Search for the Truth (Deadendia)

A Charity Commission for Thomas Maluck @LiberryTom

"All things below voice his burning name."

Of the two books that Deadendia consists of thus far, The Broken Halo is by far the most interesting. It’s not that The Watcher’s Test is a bad work. It’s certainly less polished than its sequel, due in no small part to the art occasionally shifting between the earlier version used in the web comic version and the more polished style Hamish Steele would evolve into. And some of the word balloons are placed on the wrong characters (an issue not fixed in The Broken Halo). Equally, the first volume is very much a set up for where the story would go, establishing the world, its characters, and some of the themes. It’s certainly necessary and delightful to read. Just not as interesting to talk about.

By contrast, The Broken Halo is fascinating. There are many angles to which one can walk through these implications and themes, many entrances that one can start with. So let’s go with a central tension of the text: Lies. The first of three liars we will talk about in this article is Barney. Barney… Barney has been through a lot. His dog died, he’s not been home for months (for reasons involving being trans), and he just learned that the world is full of demons, magic, and horror. On the bright side, he has a supportive boyfriend, Logan, who wants to be there for him.

Nonetheless, he still needs a job. He doesn’t want to go back to Dead End (the theme park attraction he used to work and live at) due to the events of The Watcher’s Test making him nervous about the supernatural killing Logan and him feeling he ruined his relationship with Norma because of said events (more on whom in a moment). By “luck,” a demon comes with a job offer in a work environment full of liars, violence, and performative cruelty: Wrestling. At first, Barney is being pigeonholed as a heel, but he fights for the story he wants to tell. In the words of another wrestler, “The only way to change [your] story is to show the Big Wigs exactly what [you are] made of.” Unbeknownst to either, Barney is being led into a trap. A trap made from a misunderstanding of the truth of who killed who.

But the trap he’s made for himself comes in the form of his lies. Rather than tell Logan that he’s a pro-wrestler for the entertainment of hell, he says he’s working for Dead End as a manager (hence being rich enough to afford to rent a Flamingo). He lies because he doesn’t want the man he loves to be hurt by the various supernatural weirdness that’s been going on. (One could argue he also doesn’t want him to see this part of his life, which, given Logan’s initial reaction to seeing the supernatural [rather than getting the implications of it {actually, his initial reaction is a bit confused given the rest of the book seems to imply that he’s seen the supernatural in the past, but that initial reaction implies that he hasn’t}] is “You’re all freaks,” is understandable.) It gets to the point where Logan starts to ponder if maybe his boyfriend is cheating on him with a bear calling himself Az (incidentally, if you’re aware of comics history, Az has probably sparked the most C U R S E D question in the history of comics in your minds. Though, it could just be me).

It all comes to a head when Logan calls Barney out for his lies. He’s not mad that the supernatural is a part of the world, he’s mad that Barney keeps lying about it. Throughout both books, Barney has been lying to everyone. To Norma about not being homeless. To Az (unintentionally) about the nature of their relationship. And to himself about what he does. He tells himself he faces his problems, he confronts them head on. But the truth is, he runs away from his problems. He hasn’t talked to Norma since his dog died, rather than talk about their mutual guilt for what happened. He lies to Logan rather than talk about the strangeness of the world. And then there’s his family, which is a whole complex web of cruelty and misery. (There’s certainly a long conversation within the queer community about the fantasy of your transphobic/homophobic family learning to accept you. Notable texts include Steven Universe, Sense8, and only one of the adults in Dumbing of Age.)

The only thing he hasn’t lied about… is himself. In perhaps the happiest he’s in throughout the comic, we see Barney without a shirt or binder, reveling not just in the ocean and his boyfriend, but in being Barney. He is living a truth he’s been denied for so long. It feels… right. Even with all his riches, all his fame, he’s never this happy throughout the rest of the comic. There’s always a wall, always a performance between him and his truth. But he is always himself. He is always Barney.

Norma, our second liar, has a difficulty with herself. Not in terms of gender, but rather sexuality. She’s in love with her best friend, who is straight. But that’s ok, because she’s totally straight too. I mean, if she wasn’t she’d be abnormal and weird and people would look at her and why are people looking at her please stop looking at her, everything’s fine everything’s fine everything’s fine everything’s fine everything’s fine everything’s fine everything’s fine everything’s fine everything’s fine everything’s fine. Also, Norma’s kinda dead.

Suffice it to say, Norma tends to act as if everything is fine when it very much isn’t. There are a number of rather sad reasons for it, including a mild (somewhat unintentional) resentment from her sister for being young enough not to experience her father’s abusive tendencies before he died, as well as some that I’m very understanding of. Norma, like myself, is on the autism spectrum. And like Norma, I like structure in my life, even as I know the world is a mad house of chaos and disorder. And as such, sometimes her family doesn’t know how to interact with her, which causes some damage.

But her biggest lie lies not towards others but herself. Near the end of the fifth chapter, she tells her mother, and subsequently herself, that she’s the worst. She has a self-loathing that I absolutely get way too much. She believes that she doesn’t deserve her friends because she never learns anything. She hurts everyone around her. And that’s as far as I’m going before I turn this into yet another piece of “Sean gets depressed/commits self-harm at a work of fiction for 2,000 words.” There are more pressing matters to consider.

Mainly the biggest liars in the entire series: Heaven. We were told from the first time we saw an angel that they are not what we could consider as such. But even the grotesquery of Kushiel’s mouth couldn’t prepare us for the horror at the heart of Heaven. In Deadendia, when a ghost possesses a person, they get to see the whole of their inner self. Their obsessions, their memories, their inner truths. But when an Angel is possessed, there’s none of that in there. Just an empty white void that seems to go on forever and a husk. (I’d go deep into Qliphoth and the mystical implications therein, but I’m not knowledgeable enough on the subject to do so properly.) It is this husk that the higher plains call… perfection.

This is not the only lie the angels tell. They can make one believe an hour has been a week, a month, a year, an eternity. They can twist the story so the only available endings are death, betrayal, or pointless violence and cruelty. They tell such horrible, awful lies all at the behest of one major lie: there’s a line in the sand and you can’t cross. Who determines the borders but those with power? And borders can be changed to suit their interests. Their perfection views the lesser worlds as being aberrant, monstrous, in need of fixing. Through violence, through forced separation, through lies.

There’s another Hamish Steele comic that I’m thinking about in response to their cruelty. “I often wonder why humans look up to us. I mean, you just read our story. Gods lie, cheat, steal, kill and yet we condemn humans to eternal damnation for doing far less. But perhaps that’s the point of us. Humans look up to us to learn from our mistakes.” It’s clear that the God of Deadendia, presumably seen near the end of the story, is not capable of such self-awareness (at this time), but there is something to learn from them. That to aspire to a state of perfection, arbitrarily static in its nature, is self-harming. It lessens oneself to commit to such a lie as that and it hurts those around. Because for all the necessity of lies (otherwise, we wouldn’t have stories such as Deadendia), they are often harmful to everyone around them, especially when you always go back to them. Because though the truth may be painful, it’s less painful than living a lie.