12. Christmas with the Super-Heroes #2 (1988, DC Comics)
“Should Auld Acquaintance Be Forgot”
Alan Brennert and Dick Giordano
No action scenes, no fights, no criminal plots, no death-traps. Just a night in the life of Boston Brand, aka Deadman, during the Christmas season that says far more than many a mini-series about why people do what they do, super-heroes included.
Alan Brennert, whose every story is a diamond, brings his unequalled ability to see superheroes as human beings to a deceptively simple 10-pager that is reminiscent of “A Christmas Carol,” Greek mythology, and the justifiably admired “Silent Night of the Batman.”
There’s even more, of course, as there always seems to be in any Brennert story. Nestled into the final slot in a Christmas-themed special, this is a beautiful, human story that works on several levels. Of course it’s a comic book story, with a couple of super-heroes teaming up to tackle a problem, but it’s about far more.
It’s about the simultaneous brightness and darkness of Christmas; the loneliness and disregard we all feel at one time or another; the need to look beyond our own narrow vision of things; and the lack of awareness of the plights of others that all of us fall prey to.
And it’s also something of a fanboy reaction to the Crisis on Infinite Earths in which Brennert shows us the most powerful effects of the Crisis -- not the deaths of dozens of universes, thousands of worlds and millions of beings, but the death of one particular human being, and worse, of the forgetfulness of those who survive, who live on another day or another year or decades more.
Brennert takes on the casualness of comic book death, the dismissive wave of the hand that condemns to arbitrary death a supposedly useless or dated or overly complicated character so that a new creator can start afresh with the proverbial clean slate. But the new creators could not turn our memories into so many clean slates.
Problem is, a writer as skilled as Brennert, in just a few panels in this one story, breathes more life into a supposedly moribund character than dozens of less imaginative ones had in the two years after the Crisis.
Deadman, whose only chance to experience life is by denying others any contact with it, is beset with anger and self-pity as he watches the joy of the Christmas season take hold in the crowds of people shopping and jostling each other in the streets.
Brennert uses the moment to show us something about Boston Brand that there’d not been time for in standard super-hero stories: apparently, Deadman goes Christmas shopping every year. In this story he briefly inhabits the body of a plutocrat whose specialty is the leveraged buyout. Like Robin Hood, Deadman uses the billionaire’s body (and charge card) to send gifts to Lorna Hill, Vashnu, and his other old friends at the circus, to his brother Cleve, and even to Rama Kushna, the spiritual entity who gave him new “life” as Deadman. He also authorizes six weeks’ severance pay to the 50,000 people whose jobs he eliminated thanks to his recent financial machinations.
Releasing the venture vulture, Deadman recalls visiting the circus one year but realizing that it just doesn’t work, as he felt like “the spectre at the banquet” or “something out of Dickens.” (Who knew Boston Brand was such a lover of classic literature?)
Spying a young couple skating, he can’t resist just a brief flirtation with the life and human contact he yearns for: “Being able to feel the wind on your face… the chill on the air… the smell of fresh-fallen snow. You forget what it feels like, being alive.”
He takes over the body of a young man and remains in his body for more than just a quick turn around the rink when his companion, seeing that his lips are turning blue, kisses him. He ends up with the beautiful woman on his arm at a festive Christmas dinner with “their” friends.
Enveloped in joy and love and merriment, Brand feels more and more comfortable being “this lucky guy” and we wonder why Deadman doesn’t just do it. Why doesn’t he just live the lucky guy’s life? And why hasn’t he just done that before? Why not turn your punishment into a reward, Deadman?
And so Brennert deftly, subtly raises a question never raised before in all the Deadman stories.
But Deadman can only take his ruse so far. He realizes that he’s stealing what for all anyone knows could be the lucky guy’s last Christmas and leaves his body, “before I can hear the confusion, before I can see the bewilderment in his eyes or the concern and worry in his friends.’”
And he adds, “I always leave before then.”
So he’s done this before. A lot. Thefts of precious moments from unsuspecting people to satisfy his craving for real life.
Cursing Rama for his cruel fate, Deadman sits, posed like Rodin’s thinker when a woman strikes up a conversation. He responds instinctively without questioning at first how she can see and hear him. He assumes that it’s because she’s some kind of magical creature, but thinks that he knows every “spook, sorcerer, mystic, or magician on Earth” and can’t figure out who she is.
She asks him questions about himself, his anguish, and his discontent like a skilled therapist or a caring friend.
SPOILER ALERT: If you’ve not read this story, please read the rest of it now or proceed at your own risk.
(Go here:
observationdeck.kinja.com/what-is-supergirls-greatest-moment-1792247750)(Or here for the whole story:
talesfromthekryptonian.blogspot.com/2008/12/merry-christmas-deadman.html)Is it that “all these people… don’t even know what you’ve done on their behalf?”
Deadman answers with more self-pity: “I knock myself out fighting for them, but does anyone know? Does anyone care?”
She confronts him again: “So you want recognition, then? You want glory?”
Deadman is stopped in his tracks, thinking, “I’d been feeling like Job, and here she was, making me feel like Judas and I didn’t know why.”
He confesses that he misses the roar of the crowd, that he was a performer, after all. We get the feeling that he thinks she just doesn’t understand: “There’s nothing like it. I soar. I soared. Literally.”
And for us, the readers who’ve known who this striking, stylishly dressed blonde woman is, the irony rings in our ears like a bell. She pulls off his mask and speaks to him face-to face, sounding for all the world like Achilles or Athene speaking to Odysseus about the shallowness of glory and pride, of the dangers of hubris and the sacrifices required of a hero.
“You soared and were cut down, at your height. Maybe there’s a reason for that…
We don’t do it for the glory. We don’t do it for the recognition.
We do it because it needs to be done. Because if we don’t, no one will. And we do it even if no one knows what we’ve done. Even if no one knows we exist. Even if no one remembers we ever existed.”
And we readers, who know more than Boston Brand, feel the piercing sting of that final line.
Thus this Ghost of Christmas Past, Present and Future in one captures not just the ethos of a super-hero, but the ethos of Everyman and Everywoman, all of us, who struggle with our need to satisfy our own selfish urges at the cost of our responsibility to our fellow human beings, of the sacrifices required of all of us if we are to live in a community or a commonwealth worthy of the name.
Humbled, Boston calls himself “a putz,” but she reassures him. “No. You are only human. You are still human, Boston. Don’t be ashamed of it; rejoice in it.”
The bells of St. Patrick’s Cathedral ring and the mysterious woman must go. She has “business to attend to.”
Brand demands to know how she can see him and how she knew so much. “I don’t even know your name.”
And in a penultimate line that is surely one of Brennert’s best and bitterest, she looks back and says, “My name is Kara. Though I doubt that’ll mean anything to you.”
And Boston Brand (not Deadman) calls after her, “Merry Christmas, Kara. Whoever you are.”
The story is dedicated to Otto Binder and Jim Mooney, “with respect and admiration.”
To those words, Brennert adds a coda that speaks for many comic fans who had watched an era end in thoughtless indifference and a legacy first ravaged and then eliminated in the name of sophistication, “We still remember.”
