Comic Book / Mort the Dead Teenager

And you thought your high school years were bad!

So you think you’ve heard of every story and series in the Marvel Universe, do you? Just wait until you see what happens to one of its most unfortunate heroes.

Mort Graves, slacker from Mistake Beach, Long Island, takes his dad’s refurbished Studebaker out for a joyride to impress his crush, Kimberly Dimenmein. Kimberly is currently dating a jock named Lance Boyle with an Improbably Cool Car who suggests to Mort that they race to see who gets the girl, just past the train tracks as the finish line. The one thing Mort counted on, was that the car was nearly finished…

Except for the brakes.

Mort ends up getting caught in the middle of an oncoming train and sent directly to the Netherworld, dead, and decapitated on top of that! He meets with his eventual likeminded mentor, Teen Death, the son of Death Himself. He explains that Heaven is closed for repairs and that Hell has too many sinners, so he sends Mort back to where he was before on a mission to haunt his family and other friends as a incorporeal being, but this is a tricky job, as nobody is scared of him and his family hates his guts after pulling a dumb stunt to get himself killed.

Mort’s friends, Slick and Weirdo, hatch a plan to get themselves famous, and Mort inadvertently aides them in their homemade band Positive Feedback, along with other band members Kimberly, and Maureen, the girl who wants Mort on the same level as the flip-flopping former, who has seemingly decided that she loved him more than ever. What’s an angsty dead youth to do?

The black Horror Comedy miniseries ran for 4 issues from December 1993 to March 1994, after a pushback from a previously announced September. Written by Larry Hama of G.I. Joe fame, and illustrated by Gary Hallgren from Crazy Magazine, it was originally intended as a movie, but was rewritten to format as a short-run comic in the hopes it would be picked up by a studio for good (and of 2023 it still hasn’t, even though test footage is known to exist and press announcements stating production was moving forward. It never did.)

Not to be confused with Discworld’s Mort, which was also optioned to be a film. Or the similarly named Mort the Soul Surfer from Super Paint Brawl. Or Rick and Morty. Or the character from Madagascar. It’s happened before.

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Tropes the Dead Examples:

• Accidental Suicide: Mort dies directly in the path of the Babylon Express, due to the race he agreed to go through with.
• Adaptational Intelligence: In the officially released description for the shelved movie, it is noted that instead of Mort being a victim of circumstance having no place in Heaven or Hell to go, he instead convinces Teen Death to bring him to the world of the living to win back the heart of Kimberly.
  • Nowhere in the original comic does Mort attempt to win the heart of Kimberly post-death. He’s simply enchanted and infatuated by her, and despite her poetry and statements that she loves him, it’s more of a case of her getting “caught in the moment” and unintentionally causing trouble for her and the rest of the Positive Feedback team.
  • It is ALSO noted that in the Official Handbook, Mort’s intelligence stat is listed as 1, which is the lowest possible for that stat.
• Aesop Amnesia: After Mort wakes up from his "dream" at the end of issue 4, he attempts to go see Kimberly and the others in his dad's wheels, hinting at the idea that the whole comic is cyclical and he will forever be stuck in a loop until he can learn from his mistakes.
• Afterlife Angst: Mort VERY OBVIOUSLY laments his death, it’s one of the cores of his character. His family’s indifference towards his demise doesn’t help either.
  Wendy Graves: Is being dead anything like this movie?
  Mort: No Mom—it's more like a combination of a bad dream, an itch that won't go away, and a vague nameless dread.
  Wendy Graves: As bad as all that, huh?
  Mort: Worse.
• Afterlife Express: The Babylon Express, a train managed by Teen Death to kill Mort.
• Alien Invasion: In one of Mort’s three possible futures, aliens from Uranus land down on Earth as an adult Mort is about to win the first race of his sponsored NASCAR racer. Slick had confirmed this after he gained the ability to hear their frequencies, yet nobody had believed him.
• All Are Equal in Death: Addressed in the very first page of the miniseries, where Teen Death responds to Mort's complaint that his fate isn't fair by replying that there's no one more equal-opportunity than himself.
• Attending Your Own Funeral: Mort and Teen Death do this in the first issue. Mort realizes that his family doesn’t care that much about him, and gave him a “No-Frills Funeral”, the cheapest they could afford, leading him to be generally disgusted with the whole event.
• Ax-Crazy: Played for Laughs when Mort interacts with the movie he attempts to scare people with. The patrons of the film itself are so desensitized by the gratuitous violence that it doesn't work out the way he wants it to.
  Mort: [chopping up a victim with a chainsaw across three panels] I guess there's just no way to keep these summer friendships from falling apart...and getting all disjointed—no matter which way you slice it!
• Back from the Dead: Mort comes back as a ghostly being after his unceremonious demise.
  • In the final issue, Mort is brought back to life in bed as he is sent back to the day of his death in an attempt to fix his mistakes and not get killed. He brushes the events that had happened before as a wacky dream and moves forward with his joyride, possibly leading him to die another time.
• Band Episode: Slick and Weirdo advertise auditions for a band they came up with, with the only new recruits being Kimberly and Maureen. They end up playing at a once-popular club downtown, all due to Mort’s ghostly interference with the equipment. It does not end well.
• Barred from the Afterlife: Hell is full and Heaven is closed for repairs. The next best option is to have Mort come back.
• Black Comedy: As one might expect from a light-hearted series about a teenager becoming a ghost after the accident that killed him, there are plenty of morbid gags to go around.
  • Mort's character portrait below the Marvel Comics banner depicts his open-casket corpse, which has its state of decay advance each issue until his remains are skeletonized by the cover of the final issue.
  • A lot of the deceased teenagers in the afterlife are shown to have gotten themselves killed by doing dangerously stupid things, like lighting a bunch of explosives at once just to see what happens and thinking they're cool to drive after engaging in underage drinking.
  • Mort isn't pleased to see how cheap his family was in preparing his funeral, and is especially incensed that his mother is only mourning that he died without clean underwear, while his dad is more upset about his Studebaker being destroyed than he is at his son's death.
  • At one point, Mort tries to haunt a horror film by taking up the role of slasher villain and using a chainsaw to dismember and slaughter the cast, only to see that the audience isn't frightened due to being desensitized by the amount of violence there is in the media already.
• Betty and Veronica: The role of the Betty being filled by Kimberly, Mort’s homeroom crush, and Veronica taken by Maureen, who is much edgier and leather-clad than the former.
• Bratty Half-Pint: Kyle Graves. Shyster and tab-keeper of the entire family who could out you for any incident he has on file to get you to do what he asks.
• Broken Aesop: Life sucks, and that’s ok. Both living and dying are two sides of the same coin and being alive is just as bad as being dead.
  Teen Death: Nothing ever gets better! That's a universal law!
• Chainsaw Good: Mort’s weapon of choice in the movie he haunts in issue 2.
• Cigarette of Anxiety: Seems to be the case for the Graves family matriarch Wendy’s smoking addiction, as she tends to light up when tensions flare at the house.
• Cool Big Sis: Cyndi Graves, who suddenly after Mort’s death attempts to hook up with boys, wears edgy fashion (which according to Mort was a completely new getup for her). She also attempts to be the voice of reason to get Mort to his funeral.
• Cool Train: The Babylon Express, explicitly stated to be an ALCO FA-2.
• Cosmic Plaything: Mort gets toyed with pretty hard during the duration of the entire comic, to getting killed for his hubris, to his family hating him for not passing on peacefully, to even the FORCES OF DEATH using him as a tool to get the message across. His three possible futures aren't great either, with each of them resulting in some sort of bizarre unfortunate demise (or in the case of the first shown, he enters a coma and never awakens).
• "Could Have Avoided This!" Plot: If Mort simply had not taken his dad's car to impress Kimberly, none of the comic would have even happened. Teen Death was well aware of the fact, and Mort was to some degree. However, it's all thrown out the window with the All Just a Dream cyclical loop fakeout.
• Cranium Chase: Mort frequently has to get his head back after losing it.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: Mort dies in a classic car with faulty breaks, in the line of an incoming train, while somehow getting decapitated, and ALL while BEING YOUNG.
• Crush Filter: Kimberly to nearly EVERY male character in the comic. Even after losing Lance to Maureen, she still is held to a godly regard by Mort, until he sees her performing at a local club near the end of the comic, laughs at her, and realizes it’s totally unlike him to do so, causing him to wake up from his “dream”.
• Dead Person Conversation: Attempted in the movie Mort invades in issue 2. It does not end well.
  Mort: [sadistically] Didja ever think that us spirit-type enitities don't like being called up and bothered? Didja???
• Dead to Begin With: Exactly What It Says on the Tin.
• Death as Comedy: Part of the whole reason the comic exists!
• Death Is Such an Odd Thing: Happens multiple times throughout the comic.
• Disappointing Older Sibling: Cyndi, Mort’s older sister, is the first living person to confront him after his death. She’s pretty busy trying to hook up with boys and didn’t attend Mort’s funeral, and the only reason she thinks she can land a date is to use her little brother’s death as a pity card.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?:
  • The club Positive Feedback plays at in the third issue is called ABCD’s, is stationed in New York, and was once very popular. It’s pretty obvious the comic is alluding to CBGB in NYC.
  • At Positive Feedback’s gig at ABCD’s, Mort is suddenly launched into the performance as special effects. He then combusts into white ectoplasm, all while exclaiming “Ack!” as slimy versions of himself of various sizes fly around the stage.
• Don't Fear the Reaper: Teen Death seems like the kind of guy you’d like to hang out with, if he weren’t constantly interrupting Mort’s alone time.
• Electrified Bathtub: Among the dearly departed appearing as background characters when Mort first enters the afterlife is a woman in a bathtub with a radio that has been dropped in.
• 11th-Hour Costume Change: Maureen changes her whole biker aesthetic into a more elegant style as she begins to date Lance when she is last seen going on a date in the final issue.
• Evil Lawyer Joke: Teen Death mentions lawyers as one of the kinds of people Hell is overcrowded with.
• The "Fun" in "Funeral": It’s a horrible event for everyone involved, but Mort’s funeral provides some excellent black comedy yuks for the reader.
• The Grim Reaper: Aside from the traditional personification of Death, Mort spends much of the miniseries interacting with Teen Death, who is the former's adolescent son and specifically serves as a psychopomp for deceased teenagers.
• Growing Up Sucks: Mort’s three futures detail that he’s not going to be as successful as his peers, but when he does, it ends in disaster or death.
• High-School Rejects: In all of Mort’s three possible futures, he works at a car wash, twice as washer, and once as manager. All his other friends outclass him in at least one possible future, and Mort has an existential crisis on whether or not he actually wants to live.
• History Repeats: Mort loops back to the day he dies, but doesn’t realize the dream he just had was his deathly experience that occurred throughout the entire comic. Mort then gets ready for his meet-up at the convenience corner, and Teen Death awaits Mort in the Babylon Express.
• Hormone-Addled Teenager: Mort, Slick, and Weirdo, they all fantasize about being with Kimberly in some way, ESPECIALLY Slick when Mort uses his powers to look into his imagination.
• Horror Comedy: The miniseries is about a teenage ghost who died from getting hit by a train and is filled with a lot of humor.
• If You Die, I Call Your Stuff: Kyle to Mort after Mort had signed a document claiming that if he were to suddenly die, Kyle would get his room and belongings. Mort is then relegated to the attic.
  Mort: Oh, well...at least I don't have to worry about hitting my head on the rafters anymore!
• Ignored Aesop: Mort is supposed to learn a lesson about what death is like so he doesn’t flub up his second chance at wanting to live. He completely ignores the events of the ENTIRE comic and handwaves it off as a bad dream he had.
• In-Series Nickname: “Mo” for Maureen, and “Slick” and “Weirdo” for…well, Slick and Weirdo.
• Invisibility: One of Mort's supernatural powers is that he can make himself invisible.
• I See Dead People: Mort reveals himself to only select people, which are his family and his friends. During the course of the entire comic, Mort does not reveal to Kimberly or Maureen that he’s a ghost or that he’s helping out with the band. He’s this unseen force to them that they have no idea he’s even around.
• Lawyer-Friendly Cameo: The first issue has a panel showing a schoolbus with lookalikes of Bart Simpson and Otto Mann in the front.
• Losing Your Head: Mort’s most recognizable trait is his severed head. It can stay on his body, but sometimes it falls off involuntarily.
  Mort: Oh, this is just great! How do I get this thing to stay on?
• Lost Aesop: Mort himself was supposed to learn something, but it’s hinted at that he will repeat the same mistakes his did to get himself killed, and that he didn’t listen.
• Meaningful Funeral: Mort’s funeral brings out small details in his life, to his supposed egging of a car around Halloween to the fact he wasn’t wearing clean underwear when he died.
• Misplaced Sorrow: At Mort's funeral, his mother is mourning that he died without clean underwear while his father is only upset that his Studebaker was wrecked in the same incident that killed him.
• Our Ghosts Are Different: Mort himself is a ghost, but he can hold a somewhat physical form. To make up for it, he can make himself invisible and intangible to spy on his friends, crush, and help out with Postitive Feedback.
  • Mort himself is also entirely comprised of ectoplasm, from his clothes to hair, similarly to how The Awesome Slapstick's title character is made of "electroplasm".
• Plot-Triggering Death: The first page of the comic involves Mort in a How We Got Here scenario as he is just about to die. It flashes back approximately ten minutes to the inciting incident that caused his untimely death.
• Posthumous Character: Need we say more?
• Powers in the First Episode
• Pragmatic Adaptation: Judging by the description released for the shelved movie, the most major plot aspect of Mort being Barred from the Afterlife was scrapped to let him go back in an attempt to hook up with Kimberly for good, similarly to My Boyfriend's Back which released around the same time as the miniseries and had a comic book framing on top of that.
• Protagonist Title: Mort is the main character and is named in the title.
• Punny Name: Mort Graves (for the fact he’s a dead protagonist), Lance Boyle (for the fact he makes Mort boil), and Kimberly Dimenmein (for the fact she’s a real diamond mine of beauty).
• Role Called
• Scenery Porn: Many pages and backgrounds are illustrated with fine detail and small text on objects that many miss upon a first read. Signs, books, and even HEADSTONES are given attention, adding even more jokes that aren’t adherent to the current moment at hand.
• Shout-Out:
  • Weirdo quotes Ghost Rider when he threatens Mort with ensuring Positive Feedback’s performance at ABCD’s doesn’t have any problems.
    • ABCD's itself is a reference to the CBGB club in New York City, where bands like Talking Heads, Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, and Hama and Hallgren's own band The K-Otics have played. The last one is even memorialized in the third issue as a band playing at the club!
  • In the first issue just before Mort is about to be sent back to Mistake Beach, a newly-killed group of kids in a bus, along with a crashed sports car arrive as a rush-in. The bus driver? Otto Mann, and one of the kids? Bart Simpson.
  • In the opening page to the final issue, Mort crashes Teen Death’s gaming session of a somewhat familiar platformer where you can get “lots of lives”.
    • A lot of small details in the page are usually missed upon a first-time read, like the headstone Teen Death leans against as a back to his chair resembles the one made for James Dean.
  • Mort’s family would rather watch Ghost (1990) than deal with an actual ghost in their house.
  • Lance insults Mort's ride, saying the last time he saw a Studebaker, Fozzie Bear was driving it. The exchange then leads to the race that ends Mort's life.
  • The aging psychologist hired to aide the students of Mistake Beach High with the death of Mort is named Dr. Caligari.
  • The band playing before Positive Feedback at ABCD's is named Bombs and Hoses, in reference to Guns N' Roses. The members even look like the members of Roses circa 1993.
  • Rock and Roll Purgatory features many lyrical music references, burning airplanes, and caricatures of Elvis Presley, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and the victims of The Day The Music Died.
    • At Mort’s house, it’s even shown that the family has Elvis merchandise near the front door and couch, and a promotional “Bludmeister” mirror in the foyer.
  • The Babylon Express is named after the Babylon Branch rail line, notable for having stations in Babylon, New York, and Amityville, where a famous haunting had happened several years before the comic occurs...
    • It could be speculated that Mistake Beach is located in Suffolk County, as Babylon Station is located there.
  • Maureen herself could be seen entirely as a take on Ringo Starr's first wife Mo Starkey, from the black hair to proficiency in rock music.^note And like her inspiration, Maureen's nickname from the boys is, you guessed it, Mo.
  • This exchange from Issue 3.
    Jaded Rocker: Hey, help out an old rock 'n roller! Wouldja believe I used to play lead guitar for KISS?
    Kimberly: Who?
    Jaded Rocker: Yeah! Them too! Me and Townsend were tight!
• Shout-Out Theme Naming: A rather obscure reference to a novel that promotes eugenics of all things is found in the Kalikak brothers and sister, with the name borrowed from the title of The Kalikak Family, which is quite dark for a comedy to reference.
• Speak Ill of the Dead: Mort’s funeral involves a eulogy by the priest from the local church, who rags on Mort for supposedly egging an old woman’s car and for not attending services.
• Springtime for Hitler: Mort's attempt at destroying Positive Feedback equipment ends up landing them a gig at the club.
• Totally Radical: The whole comic REEKS of 90s ‘tude. The way the teen boys talk is filled with late 80s-early 90s youth slang like “totally” and the addition of “so” to describe desperate situations.
• Undeathly Pallor: Mort after he has died has a stark-white complexion, compared to his peachy tone when he was alive.
  Mort: This anemic look has got to go! And what's that line around my neck?
• The Unreveal: One of the many pieces of incriminating info on Mort Kyle has is a photo of Mort engaging in a “little discretion”, which is totally unknown to the reader due to the framing of characters, but is very embarrassing for Mort.
  • Mort’s older sister Cyndi even has dirt on her, which was almost explicitly described by their dad to which she threatens to kill him if he slips even a little bit of info about it.
• Uranus Is Showing: The final issue twice uses the gag of a character exclaiming "My what?" in response to the mention of Uranus, first with Mort on the title page and the second time with a female customer of the car wash Mort works at in one of the hypothetical timelines of how his life would turn out had he not been killed as a teen.

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