In 1991, DC published a limited series by Keith Giffen, Robert Loren Fleming and Pat Broderick, starring the relatively obscure character Ragman. Though it was not the first appearance by the character—he was introduced in an extremely short-lived "ongoing" series in 1976 by creators Robert Kanigher and Joe Kubert—it was a pretty good place to start.
After all, this was the first post-
Crisis appearance by the character, and writers Giffen and Fleming has revised his origin, giving him a new, mystical nature, and one tied directly to Jewish legend. The eight-issue series wrapped in 1992, and I probably read it sometime that year, as I had bought it in back issues from my local comics shop.
I was still quite new to comic books back then, but I was attracted to the character's name, the book's logo and, especially, the character design (All of which you can see on
the cover of the first issue). I'm sure the Gotham City setting and the appearance of Batman late in the series didn't hurt, either.
That series made me a fan of the character, although there weren't many other Ragman comics to track down at the time (I eventually found 1976's Ragman #1, but none of the four issues that followed it). Still, the character stayed in my head, and he was a character I delighted in drawing sketches of; like the Tim Sale version of The Scarecrow from 1993's Legends of the Dark Knight Halloween Special, Ragman would often appear in the corners or along the edges of various spiral ring notebooks and class handouts in high school and college.
The Giffen/Fleming/Broderick limited series lead to another mini-series by a different creative team, Elaine Lee and Gabriel Morrrissette's 1993-1994 Ragman: Cry of the Dead, probably most notable for featuring gorgeous covers by Joe Kubert, after which point the character re-entered limbo again.
I kept wishing for a return, though, thinking the fact that he lived in Gotham City meant he had to turn up in one of the Bat-books eventually. I mean, what he was doing during "Knighftall", for example, or "Contagion"? Did Eclipso not try to eclipse him in The Darkness Within? Did history going crazy during Zero Hour or the sun going out in Final Night not affect his neighborhood?
You can imagine my delight, then, when he finally turned up in 1998's Batman #551. Sure, that was just a few years after the last issue of Cry of the Dead, but it's forever in teenager years, and do you have any idea how many different Batman books and comics set in Gotham City that DC had published during those years?
Better still, here Ragman was appearing in a comic drawn by the art team of Kelley Jones and John Beatty, who had already done such an amazing job of drawing whatever guest-stars witer Doug Moench was able to work into the series by this point, like Swamp Thing, Deadman, The Spectre and The Demon. (For the purposes of this review, by the way, I'm rereading Batman #551-552 via digital copy of Batman by Doug Moench and Kelley Jones Vol. 2 borrowed through the library. Same place I found the two-parter featuring The Spectre, which I covered here).
First, it should be noted that, as always, the art is great—if over-the-top in every conceivable way, as is Jones' wont—starting right there on the cover of the first issue (at the top of the post), in which we see Ragman's rags attacking Batman, bending one of his rabbit-like ears in the process.
Spooky, dramatic and wearing a living costume that is like half billowing cape, Ragman is a character that seems almost as if he was specifically created for Kelley Jones to draw.
Let's look at a few of Jones and Beatty's renderings of Ragman, shall we...?
While it's of course hard to compete with the images of Ragman terrorizing a Nazi, or that badass image of him as a ragged, living green cape flying through the air, I think I like that last image the best, the way his cape is drawn so large that it seems to fill the room, draping itself over crates.
I like how Jones draws capes, usually Batman's, as gigantic, a bit of artistic flair. I like it even more though when he draws them in such a way to suggest that
No, it's not just artistic license, the cape I'm drawing is literally thirty-feet long and twenty-feet wide, see?
Because Ragman's costume has a life of its own, it makes a certain sense that his cape's size might vary from image to image and move in dramatic, unnatural ways that real fabric might not in real life. In that respect, I think Ragman, like Spawn, is a perfect character for Jones to draw (Sadly though, he he's never drawn Spawn, not even on a variant cover).
Jones doesn't draw his Ragman with the same prominent "bow" that Broderick did at the front of his cape. You can see some cords dangling from beneath his hood in a few of those panels, but they are not as big and prominent as Broderick drew them; Broderick's bow is a bit more like tentacles crossed with a ribbon on a Christmas gift.
Now Ragman's origin, at least the revised Giffen/Fleming one from 1991, was that each of the rags that comprise his costume is actually a human soul, that of an evildoer that the Ragman has punished and absorbed (Broderick actually depicted this occurring on
the actually kinda scary cover to that series' second issue).
The Ragman costume then, is a sortof living "suit of souls." It was originally created in 16th century Europe by the same Jewish mystics who had created the legendary Golem of Prague. They eventually deemed the golem a defective defender of the Jewish people, as it lacked a human soul to guide it, so they then created the suit of souls, which could be worn by a human defender. The costume and mantle were thus passed on from champion to champion, ultimately going to Gerry Reganiewicz.
After World War II, Gerry emigrated to the U.S., where he opened the Rags 'n' Tatters junk shop. But when he was killed by gangsters, his adult son Rory Regan found the suit, becoming the new Ragman, now the sort of spirit of vengeance type of character that populate "universe" comics, not unlike DC's own Spectre or Marvel's '90s iteration of Ghost Rider.
Don't worry; you don't need to know any of this before picking up these comics, as Moench recaps it all elegantly enough in the space of a page or two.
In the two-part
Batman story, entitled "Suit of Evil Souls", Regan returns to Gotham City, having apparently been in New Orleans ever since the
Cry of the Dead minieseries. The reason for his return is a rather unhappy one: Benjamin Mizrahi, a man who used to visit his junk shop, has just been murdered in his synagogue by a member of the Aryan Reich, a racist prison gang-turned-street gang now terrorizing Regan's old Jewish neighborhood.
Both Batman and Regan-as-Ragman pursue the killers. In fact, the first issue opens with an image of Batman swooping down on one of them:
Batman brings the skinhead
he was chasing in.
While Regan talks to his late friend's rabbi about the Reich and how they have been terrorizing Jews and others in the neighborhood, one of their number throws a brick through the window. Regan and his rags give chase. The rags wrap tightly around the evil man they were pursuing, seeking to smother him, but Regan calls them off, and they form his Ragman costume around him.
After he's dealt with the threat though, some of the rags detach again, rebelling against his control, and they then smother the man to death. To his horror, Regan learns he can no longer control the rags. And, what's worse, the soul of the man they killed turns into another rag in Ragman's suit of souls, adding to their evil, and thus making it still harder for him to control them.
The rest of the story then, will revolve around Regan and his rebellious rags. Apparently, the new hate crimes in the neighborhood are exacerbating the evil in the suit, and Regan's own hatred—his hate of the hatred of others—further affects his control of the suit.
He asks for help from the rabbi (with whom he shares the story of Ragman, from the suit's creation to his own inheritance of it) and, later, from Batman.
Meanwhile, Vesper Fairchild, the late-night radio host that Bruce Wayne is falling in love with, has a guest on to talk about the rash of hate crimes, and the Aryan Reich prepare to escalate their murder campaign, opening a new crate of weapons in their headquarters. The guns are, of course, lugers.
Ultimately, the rabbi's lessons about the power of God's love are enough to help Regan regain his control of the rags, and Batman helps him round up the rest of the gang—without allowing the rags to smother them all to death or let them burn up in a warehouse fire that accidentally starts during the confrontation.
Luckily, there are less than a half dozen members of the Aryan Reich, so the heroes are able to defeat this particular threat once and for all by the end of the second issue.
Jones does a great job of depicting the rags themselves as a threat. When they go after their victims, they don't do so in the form of the suit, but as a swarm of individual rags, seemingly growing rigid and flying as if by an agency of their own.
Not only do they attack their victims by clinging to them, wrapping them up like mummies and suffocating them, but they also hold Regan captive at one point, some binding him at his wrists and ankles, while the others swirl menacingly above him.
They fly through the air, shattering a window to escape and, in one panel, they form a little tornado shape.
Obviously, antisemitism and racism aren't so easily defeated in the real world, and so we are obviously still dealing with it today. In fact, it seems worse now than at any other point in my life, with the mainstreaming of various racist conspiracy theories and masks-off appreciation of Nazis (often in the form of nihilistic, irony-soaked "jokes" that give those who espouse them a degree of deniability) being mainstreamed by the right.
Given that, it was interesting to re-read this 27-year-old story today. That the skinhead gang that plays the villains are Nazis is never in doubt. The first one we meet has a swastika and the words "Hitler Youth" tattooed on his arm. Another has the double-lightning bolt "SS" tattooed on his arm. While one of them holds the rabbi at gunpoint and raves about how Jews always cheat, and how they had apparently "tricked" America into joining the "wrong side" of World War II, Jones super-imposes a realistic image of Adolf Hitler in the panel's background.
The victims are here all Jewish, and the interview scene discusses antisemitism, but the rabbi tells us that it isn't just Jews who are the focus of the gang's predation.
And as for the obviously white Batman, well, as the man he pursues in the first issue's opening scene tells him, "And if you're siding with
them-- --It's time
you were stomped
too!"
I don't think Moench ever uses the word "white" though, nor "white supremacy" to describe the Aryan Reich, which is too bad, I think, as I would prefer "white supremacy" be as directly linked to racism and Nazism as much and as often as possible, personally. I wonder if there's a space here in America where people stake out their own thinking as pro-white (rather than anti-Black or anti-Jewish, etc) and, in their minds at least, wall it off from racism or Nazism, despite how close those thoughts might be, or how the former might lead to the latter.
At any rate, Moench has the Aryan Reich refer several times to the "pure" man, as opposed to the white man.
Moench obviously paints with a very broad brush here—this is mainstream superhero comics, after all, and from a time when a lot of kids were still reading them—and some of the story might seem a bit preachy. Especially the radio interview section, which is essentially a little lecture in the form of a scene.
In fact, in 1998, I might have thought that villains were a little bit too cartoonish to be realistic, but, well, here it is 2025, and in the news the week I am writing this post? The Secretary of Defense, who prefers to refer to himself as the "Secretary of War" and has several controversial tattoos associated with the Crusades and white supremacy, has been accused of ordering the illegal killing of survivors of illegal military operations to kill presumably innocent Venezuelan men accused of drug-trafficking. And the President of the United States has been publicly calling African immigrants "garbage" that he doesn't want in this country.
At this point, our cartoons aren't even as cartoonish as our real-life villains.
But back to the comics. These two issues comprise a pretty good superhero morality tale, one about the power of God's love to conquer hate...and, as ever, how strong, good men can and should overcome the work of weak, evil men. And the art is great, as Jones and company make great use of two extremely potent comic book character designs.
The final of these issues, Batman #552, would ultimately prove a significant one. It is actually the final issue of the Moench/Jones/Beatty team, which had begun their run on the title in 1994's #515. The issue's last page has Batman in the Batcave, remarking on strange balls of light drifting through the cave, "some sort of geomagnetic anomaly...the phenomenon known as earthlights? Or something else...?"
No, they were earthlights, of the sort that some people believe sometimes presage earthquakes. The very next issue of Batman would be part of the "Cataclysm" Bat-books crossover about a massive earthquake striking the city, followed by stories bearing an "Aftershocks" logo, followed by a couple of those with a "Road to No Man's Land" logo, and then the start of the "No Man's Land" mega-story/status quo.
And what became of Ragman?
Well, if he had anything to do with "No Man's Land", DC never showed us what it was. (I presume he continued to defend his own Jewish neighborhood of Gotham throughout that state of affairs just as Tommy Monaghan and his friends defended their neighborhood The Cauldron. In Regan's case, he must have done so completely off-panel, while Hitman at least devoted a single story arc to its cast during "No Man's Land"...that's 1999's #37 and #38 "Dead Man's Land," in which vampires try to move into Gotham City, if you're interested. It's great!).
The next place I remember seeing Ragman was a short story in 1999's Day of Judgment Secret Files and Origins #1, wherein he is part of a group of magical superheroes deciding where to put the Spear of Destiny (There he was drawn by another of my favorite artists, Hitman's John McCrea). He would later appear in 2005's Infinite Crisis lead-in Day of Vengeance, chronicling The Spectre's war against magic, and the 2006-2008, 25-issue Shadowpact series (the magical superhero team book that DC seemed to have been flirting with launching for years), and he seems to have appeared in the final issues of the New 52 Batwoman for a bit, although I didn't read that.
As a headliner, this version of Ragman's last appearance was in the 2010 one-shot Ragman: Suit of Souls by Christos Gage and Stephen Segovia. In 2017, writer Ray Fawkes and artist Inaki Miranda were responsible for a six-issue Ragman series that gave the hero a new origin and new, much blander look. As that last series fell between the New 52 reboot and the Death Metal de-reboot, whether it's now meant to be canonical or not, I can't say.
Personally, I liked it better when DC rebooted their continuity only once every generation or so.
