Dead Corps

• Schedule — Monthly • Format — Miniseries • Limited — y • Publisher — Helix (DC Comics imprint) • Date — 1998 • Issues — 4 • Scifi — y • Main Char Team — CJ Rataan • Writers — Christopher Hinz • Artists — Steve Pugh • Colorists — Patricia Mulvihill • Creators — Christopher Hinz • Editors — Stuart Moore • Subcat — Helix (comics) • Sort — Dead Corps

The year is 2101 and thirty three years have passed since the first successful brain tissue remodulation and body reanimation of a human being. Vitals, ordinary living human beings, share their lives with Expireds, an underclass of once dead people who have been restored to life to perform a variety of specialist but unwanted tasks. Apart from the pallor of their skin and the putrid chemical unction which they are forced to consume as a food-substitute, the dead are otherwise indistinguishable from ordinary functioning human beings. Detective Sergeant CJ Rataan is the senior officer in a squad of the Paladin Dead Corps, an elite but poorly respected team of mixed expired and vital police officers based out of North Nome, Alaska. CJ himself is an Expired, having been murdered and then revived several years prior to the narrative owing to his role thwarting the operations of a gangland syndicate of body-poachers and killing the leader's brother. As the tale develops, CJ and his rag-tag crew of Expireds (Detectives Cicatriz and 'Pappy') and Vitals (Detective Eldo Kway and Corporal Meep) are engaged to investigate the circumstances surrounding CJ's death, but in addition to robbing him of his first life, CJ has been targeted for PR.