Review: 1995's Lobo/Deadman: The Brave and The Bald

I quite clearly remember seeing the house ads for this 1995 one-shot—that sub-title is a memorable one—but I passed on paying $3.50 on a Lobo one-shot. A fan of writer Alan Grant and artist Simon Bisley, I had previously read the 1990 miniseries the pair did with the character's co-creator Keith Gifffen, as well its 1992 sequel, Lobo's Back and 1991's Lobo Paramilitary Christmas Special. I had read a few of the one-shots (like 1993's Lobo Convention Special, drawn by Kevin O'Neill) and, of course, by the early '90s the character was regularly appearing in DC's crossover events. 

By the time The Brave and The Bald had hit stands, I had heard the character's one-note played often enough—that he is, get this, really, really violent—and would have needed something sort of extraordinary to get me to plop down some of my then precious few dollars on another Lobo comic. (And by that point, Lobo had graduated from miniseries and an endless string of one-shot specials to his own ongoing series, also written by Grant. There was no shortage of Lobo comics available for those who were interested.)

I was reminded of this particular one-shot's existence recently when looking up Deadman titles on comics.org for something else I was blogging about. Since I have been writing about so many '90s comics in the past few months anyway, I figured why not check this book out now? After all, is there anything more '90s than a Lobo one-shot...? 

Now, looking back at this comic from a remove of 30 years, I see there are a couple of things that are sort of unusual about it.

First, Lobo was sharing billing with another character here, something that was a bit rare. In the '90s, the only other times this happened was in 1996's Lobo/Judge Dredd: Psycho-Bikers vs. The Mutants from Hell (by Grant, John Wagner, Val Semeiks and John Dell), Lobo/Demon: Hellaween (by Grant and Vince Giarrano) and 1997's Lobo/Mask (by Grant, John Arcudi, Doug Mahnke and Keith Williams). It wouldn't be until after the turn of the century that we got further Lobo team-ups, featuring Hitman, The Authority, Batman, The Roadrunner and Superman. 

And, as you can see, Lobo/Deadman actually predates all of those, so this was his first team-up comic.

Second, the comic's art was by New Zealand artist Martin Emond. He had a handful of prior Lobo credits, and while his art here differs from that of Simon Bisley in quite a few ways, it very much is following in Bisley's conception of the character as something of a compromise between a cartoon and a heavy metal album cover. 

Finally, Deadman seems like a completely random character to pair with Lobo, the two characters literally coming from different worlds (Earth and Czarnia), different sub-genres (supernatural superhero and sci-fi superhero) and different tones (serious melodrama and brash, broad parody). I don't think they had ever crossed paths before this, and I don't think they ever crossed paths since (Although given all the crisis comics DC has published in the last 40 years or so, chances are they both appeared in crowd scenes within the same issue of some comic or other).

Grant and Emond divide their story into three distinct chapters, and there are several surprises of one sort or another, although I will go ahead and spoil the last and biggest surprise, as you've already had 30 years to read this comic unspoiled.

In this first chapter, Lobo is speeding towards Earth on his flying space motorcycle (or a "far-out fragger of a space hawg," in Lobo's words), talking to the reader through the device of a little alien hitchhiker he has picked up (and will ultimately leave hanging from its tied-together antennae from a satellite. This being a Lobo comic, the setting is very much of a painted-looking Looney Tunes sort, with a floating sign pointing an arrow toward Earth.

Lobo is headed to Earth on a bounty-hunting job, and if he's not excited, then at least his interest in piqued:

This guy I gotta arrest sounds like a real hard dude--an' I ain't never met no hard dudes from Earth afore!

'Ceptin' Etrigan The Demon, of course. But he ain't really from Earth...

An' he ain't all that hard, either!

By this point, Lobo has thrown hands with Green Lantern Guy Gardner, Captain Marvel and Superman before, so apparently none of those powerhouses count as hard dudes. As for Etrigan, it's worth noting that Grant wrote The Demon for about 40 issues between 1990 and 1993, and if Lobo and Etrigan weren't exactly friends, they were at least frenemies, showing up in one another's books (And sharing that Hellaween one-shot mentioned above, which I had bought and read for Grant's name and Giarrano's art, although it must not have been very good, as I don't remember anything at all about it now; maybe taht's another old '90s comic I should revisit...). 

Meanwhile, Deadman is floating above a map of the United States, in a very uncomfortable looking, folded-up position. (He is, of course, the "Bald" in The Brave and The Bald). Emond's Deadman looks a bit like Carmine Infantino's original design for the character, and a bit like the emaciated corpse version Kelley Jones drew in 1989's Deadman: Love After Death. He's extremely boney, maybe even skeletal, but doesn't quite look rotten in the same way Jones' does. Also, Emond's version of his long, pointed collar trails off into thread thin curlicues.

Emond's work with Deadman is perhaps the most visually interesting aspect of the book. 

I found his rendering of the ghost a little off-putting, as, in terms of color and texture, Deadman seems to be made of the same "stuff" as everyone and everything else in the comic. There's no visual indicator that he may actually be a ghost, or made of ectoplasm or something, so it looks kind of weird and wrong when Emond draws him climbing into a particular body to possess it. It looks a bit more like they are just being smoothed together, rather than Deadman going inside the person.

You can also see this on the cover, where Deadman's arm is extending through Lobo's chest, but Lobo's flesh also seems to be poking out along with the arm, suggesting some sort of stretchiness to Lobo's body, rather than Deadman simply sticking his insubstantial arm through Lobo's quite substantial chest.

While Emond's Deadman may look as solid as Lobo and the other non-ghost characters, he's unnatural looking in the way he moves, constantly stretching and bending, his limbs often extending behind him and resembling long strings of spaghetti or, perhaps given the red of his suit, licorice. More than once while reading this I found myself wishing Emond had drawn a Plastic Man comic before he had passed away.  

According to his narration, Deadman's therapist has said he needs a vacation, and so he heads for Pismo  Bizmo Beach. He proceeds to take over the body of an apparently good-looking "skurfer" (That's "sky" + "surf") and is in the process of enjoying having oil rubbed on him by various beach babes when their boyfriends from the Steroid Biker gang arrive. A fight ensues, Deadman body-hopping in order to defeat the bad guys.

After a few pages of Lobo wandering around the beach, giving Grant a few scenes to play the hyper-violent "Main Man" off of Californian beachgoers, he arrives at the fray, and we begin chapter two, and the first of those surprises.

Deadman is the bounty that Lobo is hunting! I suppose that should have been obvious from the title, huh? But it still surprised me. This panel, by the way, features what is my favorite joke in the comic, the "Wanted: Alive!!" poster for Deadman.

Okay, maybe it's not much of a joke, but I liked it...

Lobo is armed with a spook-detector and a spook-collector with which to find and capture Deadman, but it is ultimately Deadman who captures Lobo, taking over his body...although not without some difficulty, due to Lobo's alien physiology and single-minded will ("His mind is a seething cauldron of undifferentiated rage, hatred and boredom...Somewhere, really ugly heavy metal music is playing.") 

In order to find out who put a price on his head, Deadman-in-Lobo's body flies to the meet point in outer space...only to be Boom Tube-ed to Apokolips, which is the other, bigger surprise: It is Darkseid who hired Lobo to capture Deadman!

Well, in actuality, it is one of Darkseid's minions. Not Desaad, but a new, original-to-this-book one, a Doctor Kroolman. (If you're wondering why Grant made up a new New God for this story rather than using Desaad or someone, well, this is a Lobo comic, so you can probably guess how it will ultimately turn out for the villain, and obviously this isn't the place to lose valuable IP). 

What does Kroolman want with Deadman? Well, his is a rather weird, though amusingly audacious, plan and, refreshingly, it isn't just another attempt to secure the Anti-Life Equation. We'll get to said plan in a moment.

As Deadman-in-Lobo fights his way through hordes of Parademons—which Emond draws as bat-winged demons from his own imagination, rather than hewing to Jack Kirby's designs—he accidentally uses the gun on his hip, which is the spook-collector, and thus Deadman gets sucked out of Lobo and trapped, ready for delivery to Kroolman. 

The trapped Deadman is a great image, by the way. Here are the first few images of him in the collector, a tiny little head, pair of hands and a mass of red squiggles:

It's only after Kroolman tricks Lobo into accepting a hit on himself—which, unable to ever go back on his word, he goes through with, killing himself to complete the contract—that Kroolman finally explains his plan to Lobo:

Both you and Deadman have been to Heaven. Therefore, you must know your way back--not consciously, perhaps, but deep down inside you--on the spiritual level.

By interrogating Deadman, and matching his buried knowledge with yours, I will be able to locate it with pinpoint precision!

And why does Kroolman want to get to Heaven? Well, he explains, in order for Darkseid to be "the one true God", he has to unlock the secrets of the old gods, secrets that can be found in Heaven. 

So Apokolips plans to make war on Heaven. (I have to assume in an earlier draft of the script, Grant had Kroolman saying something about Darkseid trying to bump off God and take his place, which seems more direct than this business about finding secrets, but maybe DC balked at that). 

Once they're both dead, Lobo and Deadman finally meet face to face, and they do not get along. Kroolman uses his special equipment to start disassembling the pair's spirits but, as the stars of superhero comics so often do, they manage to escape the— Well, I was going to say "death trap", but I suppose that's not quite the right word, since at that point they are both already dead.

Suffice it to say that the guys whose names are in the title are not erased from existence, and the villains' plans to conquer Heaven never come to pass. This is thanks to a pep talk from Lobo ("'S loser talk...dude!"), Deadman's possession abilities and the stupidity of a henchman (Although to be fair to that henchman, I would have done the exact same thing had I found myself in his circumstances).

In the end, Kroolman dies, Lobo flicks off Darkseid and gives him the business and, after a few more neat images of Deadman, he walks off into the background of a panel, one ridiculously long leg trailing behind him as a raincloud forms above his head. 

While there are definitely some fun elements to the book—and I suppose it's something of a must-read for fans of Deadman, if only to see Emond's rather unique take on him—it's still very much one of Alan Grant's Lobo comics, and thus your mileage may vary, depending on how funny you happen to find Lobo. 

Do take that into consideration if you decide you might want to track this book down. It hasn't been collected, so doing so would require either finding a back issue or turning to Amazon's Comixology. 

I do feel it is something of a waste of the "Brave and The Bald" joke, though. I think that might have been better suited to a Lex Luthor team-up book, as baldness is associated with Lex in a way that it isn't with Deadman, even if, yes, Deadman is technically bald...