Deadman: Dark Mansion of Forbidden Love is another retelling of Bluebeard where a man and a woman go to some big house, the man turns out to be crazy and the woman runs away from him. Other famous versions include Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre and Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. What does Deadman/Boston Brand have to do with it? Nothing really. And that’s the book!
Ugh, awful. I’d hoped Alex + Ada co-writer Sarah Vaughn’s story, with the inclusion of deceased superhero Deadman, would be good in an offbeat way but it’s just a standard gothic romance. What’s worse is that Vaughn appears to be a Social Justice Warrior who’s infused the book with her regressive left politics. A female character, Sam, claims to be non-binary - that is, neither male nor female - and uses they/them pronouns. Oh. Fuck. No. Gawd. And, per that toxic ideology, the villain is a straight white male - the worst thing imaginable! Deadman gets a pass I guess because DC didn’t want their character shit on - while the heroes are a woman and a gay “non-binary” black woman, aka the best thing imaginable!
I’ll try to keep my political rant as short as possible: I can’t stand the absurdly PC gobshite that’s infected liberals today. I don’t care if you want to be called male, female, or if you’re a hermaphrodite, but there’s no such thing as non-binary. It’s fucking stupid. You’re one of those things. To call yourself “non-binary” is preposterous, pretentious and nonsensical, not to mention ungrammatical!
DC: please don’t pander to the SJWs, they are CANCER. Look what happened to Marvel when they did - their sales have been in the toilet for over a year! Comics Alliance went full SJW and it’s now dead. Everyday Feminism is going under as we speak. The Guardian is literally begging people to support its leftist propaganda machine when you visit their website. The Labour party in the UK and the Democrat party in the US are in freefall after siding with these extremists. Bottom line: these idiots poison everything they touch. I guarantee you also they make up a miniscule percentage of the comics reading audience; they won’t support you financially and they’re NEVER happy with anybody’s efforts to try to placate/accommodate them. Like Flat Earthers and other uneducated anti-intellectuals, it’s best to just ignore them. They’ll be gone soon enough while the actual fans reading this, and other DC books, who’re just looking for an entertaining story, will still be there.
Even without the politics though, Dark Mansion would still be a crappy comic. It’s an unoriginal, cliche-ridden romance with an obvious (as well as confusing and contrived - I guess Berenice is bi or secretly gay even though that’s never established?) love triangle and unexciting “mystery” at its core; Deadman is an incidental and, at best, supporting character despite the book being supposedly starring him; and the whole thing reads like a half-baked episode of Scooby-Doo. It’s such a boring read.
The art team do an outstanding job though. Lan Medina, Phil Hester and Jose Villarrubia have produced a gorgeous book and every page was a stunner - shame that it was all in service to Sarah Vaughn’s garbage script.
I was disappointed because this looked like a really fun book. I liked and appreciated that DC were doing something unusual with one of their lesser-known characters so it’s a shame that it turned out the way that it did. Dull, uninspired, deeply generic and unfortunately tainted with regressive politics, Deadman: Dark Mansion of Forbidden Pants ain’t worth it.
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