Blog
The History of DC's Manhunter
aka How to Break Matt's Tiny Brain
04/27/2025
I generally consider myself pretty good at this. I do a lot of what I'm not ashamed to call research, both in my own reading and by collaborating with lots of people with different areas of expertise, to slowly build an ever-broadening understanding of DC lore so that we can reinterpret it into what we believe is the best possible single, central narrative. Or at least our idealized narrative.
I say this because sometimes I find myself swimming in some pretty obscure details. That's part of the fun... we're all a bunch of obsessive nerds, and drilling down into those obscure details so that we can share them with you guys is a huge part of what I enjoy here. So when we dove into the Manhunter legacy for our newest update, we were ready to do what we always do; give you all an overview of the history of these characters, and then interpret a version of them for our project. We already knew there were a ton of Manhunters, but we'd done something similar to this before with characters like Starman, so there should be no problem, right?
I say this because sometimes I find myself swimming in some pretty obscure details. That's part of the fun... we're all a bunch of obsessive nerds, and drilling down into those obscure details so that we can share them with you guys is a huge part of what I enjoy here. So when we dove into the Manhunter legacy for our newest update, we were ready to do what we always do; give you all an overview of the history of these characters, and then interpret a version of them for our project. We already knew there were a ton of Manhunters, but we'd done something similar to this before with characters like Starman, so there should be no problem, right?
The issue here is not just that there are a ton of Manhunters, but that they aren't actually distinct enough to have clear-cut differences between them. They kind of blur into an unclear moosh of characters. We have a plan for how we're going to execute our versions, but they will need to be built referencing several of the original Manhunters each. Figuring out how to present this information wound up burning through all my momentum and required me to just fully walk away from the website for a while. So now that I've refueled my tank (and found a cool new café where I can write this!) I thought the best way to do this was to put all the specific information HERE, freeing up the pages to focus on just the relevant characters.
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Just to make sure we're on the same page, you can take a look here at the spreadsheet I put together trying to track WHICH Manhunter Appeared WHEN.
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The Golden Age Manhunters
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This part is relatively straightforward... although it's still twistier than usual. Depending on how you look at it, there are either two or three Manhunters from the 1940s, and while the publication date says one of them came first, continuity says another. By publication date, the first Manhunter is Paul Kirk, Manhunter... a story about a suit-wearing private investigator. He appeared in Adventure Comics starting in 1941 in a series of really competent capers that lived up to the anthology's title. As an extra wrinkle, this Paul Kirk didn't actually call himself Manhunter, that was just the name of the feature. This original character appeared for a little more than a year and then, practically at the same time, we got two new Manhunters.
The first new Manhunter was a DC character that literally took the original Paul Kirk's place in Adventure Comics. Issue #73 had, as its cover feature, an entirely new version of Manhunter by the legendary duo Joe Simon & Jack Kirby. This one was a big game hunter, Rick Nelson, who chose to hunt the most dangerous game (man!) when his friend, Inspector Donovan, was killed by a criminal named the Buzzard. Rick debuted a version of the familiar red superhero costume, and would go on to appear in Adventure Comics until 1944, but after his first appearance his name was changed to... Paul Kirk. This is still the characterization introduced with Rick Nelson, however, so the original Paul Kirk, Manhunter and this Paul Kirk are two different characters. |
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In the meantime, a third Manhunter debuted over in Quality Comics, appearing just one month before the Rick Nelson (Paul Kirk II) Manhunter. This, and the fact that technically the original Paul Kirk never actually used the name Manhunter actually makes this, canonically, the FIRST Manhunter. This was Dan Richards, a police patrolman who created a vigilante identity to clear another policeman who had been framed for murder. He did so primarily by having his own secret crime lab and extensive criminal files... but by far the coolest thing about Dan was that he had a dog sidekick! Thor the Thunderdog came when Dan blew a sonic whistle, was an excellent tracker and attack dog, and is just the bestest boy in the whole world, yes he is!!!!
Dan was a recurring feature in Police Comics, the flagship title in the Quality line as the home of Plastic Man. Given its high profile, the Dan Richards Manhunter actually had a ton of appearances, continuing long after DC's Paul Kirk Manhunter was gone, all the way to 1950! DC bought the Quality catalog not long after, but while they owned Dan Richards, they didn't use him at all. |
So, if you're keeping up, we haven't even gotten to the Silver Age yet and, while functionally we really have one Manhunter, Paul Kirk, technically we've actually had three, with two but really three names, one of which wasn't ever actually Manhunter even though he has the same name as the one actual Manhunter, except when he didn't.
Manhunters of the Seventies
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Once the Quality Comics Manhunter stopped appearing in 1950 we had several Manhunter-free decades. In 1971, reprints of the Paul Kirk Manhunter (the red costumed, big game hunter variant) appeared as backup stories in New Gods, capitalizing on Jack Kirby's run in DC by showing his Golden Age DC work with Joe Simon.
This was followed in 1973 by some very interesting stories running as backups over in Detective Comics by a couple of industry legends, Archie Goodwin and Walt Simonson. A new take on Manhunter was introduced, with a new flashier costume and a backstory involving the World War II Paul Kirk Manhunter being put in suspended animation for decades by a shady organization, the Counsel, who finally revive him to... lead an army of clones of himself? Kirk escapes, gets himself a cool arsenal of weapons and a garish costume to fight them Shepard vs Cerebus-style for seven issues, culminating in a final mission in the main story of Detective Comics #443 when, accompanied by Batman himself, he leads an assault on The Counsel's headquarters and sacrifices himself to blow them up, ending this wild chapter in the legacy of Manhunter.... If it wasn't for all those clones. One of them showed up a few years later in the pages of Secret Society of Super Villains, assembling and leading the team for Darkseid only to later sacrifice himself (again) trying to kill the Despot of Apokolips. If you're counting, while this is a clone of Kirk, he's actually the THIRD Paul Kirk, since there's still that original non-costumed one. |
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Almost a year before the appearance of the clone of Paul Kirk, however, we actually get an entirely new iteration of the Manhunter legacy, one that is destined to get REALLY weird. 1975's 1st Issue Special #22 saw series writer, artist, and editor Jack Kirby revisit his old Manhunter concept and completely recreate it as a whole new character. We're introduced to the Manhunters, an ancient cult dedicated to justice, whose members wear a costume with a similar color motif to the original Paul Kirk costume, although fans of modern-day Green Lantern might recognize the particular style here. We meet Mark Shaw, a public defender who is similarly dedicated to justice but feels he does not have a satisfying way to serve it. He learns about the ancient Manhunter cult and contacts it through mystic artifacts, and becomes the latest Manhunter.
Mark Shaw only appears in that single issue at first, but a few years later (after the appearance of the Paul Kirk clone in Secret Society of Super Villains), the Mark Shaw Manhunter appears in Justice League of America #140 & 141 in 1977. The cult starts to mysteriously target Hal Jordan, saying he's responsible for the destruction of a planet and that he has to be brought to justice. We eventually learn from one of the Guardians of Oa that the Manhunters were originally androids they build before they even built the Lantern Corps, who eventually went rogue and attacked Oa. They were exiled to live all across the galaxy as normal people, creating their cult. Mark Shaw actually gave up on being Manhunter and for a while and became the Privateer, who appeared in further Justice League stories. So, we have Mark Shaw... human Manhunter empowered by a secret Justice Cult, while the rest of that Cult is actually alien androids with a vendetta against the Guardians. Also Paul Kirk is dead but clones. |
Manhunters of the Eighties
Perhaps the biggest contribution to the Manhunter history comes in Roy Thomas's All-Star Squadron. He incorporated characters from all the various companies DC had acquired over the years. This meant that not only were we going back into continuity to see the original Paul Kirk Manhunter (not actually the original Paul Kirk, just the one we actually count) but DC finally referenced the Quality Comics Manhunter Dan Richards when the two actually met.
Appearances of classic versions of both characters make up the bulk of the 80s Manhunter appearances, but lest we forget, Mark Shaw still exists. He made several appearances in Suicide Squad over the decade as the Privateer, but his story kind of went nuclear in 1988 in the company-wide crossover Millennium.
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The Guardian-created Manhunter androids used stolen knowledge left over from the Crisis to find the secret identities of all the superheroes in the world, and placed sleeper agents in their lives, which basically meant that almost every series revealed that one of their supporting characters had been a Manhunter android the whole time, including Helga Jace in the Outsiders, Commissioner Gordon, Lana Lang... and Dan Richards dog Thor? Blasphemy!
In the aftermath of this crossover (which in the end felt like a fairly bare-faced attempt to do DC's version of the Skrull invasion), Mark Shaw was now the only remaining Manhunter, and got his own series out of it. I don't know how successful it was (I've read most of the series and couldn't really tell you anything that happened in it), but it did feature a new costume for Mark that did evolve the design of the Cult-based android Manhunters in a cool way. So at the end of the eighties, despite the insane roller coaster of the Manhunters, Mark Shaw is now the sole remaining character going by the name. Dan Richards is now considered to be canon to DC (although his dog was a robot?) and Paul Kirk is still deceased as is his last surviving clone. As far as we know. |
Manhunters of the Nineties
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The decade starts strong. Mark was still starring in his ongoing series, while Dan Richards and Paul Kirk (in his Golden Age persona, not his Detective Comics ninja garb) both occasionally appear in flashback stories in the pages of Young All-Stars. In 1993, James Robinson's Elseworld's series Golden Age told a standalone story set in DC's historic past, and it delivered perhaps the definitive version of the classic Paul Kirk Manhunter. Meanwhile, Mark's series ended, he made some appearances in Suicide Squad... and then was killed by Eclipso during the villain's miniseries. For a few years there was no Manhunter at all, but then we were introduced to Chase Lawler.
Lawler was an entirely new concept, a 1994 book that is so obviously being created in a post-image world that it might as well be printed in Todd McFarlane's blood. Chase is a musician that is empowered via a sorcerer named Malig by a primal force called the Wild Huntsman. The series lasted 12 issues, and even though it's written in English it is practically indecipherable. |
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2000s Manhunter aka Finally Nailing It
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A new wrinkle in the legacy of Manhunters came kind of from left field; writer Kurt Busiek created a new superhero team book The Power Company in 2002, which he'd been developing going all the way back to the 80s. and he arrived at his version of Manhunter really organically. He had a particular role for a cold, pragmatic weapons master and martial artist on his team but kept drawing a blank on how to develop them into a character. He kept looking back at the Archie Goodwin & Walt Simonson Manhunter from Detective Comics as an ideal version of what he wanted, and when he finally brought the team to DC, he actually had an idea for how to use that concept. He even reached out to Walt for his blessing (Archie had passed a few years prior).
Paul Kirk, in his Detective Comics story, continually fought clones of himself. We even met one of those clones in the Secret Society of Super-Villains. This, then, was the last surviving Paul Kirk clone. He claimed to not have any interest in the Manhunter legacy, but adapted a version of his costume, used the name, and even took the name Kirk DePaul as his civilian identity. The Power Company ran for 14 issues, but it was a really great book by a great writer with great characters, and Kirk DePaul was a really cool idea. |
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Then in 2004 we finally get to the definitive Manhunter. I know, for a long time Paul Kirk really was THE Manhunter and everyone else was really just borrowing the role, both from his golden age Kirby / Simon adventures and his seventies Detective Comics Goodwin / Simonson stories. Alternately Mark Shaw might have been all over the place and never really managed to secure just what his version of Manhunter actually was, but he was the main carrier of the legacy for a good long while.
But nobody has nailed this like Kate Spencer. Kate debuted in her own series by writer Marc Andreyko, the co-creator of the award-winning Image crime series Torso. This is one character I don't need to work too hard explaining since she's the only one of these character's we'll be including basically verbatim on our timeline, but suffice to say, she was one of the most compelling new DC characters in decades, her book actually did a lot of work cleaning up the continuity mess that was the rest of the Manhunter Legacy (including establishing that the Mark Shaw that died back in the Eclipso series was actually an imposter, and that the real Mark Shaw was active as the villain Dumas), and was so well loved that even after it was cynically cancelled like most good series in the 2000s fan outcry actually brought it BACK. |
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Kate has really locked up the legacy of Manhunter even long after the end of her series, appearing in the Birds of Prey, in Batman comics, and even well into the nu52. Oddly enough, while Mark Shaw has long since left his Manhunter identity behind he continues to appear right up to the last few years when he was established as the big bad of the crossover event Leviathan.
That, then, is the history of DC's Manhunter... and maybe you can see why trying to cram that into just a few character pages was driving me up the wall. Now I can go do the pages for OUR versions of Paul Kirk and Mark Shaw, and just send everyone back here for their histories.
That, then, is the history of DC's Manhunter... and maybe you can see why trying to cram that into just a few character pages was driving me up the wall. Now I can go do the pages for OUR versions of Paul Kirk and Mark Shaw, and just send everyone back here for their histories.