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Post by mh on Jan 8, 2014 17:19:05 GMT -6
Getting back to the Peacemaker for a moment, I recently read most of the Vigilante series from the 1980s up to the point when the Post-Crisis Peacemaker was first introduced in those pages.
The Christopher Smith/Peacemaker we see in The Vigilante #36-38 is a crazy person. Simply because the current Vigilante touches him while trying to reason with him, Peacemaker shoots the current Vigilante in the chest with a gun powerful enough to blow him clear off a plane, and moments earlier he's seen blowing away two terrorists who have taken over the plane. The death of the current Vigilante is what spurs Adrian Chase, the first modern-day Vigilante, to don his mask again.
Clearly, the Post-Crisis Peacemaker was not introduced to be a headlining character, but to merely act as a foil for the Vigilante. He's given the same level of violence as the Comedian from WATCHMEN (who is based on the original Peacemaker) but with the crazy notched up times ten. Peacemaker is essentially what Adrian Chase is fated to become if he keeps going along the path he takes.
This is shown to be true when Adrian Chase kills a cop by kicking him off a balcony several floors to the street below, when he breaks into the dead Vigilante's house to get a full Vigilante uniform to wear. He doesn't show any remorse at the time, but this killing of a police officer is what drives Chase over the edge and eventually causes him to commit suicide in the last issue of the series. Peacemaker is like the "Ghost of Christmas Future," in the sense that Adrian Chase will become the crazy Peacemaker if he doesn't take himself out of the game.
And thus was the original Peacemaker destroyed as a viable character.
but back the the point, there must have been a hint of insanity in charlton's christopher smith that escapes me! DC's staff of geniuses looked at the old charlton comics and decided to make him a psychotic lunatic, who shoots a guy for just touching him, and alan moore bases the comedian on the charlton peacemaker -- who is a sociopath! to me, the 60's peacemaker appears as sane and self-contained as -- adam strange. he never even raises his voice! i've got to be missing something |
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Post by Doc Quantum on Jan 8, 2014 23:48:21 GMT -6
I think the key is that, in both VIGILANTE #36-38, and WATCHMEN, the Peacemaker/Comedian (yes, I'm equating both characters as if they're the same) is not used as a protagonist, but as an antagonist or character foil to measure other characters against. He's the bad seed super-hero who gives everyone else a bad name. He makes everyone else look good in comparison. The writers (Kupperberg & Moore) basically used the guy to serve in an antagonistic role.
In WATCHMEN, he's portrayed as a total psychotic badass (and rapist, and woman-beater, and murderer of a pregnant woman carrying his child) who is taken down by someone you wouldn't expect to be a badass, namely the more cerebral Ozymandias.
In VIGILANTE, he's portrayed as a total psychotic badass who kills the "good" Vigilante of the time (Dave Winston, who arguably was the most balanced Vigilante) so that the original Vigilante (of this series, anyway), Adrian Chase can be brought back as a more "edgier" Vigilante, but one whose ultimate fate is decided once he starts down Peacemaker's path and kills a cop for no good reason.
Yes, DC had a PEACEMAKER miniseries as well, which explained that his father was a Nazi whose ghost haunts Peacemaker, along with all the other people that Peacemaker has killed over the years, but in no way was this Peacemaker a viable ongoing character. He out-punished THE PUNISHER in his ruthlessness.
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Post by Doc Quantum on Jan 9, 2014 0:04:24 GMT -6
Man, those were some really good Vigilante stories. Greg Sanders really kicked ass. I recently even found some early 1970s back-up Vigilante stories by Gray Morrow in ADVENTURE COMICS (following the headliner Supergirl, of all people), which were published a few years before Vigilante's short-lived series in WORLD'S FINEST COMICS! But for some reason, DC dropped him like a hot potato by the time the 1970s were over. I guess urban cowboys really were more of a 1970s thing by then.
When Adrian Chase was introduced as the new Vigilante in 1983, a lot of fans were clamoring for him to meet Greg Sanders at some point, or even give some kind of grudging acknowledgement that Greg Sanders still exists and preceded Adrian Chase as the Vigilante. But Marv Wolfman, creator of the 1980s Vigilante, wanted to keep Adrian Chase "cool," I think, and really minimized his exposure to other DC Universe characters. Outside of the appearances of Nightwing and Cyborg in three notable issues, there weren't any other DC characters involved. After Wolfman left the series as both writer and editor, there was a DC COMICS PRESENTS issue that teamed up the Dave Winston Vigilante with Superman. And, of course, in the storyline mentioned above, that makes Adrian Chase the Vigilante once more, they bring in Peacemaker. They also bring in Valentina Vostok, but not as a super-heroine in any way, shape, or form -- no, she's not Negative Woman any longer; she's just the head of the Agency, a black-ops organization that existed before CHECKMATE was introduced. Paul Kupperberg was even more determined to keep the rest of the DC Universe out of the pages of the Vigilante, with the only exception being an issue guest-starring THE BATMAN during the time when he started to be portrayed as this really grim Dark Knight.
I just wished they had mentioned Greg Sanders just once. Sanders wouldn't be seen again until he was reintroduced as an old man in the pages of EL DIABLO, which effectively erased all his 1970s adventures drawn by Gray Morrow. And that's a crying shame. Oh, well. At least we got that James Robinson VIGILANTE: CITY LIGHTS, PRAIRIE JUSTICE miniseries in the mid-'90s, but it was just so out of the blue and unexpected that we never saw any follow-up. I understand there's a Nu52 VIGILANTE series that stars a completely different Vigilante whose last name is Chase, but who isn't Adrian Chase. Anyone read this series? I wonder if it's any good.
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