For some reason I wrote this on Facebook then realized nobody there will appreciate it like the people here will. Anyway, here’s Wonderwall.

I just read Deathmate for the first time ever. Yes, the infamous Deathmate. I’d never read a single page of it before. Maybe it’s my nostalgia for all things 90s but I didn’t hate it. Honestly, I sort of enjoyed it. After all of the mental gymnastics necessary for the usual stuff I read by guys like Grant Morrison, Alan Moore, Brandon Graham, Neil Gaiman, and etc, it was nice to sit back with some pure 90s ridiculousness that didn’t require much thought and just bask in it. I’ve always heard that Deathmate was one of the leading culprits for the 90s comic bust (especially the forever delayed Deathmate: Red) so I felt, as a life long comics connoisseur, I had a duty to read it one day. Today was that day. A month ago I got the entire series at a con for $5 (still an overpay for sure) and I was just waiting for a cold evening when my dog wouldn’t want to be outside much and it would free up the time to dive into the biggest disaster the comics industry has ever known. I’m glad I finally read it.

A funny thing about Deathmate, they said the chapters could be read in any order so they assigned colors to them rather than numbers. Because having shiny foil covers on everything wasn’t enough of a gimmick, they also wanted to reinvent the way we look for guidance on how to appropriately understand the chronology of storytelling by completely throwing conventional methods out the window. So instead of #1-6 we are left with a Prologue and Epilogue, then we put Yellow, Blue, Black, and Red in whatever order tickles your fancy. Because that makes sense. If you were fortunate like me, you also got the two rare preview issues Green and Pink that were both really short and could also supposedly be placed at whatever random order you like between the Prologue and Epilogue. Oh yeah, Deathmate Pink also had a variant that was Orange and told the same story because they needed all of the colors but only apparently only had so much content. No Deathmate Purple, though. Whenever I approach something that basically says “throw the shit all over the ground and put it back together however you please. Hell, have a blind man put them in order for you” it doesn’t instill any confidence in me at all that I’m about to partake in some sort of masterpiece.

However, like I said earlier, I did find myself enjoying Deathmate and I’m pretty sure after one reading I have solved the mystery of the proper reading order. You see, despite Image and Valiant both claiming that it didn’t matter and the story would make sense no matter what, people have been theorizing online and in comic shops for almost 25 years that there is, in fact an actual order. Why? Because the story both does and doesn’t make any sense. Hard to wrap your head around that statement but it’s true. There actually is a solid narrative in there but it’s broken up over eight/nine colors and two bookend chapters with release dates that absolutely do not coincide with their place in the story. Sort of like a ‘choose your own adventure’ book except if you make any choice at all other than the one that the publishers deny exists, then your adventure is a borderline incoherent head-scratcher that almost singlehandedly brings down the juggernaut of the 90s comic boom. Choose wisely.

Deciphering the conundrum of the Deathmate reading order was built up to the point where I thought it was supposedly unsolvable, like the Oak Island of comics. Fret no longer, nerds. I have the Rosetta Stone of the comics industry’s most notorious puzzle. Are you ready? In order to get the most out of Deathmate, it reads like this:

1. Prologue
2. Green
3. Red
4. Pink/Orange
5. Yellow
6. Blue
7. Black
8. Epilogue

Yes, you read that correctly. After all these years of nobody giving a shit anymore I provided the answers. Neat! To put it quite literally and describe things based on the release dates to really show how bizarre it is, it looks like this:

1. Prologue that actually didn’t come out first.
2. Green, which is a “preview” issue that actually did come out first but must be read second because why.
3. Red, which came out last. It was so late it actually came out after the Epilogue thus killing any hope at all that there was any logic to the entire event.
4. Pink/Orange, which was another “preview” that came out before the Prologue but should be read fourth because oooh mystery.
5. Yellow. It has a story that directly continues from Pink/Orange and, despite the Prologue and Green both saying “to be continued in Deathmate Yellow,” if you don’t put Red before Yellow then you can essentially toss Red into the garbage because it literally makes no sense at all anywhere else.
6. Blue. It continues directly from Yellow and everyone has always known that.
7. Black. This one was tricky. I would almost place it between Red and Yellow but I think it fits better here right before the end. It almost has nothing at all to do with anything else in the entire story until the very end when a character takes off to participate in events that happen in the Epilogue. Putting it here adds to the suspense from Blue going into the big finale.
8. Epilogue because even though Red came out like six months after this it was still intended to be the final chapter.

Now here’s the thing: Prologue, Green, Pink, Yellow and Blue actually tell a fairly tight narrative that flow directly into the Epilogue. You could honestly throw Red out if you want to and, if not for one character joining up in the Epilogue, you could throw out Black, too. Sure, if you did that then a character would pop up out of nowhere in the Epilogue but in these big inter-company crossovers that’s just par for the course. Black is a long-winded story just to get one guy in place at the end of it all. If you choose to include Red it has to go after Green and before Pink/Orange. It also gives you some closure to Prophet’s story by including Red but so many other plot threads get left hanging so what’s one more. Keep it or toss it, I just reiterate that it makes no sense anywhere else. The real bummer to all this, besides the fact that I read it and wrote this insanely long breakdown, is that there are still numerous side plots that are left completely unresolved. Not because they’re out of order, it’s because they’re never revisited at all. It’s like the writers just said “Fuck it, let’s fit as many characters in here as possible and we’ll sort it all out later” but there was never any sorting out to be done. Maybe we were supposed to be so distracted by trying to make heads or tails of the asinine numbering scheme that we would just forget all of the dangling threads left hanging.

Well, listen up Valiant-1993-before-you-filed-bankruptcy-and-disappeared-for-15-years-but-then-randomly-showed-back-up-and-put-out-decent-stuff-now, and you listen up, too Image-1993-we-shipped-Red-so-late-we-killed-interest-in-the-series-but-comic-shops-have-to-order-months-in-advance-so-they-got-fucked-and-stuck-with-shit-nobody-wanted-anymore-because-fans-said-fuck-this-color-coded-bullshit-comics-are-for-kids-anyway-I-only-got-into-this-as-an-investment-but-for-some-reason-my-shit-that-sold-millions-of-copies-isn’t-worth-anything-gee-I-fucking-wonder-why-and-now-the-90s-comics-boom-has-become-a-comics-bust-that-resulted-in-Marvel-having-to-file-bankruptcy-and-sell-off-the-movie-rights-to-their-properties-and-they’re-just-now-getting-them-back-under-their-control-over-20-years-later-thanks-to-the-money-machine-known-as-Disney-but-who-cares-because-Hugh-Jackman-said-he-isn’t-playing-Wolverine-anymore... I figured out your little riddle that you published when I was 11. Even though I couldn’t be bothered with it at the time here I am as a 36 year old man and I’m fucking bothering with it now. I solved your unsolvable Linear B Rainbow Numerical God Equation but I didn’t forget about all the shit you just left hanging in there. So ha-fucking-ha. Got you. But what happened to Archer & Armstrong? Where did Grifter take that guy that shot Shadowman? What happened to Shadowman? How was Emp in 3 different timelines? Was this whole thing a metaphor for safe sex because these two people from alternate realities fucking in some interdimensional energy plane led to their realities converging and collapsing in on themselves hence the title Deathmate? Everybody shit talks your Deathmate disaster but I had fun with it and cracked a mystery almost as old as Image Comics entire existence as a publisher. I am the codex, Rob Liefeld. Where’s Youngblood: Bloodsport #2?

As the Lagina boys of Oak Island would say if they ever stopped digging up coconut fibers and having Dan Blankenship’s blue-lipped, propped up corpse sniff wood, “Lets slam some can! It’s crown time!”