Behold The Spooky Art Process Of ‘Deadman: Dark Mansion Of Forbidden Love’

I've expressed my excitement about Deadman: Dark Mansion of Forbidden Love plenty of times before. Written by Sarah Vaughn with art by Lan Medina, it's a gothic haunted house story that's simultaneously retro in its tone and progressive in its politics.

DC has provided ComicsAlliance with an exclusive look at Medina's design process for the book, as well as art from both Medina and guest artist Phil Hester.

The main character in Dark Mansions is a young woman named Berenice, who can see and communicate with ghosts that are invisible to those around her. Naturally that leads her into a story that involves the dead acrobat --- and DC's most famous ghost (except maybe for the Spectre) --- Boston Brand, aka Deadman.

Deadman has been around since 1967, when he debuted in Strange Adventures #205, by Arnold Drake and Carmine Infantino. He's been in all kinds of stories since then, bridging the gap between horror and superheroics, and occasionally swerving hard in one of those two directions before eventually swinging back to the other. But he's never been in anything quite like this. Visually, however, Lan Medina's Boston Brand is the Boston Brand of Carmine Infantino, and perhaps even more the Boston of Neal Adams, perhaps the artist most associate with the character.

In this gallery of production and process art, we can see Medina getting a handle on the character and fitting him into the sumptuous gothic setting of Vaughn's story. There's also some layouts for issue two by Hester, and even a model of Boston Brand's face, which is obviously a great way to understand how light falls on his ghostly visage.