The first comic both starring a trans woman and written by a trans woman. But you may know Maddie Blaustein better for voicing Meowth in Pokemon.
That’s right, Blaustein voiced Meowth for the first eight Pokemon seasons and was even inspired by him to fully transition. But that was her second career: she had started as an assistant to Marvel Editor Jim Owsley/Christopher Priest. At Marvel she also wrote some stories for Web of Spider-Man and Conan the King among others. In the nineties she moved to DC and wrote for several of their !mpact titles before getting involved with Milestone where she worked as production manager, doing some fill in stories for e.g Hardware on the side, often together with Yves Fezzani with whom she also wrote Deathwish.
The character itself had actually debuted in Hardware, a Dwayne McDuffie/Denys Cowan creation. A Punisher type vigilante with no powers but who was tough enough to take on the Iron Manesque Hardware in hand to hand combat, Deathwish specialised in hunting down and murdering sex offenders and rapists. When both he and Hardware were after the same serial killer of sex workers, they came to blows. Ultimately it turned out that Deathwish himself was the murderer, having periodic blackouts as the result of severe trauma. His backstory is tragic and deserves a trigger warning; both McDuffie and Cowan felt uncomfortable writing and drawing it. Deathwish had seen his son and wife be raped and murdered in front of him before the same was done to him. He survived and tracked down the murderer, then became a vigilante. McDuffie even gave him a little spiel to go along with it he tells his victims. “There’s this movie. It’s about this guy who gets pushed too far. So he decides to push back.” Rather purile in light of what happened to him and what he ends up doing, but that is as intended. Deathwish isn’t cool, Deathwish is a murderer who serves as an example for Hardware of how not to be a hero. That’s the point in which Blaustein picks him up to star in his own miniseries.
Except he isn’t. The real star of the series, the one we follow the most, the one narrating the story is lt. Marisha Rahm, “the first pre-operative transsexual police lieutenant the city has ever employed” as her narration puts it. We first meet her four years earlier, when she’s on the trail of Boots, a serial killer specialising in murdering trans and queer sex workers. That’s when she meets Dini, who had survived his attack. It’s also when Marisha first meets Deathwish, who tells her that maybe she hadn’t faced it yet, but she’s one of the girls. As Boots returns in the present day, Marisha visits Deathwish in prison, where he’s been since what happened in Hardware and asks his help. He agrees, but only if she tells her story, as shown above.
Not too hard to tell… This movie ran through my head twenty-four seven. It was with me when I was a small child lying awake at night and cursing the fates. It was with me when I walked down the aisle at my wedding… like a Jew at Treblinka. It was with me when I took the Seaport murders case. It was a story of mind-numbing pain until I met my Dini. My life started after her attack at the warehouse. I’d give her flowers. She gave me her ears.
This, Marisha’s story is at the heart of the issue and the series as a whole. Most of the surface plot is a fairly by the numbers serial killer plot, but Marisa’s transition and the reality of what that is like is what sets Deathwish apart. The story Marisa tells of her coming out, of the pain that living as a man brought with it, the realisation that she could change and the realities of being out in a world that’s not kind to trans women, these are all things I’ve heard from trans friends as well. As Blaustein and Yves make clear in the letter columns, the story of Marisha and Dini is their story; even the murder of Dini’s friend on the first page is based on the murder of one of Yves’s trans woman friends. this gives it an authenticity that’s rare in comics then or now.
But if there was any publisher which could publish a series like Deathwish it was Milestone. It was founded after all by a coalition of African-American comics creators (Dwayne McDuffie, Denys Cowan, Michael Davis, Derek T. Dingle and Christopher Priest), explicitly set up to provide a much more diverse sort of superhero universe than that of the Big Two. That sort of worked against it sadly as readers thought of it as “those Black superheroes” (putting it politely), with white readers thinking that therefore it wasn’t for them. But it also meant that it could publish a series like Deathwish.
(As a side note, Maddie Blaustein was not the only trans comics writer working then: at roughly the same time there was Rachel Pollack writing Doom Patrol after Grant Morrison had left the series, introducing her own trans superhero, Coagula.)
Deathwish, published in late 1994, early 1995 is a bit rough when looked at thirty years later. Terminology has evolved since then and of course it wa swritten for an audience that had much less knowledge of such things. There’s also the issue that Blaustein is credited under her dead name, though she ia called “Addie” in the editorials. I should hope these credits have been fixed in the collected edition. One last thing worthy of mentioning is the art, some of the earliest work done by J. H. Williams III, inked by Jimmy Palmiotti.
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