I got me this neat Deadman badge from Midtown Comics in Manhattan last month. Put it on the bowler hat, rare honor for a badge.

I would’ve been a charter member of the Deadman fan club if they’d ever had one. I was there with mourning-bells on when the character first appeared, rendered by Carmine Infantino and then by Neal Adams, in Strange Adventures Comics. I was six years old, but the Comics Code Authority was on the case, making sure that kids could not possibly be creeped out by the adventures of a brutally murdered ill-tempered circus aerialist who could swoop into the bodies of living people and take over their souls quicker than he could say “Boo!”

Deadman is now a revered cult hero, hardly the first dead comics hero (that would be The Spectre, a quarter-century earlier) but among the hardiest. Back then, there were no “cult” heroes, only poor-selling ones. Nobody at the schoolyard cared whether you read Deadman. It was something uncool you kept to yourself. Ditto Len Wein & Bernie Wrightson’s Swamp Thing and E. Nelson Bridwell & Joe Orlando’s Inferior Five and Bridwell & Bob Oksner’s Angel and the Ape.

Deadman rated a National Lampoon parody (in which villains are stopped by a plummeting lifeless corpse), drawn by Neal Adams himself. Dave Bullock revived (resurrected? Reburied?) for the cool Wednesday Comics miniseries a couple of years back. Neil Gaiman used him for the supernatural superhero miniseries The Books of Magic. Deadman’s got staying power, which I guess in his line you call immortality.

But mostly the cool DC characters of this ilk are used to remind us that DC operates an entire universe and not just a stock ensemble company that wears nothing but “S” insigniae or batcowls.

Every time there’s a cataclysmic worlds-changing event in comicsdom, that’s when the minor stars get trotted out, usually unrecognizable except for their costumes. The grief-stricked Elongated Man of Identity Crisis. The uncharacteristically subtle Swamp Thing of Brightest Day Aftermath. The suddenly overbearing Oracle once Batman died. And now—for Flashpoint, a multi-comic reinvents the origins and working relationships of dozens of DC mainstays—a Deadman who isn’t even dead yet and already has a too-fast-to-live attitude.

The supposed cleverness in this reworking is sheer obviousness. Boston Brand, destined to be Deadman, is a circus acrobat. Hey—so were the Graysons, the trapeze-grabbing clan which begat Batman’s sidekick Robin (aka Nightwing, aka Batman).

On the other hand, the cover of the first issue of the three-issue Deadman Flashpoint series is pretty cool—circus postery, with nice use of white space.

And they gave me a Deadman badge about it. Something I’ve been waiting for all my, uh, life.