What is a Bell Bottom Pick? At Comic Pants, we love the new, but sometimes we get nostalgic to talk up an older book or series and remember some greatness from “back in the day.” That “day” could be the extreme 90’s, the socially relevant 70’s, or the guys-wore-hats 50’s. Who knows? All we can tell you is that a Bell Bottom Pick is worth rifling though back issue bins for or even braving the wilds of Ebay. Our latest “Bell Bottom Pick” is Deathlok #1-4 (1990).

Writers: Dwayne McDuffie & Gregory Wright
Artists: Butch Guice, Scott Williams, Denys Cowan, Rick Magyar, Kyle Baker, Mike DeCarlo & others
Company: Marvel Comics

Sometimes, you go back to series you loved when you were younger and they hold up beautifully, just as good as you remembered them, like Suicide Squad. Sometimes, they still have a lot to recommend them, but you can see the flaws that you didn’t see in your younger days. Such is the case with Deathlok, a four-issue miniseries from 1990 that introduced a new hero to the Marvel Universe whose guns and appearance seemed to fit right in with the “extreme heroes” of the ’90s to come, but whose attitudes and methods of operation were a little bit more old school.

Deathlok was the co-creation of colorist/writer Gregory Wright and one of my favorite comics writers, Dwayne McDuffie. Or, more correctly, re-creation, since the original Deathlok was a military cyborg named Luther Manning from an alternate future. McDuffie and Wright’s story references a previous Deathlok when Nick Fury expresses surprise that he’s still alive, but that’s about it, as they instead offer up basically a clean slate version of the character. Essentially, pacifist engineer Michael Collins, husband and father, finds out that his boss, Harlan Ryker, has been using his designs to build a weapon, and when he confronts Ryker, he gets killed and his brain is stuck in the very cyborg he was unknowingly helping to design.

The most interesting thing about Deathlok is the contrast between what he looks like and what he is, and Wright and McDuffie play that up to the fullest. The bystanders he saves, his wife, the guys at SHIELD, almost everybody just assumes that Deathlok is some kind of monster, because he looks like one. And of course, his first action, before Collins gets control, is to wipe out a village in South America at the behest of Roxxon, the company that created him, which doesn’t do much to help his credibility. Heck, even most comic fans would probably assume, looking at Deathlok’s scarred cyborg face, shiny metal limbs and big ‘ol guns that he’s your standard shoot ‘em all, let God sort ‘em out badass killer.

Instead, Deathlok represents the heroic dilemma at its best. You want heroic sacrifice and suffering? How about this - the guy loses not only his wife and child, but his own body, by trying to do the right thing, and finds himself forced into destroying and killing as a result. He’s on a redemption arc from the start, because of punishment someone else forced him to inflict. Collins deals with things pretty well, actually, instituting a “no killing” parameter for his computer and trying to clean up the messes he was partly responsible for, and before the series is over, he’s forced to choose between revenge on Ryker and doing what’s right.

On occasion, Collins’ morality does become a little bit unrealistic. When his son is playing a videogame and puts all his points into a big gun, Collins chastises him with “Being a hero isn’t about looking tough. It’s about making tough choices. It’s about sacrifice.” I get that McDuffie is trying to hit a lesson that Collins will be unable to convey in person later, but you start thinking as you read it, “Jeez, dude, lighten up. It’s just a videogame.” Nobody tell this guy about Grand Theft Auto!

For all that Collins’ heroic virtues can occasionally become a little preachy, though, they are pretty effective. McDuffie has a turn of phrase in here where Deathlok tells his son (through a somewhat unbelievable turn of events in which he hacks himself into his son’s game) that “Being a hero means doing what’s right, not what’s easiest.” It’s one of the truest maxims I’ve heard about what superheroes should represent, something that was all but forgotten in the ’90s and that still doesn’t seem to resonate with all too many readers. These days, I’d also add the “But for God’s sake, that doesn’t mean they have to live a life that would make Job turn to them and say ‘Jeez, sucks to be you,’” but that might be nitpicking on my part.

This isn’t to say that Deathlok is just a polemic on how tough it is to be a hero, or how important it is to sacrifice. The deadpan, logical reports of the computer to Michael’s more human, colloquial requests are often quite funny. And while Michael is a pacifist in that he doesn’t kill, he doesn’t have any particular problem using the Deathlok cyborg to its fullest, which means tons of kickass action sequences and clever uses of his technological abilities. Actually, McDuffie’s take on technology, with Deathlok being able to hack into phone lines and networks, comes across as fairly realistic and even somewhat prescient in our wireless networked Internet world, and doesn’t carry with it the somewhat sloppy computer understanding so common in movies, TV and comics of the ’80s and ’90s. Nobody accidentally starts a nuclear war or unlocks a nuclear power system to create the perfect woman or anything like that, at any rate.

McDuffie and Wright’s plot flows pretty solidly, although there are glitches. The fourth issue, introducing an ultra-nationalist Japanese plot and Sunfire as a duped part of it, feels bizarrely out of touch with the rest of the story, which is a pretty relevant story of corporate/government corruption that rings as true today as it did in the ’90s. And the first issue is a good setup, but it almost feels like there’s too much packed in there, and some people react really quickly to life-shaking events as if they were no big deal. Collins adapts pretty quickly to his situation, Ryker decides pretty quickly that the easiest thing to do with a whistleblower is to stick him in a killing machine, etc.

While the story suffers a little bit in the end, the art suffers a lot. I seem to recall there being pretty significant delays between issues, and it’s clear now, looking at the change in artists, that Deathlok never had a stable art situation. It begins with fairly nice artwork from Jackson Guice and Scott Williams. The art isn’t as beautiful as Guice’s later work at DC or Crossgen, and carries a definite emulation of Todd McFarlane’s style, but it’s clear and there’s great action storytelling, and the colors, by Wright (with the assistance of Paul Mounts and Brad Vancata) are very solid, especially by the standards of the ’90s.

However, by issue two, we’re down to breakdowns by Guice and finishes by Williams, and the art changes in quality from page to page. It’s always at least passable, but there are probably only two or three pages total that hit the quality of the first issue. Then issue three sees the arrival of Denys Cowan, with inks by Rick Magyar. Cowan’s work is a definite change, less finished than Guice’s work, but it’s still solid on issue three. Then issue four features a number of rotating inkers, and the work is really uneven, from solid stuff on some pages to extremely rushed on many of the others. At no point is the work less than professional, but there are huge variances of quality throughout the miniseries.

Cowan would go on to be the regular artist for the Deathlok ongoing series, which actually suited him pretty well. After that series folded, Deathlok more or less disappeared into limbo in the mid-’90s, but he has recently reappeared in Beyond, with his original creator Dwayne McDuffie writing him, and he more or less stole the show in issue three. If you’re reading Beyond and interested in seeing the foundation for this unusual hero, definitely dive into the back issue bins and give Deathlok a try. The story derails a bit in the end, the art is uneven and occasionally the old school dialogue and pacing can be a little bit grating, but the core message of heroism, the solid use of technology and several strong action sequences make it worth a read.

Share and Enjoy:

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
•