vivid gets blunted a bit. Deadman also gets some advertising when he joins up with the Batman in the pages of The Brave and the Bold.
Finally in these collections there is a final classic Neal Adams Deadman effort, in Challengers of the Unknown, where the ghastly acrobat shows up in a tale primarily crafted by George Tuska and Denny O'Neil. Then it was well and truly over for Deadman, as he became a perennial DC guest-star for many years. I'm currently rounding up all of those appearances I can find and will report later on that.
One note on these collections. Neal Adams is the reason these collections exist, so I can understand why he might want to fix something he sees as a problem. That resulted in one issue by him in te first volume which he found to have gotten indifferent inking by George Roussos, to be re-drawn, or at least re-inked. It sadly seems out of place with the other artwork in the series as striking as it is. I personally wish they'd left well enough alone, but then we still have the other and it's been reprinted too, so no real harm done, I guess.
Below is a cover gallery with brief story descriptions.
Bob Haney joins Adams to give us a classic The Brave and the Bold issue. In the story "The Track of the Hook", Deadman assists the Caped Crusader as he tries to bring down "The King", a crime boss in Gotham. Their partnership is a strained one as Deadman wants Batman to work his murder case, but things smooth out when they realize that maybe their goals are similar after all.
Robert Kanigher takes over writing for this one issue of Strange Adventures, one which begins Deadman down a somewhat new path to understanding his mission on Earth. In a story titled "To Haunt a Killer" he tries to save a woman who is hopelessly in love with a murderous hitman. She's hard to save since she has a habit of walking into traffic, but nonetheless Deadman struggles on in a lengthy tale that will take Deadman to Asia.
In "A New Lease on Life" Deadman finds his killer the Hook and learns that his murder lacked the specific motivation he sought to understand. The Hook is a member of The League of Assassins and the Sensei, the leader of that group is ruthless in dealing with is underlings who botch a mission. This is part one of a two-part tale. Neal Adams both wrote and drew this story, and he is really flexing his artistic muscles.
In arguably the strangest adventure yet, Deadman finds Nanda Parabat, a paradise of sorts in the Himalayas. The League of Assassins have sent a killer to destroy it, but Deadman intervenes and finds himself in a world in which he can stay and function to some degree as he did before his death. But frustrated by the knowledge of how he was killed, he seeks to broaden his mission in the name of Rama Kushna, and the latter accepts. "But I Still Exist" is the beginning of a new kind of Deadman story, but alas this is the final issue featuring of Strange Adventures to star him.
Bob Haney joins up with Neal Adams to give us "You Can't Hide from a Deadman" in The Brave and the Bold #85. The story picks up where we left it in Strange Adventures when Deadman is compelled to try and kill Batman by order of the Society of Assassins and the Sensei. Batman and Deadman then requisition the body of Cleveland Brand (in a manner of speaking) and return to Nanda Parabat where they confront the Society again. This tale reminded me little bit of The Matix as Deadman is using body after body to try and fulfill his deadly mission against the Batman.
But soon was revived in (of all places) the pages Aquaman. Neal Adams crafted a three-part story about alien invasions which dovetailed with the lead Aquaman story, though the two heroes never meet. Ocean Master does figure prominently in the Deadman story, but it is, truth told a very odd trio of tales in which Deadman battles aliens, travels to another dimension and finds romance and helps save the day for Aquaman. There's little or no Deadman on the outside, but the series continues as a back-up in these Aquaman issues. And wraps in this issue of the Challengers of the Unknown.
Deadman joins up with the Challengers of the Unknown in their seventy-fourth and for a longtime their final issue with new material. The story "To Call a Deadman" is written by Denny O'Neil and drawn by both George Tuska and Neal Adams. Tuska handled the majority of the yarn and Adams the finale. It's not unlike the Aquaman material in that we get two sides of a story, this one about a poor girl's soul which is stolen for dire purposes.
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