Bloodsport

36 years ago - Robert DuBois is born the son of an international arms smuggler. He is trained to handle weapons practically from infancy.

29 years ago - 7-year-old Robert's father locks him in a trunk with several starved rats, leading to his lifelong claustrophobia and Musophobia.

20 years ago - 16-year-old Robert's older brother tries to leave their family business and join the army; their father cripples him.

19 years ago - 17-year-old Robert fights back against his father, beating him to death. He enlists in the army using his brothers name.

15 years ago - 21-year-old Robert learns that his brother died of an oxycontin overdose. He goes awol, becoming a mercenary with a knack for using strange weaponry.

11 years ago - 25-year-old Robert is among the human specimens stolen from Earth by Brainiac and stored inside the hyper-spatial Kandor tessaract. He works as a mercenary within the city, rebuilding their weaponry to suit his needs.

9 years ago - 27-year-old Robert builds a small, under-powered tessaract of his own to create a portable armory, and uses it to escape Kandor. He tracks Superman to Metropolis, fighting him to a standstill and using kryptonite amunition to put him the hospital. He is stopped by Jimmy Olsen, who reveals that his brother is still alive. DuBois surrenders.

6 years ago - 30-year-old Robert DuBois's technology is stolen by Alex Trent, a violent white supremacist who is stopped by the Metropolis Special Crimes Unit and sent to prison, where Robert quickly kills him, recovers his technology and escapes.

4 years ago - 32-year-old Robert DuBois accepts a contract on Superman in the aftermath of the Parademon attack on Metropolis. He is stopped by Supergirl, but manages to hurt her severely in their fight, making her realize she needs to be considerably more prepared.

now - 36-year-old Robert DuBois is freed from prison by Vandal Savage to join his new team Tartarus, and battle Nightwing's Watchtower.

Given his penchant for dual-wielding giant sci-fi guns, you'd be forgiven for mistaking Bloodsport for a 90s character, but he actually predates comics reliance on musclebound gun guys. If anything, I'd say that, for better or worse, he was actually foreshadowing they type of stories that would dominate comics in the next decade. He wasn't a bad character by any means, he just wasn't a very complicated one, and he vanished from DC fairly quickly without leaving too many ripples.

Of course, if that was the whole story, we likely wouldn't have included him. He's started to turn up more recently, entirely because of the success of his depiction in new outside media, and because he happens to fit perfectly into a particular niche for us, we're going to work to redesign that original character into one that fits our story. Tell us what you think!

Bloodsport's Comic History

Bloodsport first showed up in Superman #4 in 1987, a creation of John Byrne as he created an entirely new mythology for the Man of Steel following the Crisis of Infinite Earths. This was a period of massive innovation in the world of Superman as every part of his story was reimagined, new versions of classic characters were introduced, and brand new supporting characters and enemies were invented. Bloodsport was a one-off villain at first; a serial killer firing high-tech weapons into crowds while shouting about Vietnam. He was ultimately revealed to be a draft dodger whose brother took his place and who lost his arms and legs as a result. It was a decent single issue, if only because it's always fun when Jimmy Olsen saves the day, but also because it's the first appearance of Maggie Sawyer.

Bloodsport wasn't the most memorable character, but he had cool teleporting weapons, and he could lay claim to having put Superman in the hospital. While he would make the occasional appearance after this story, they are almost entirely just references to his original story. The name Bloodsport would later be stolen by another character, Alex Trent; a full-blown white supremacist who would later fight Robert DuBois in prison in a story that ended with both characters dead.

The character technically returned to comics in 2021 as a member of the Suicide Squad, but really bore little resemblance to the original Bloodsport. This was an adaptation of the character portrayed by Idris Elba in the movie The Suicide Squad, who was basically an entirely original character meant to allow Elba to step into a Deadshot-shaped hole in the new movie. Still, he had teleporting weapons and he'd put Superman in the hospital, so he had everything that actually counted.

Our Bloodsport Story

If we're going to do Bloodsport, we want to find a way to really use as much of the original comic-accurate version of his story as we can, but there are some pretty big gaps we need to fill. In the comic, his teleporting technology and arsenal of sci-fi weapons are given to him, without him knowing, by Lexcorp. He's essentially just a pawn of Luthor's campaign against Superman, which is shy he vanishes again so quickly. We need to find a different way to get him his technology. We chose to make his arsenal something he built while spending years in the alien city of Kandor, using it's Hyperspatial nexus to build his own weapon teleporter.

We also wanted to fine-tune his relationship with his brother and his status as a soldier a little; the original story had an interesting twist, but if we want DuBois to remain a cool, threatening character, we wanted to make a few tweaks.

Finally, we shifted his focus a little bit so that he actually interacts a little more with Supergirl, presenting her with one of her first actual challenges. This makes him an excellent candidate for Vandal Savage to include in his team Tartarus. I think we've managed to give him a story that supports the cool redesign work he's been getting, and to update this character so that he's actually in a postion to be a featured villain in the future.

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