Dan Turpin
60 years ago - Dan Turpin is born in the Slums of Metropolis.
48 years ago - 12-year-old Turpin first joins the street gangs of Suicide Slums as a hitter.
43 years ago - 17-year-old Turpin beats dozens of other gang members in a street fight and is the last man standing. He is arrested for the first time. Sergant Rip Carter gives him a chance to turn his life around.
42 years ago - 18-year-old Turpin enlists in the army with the help of Sergeant Rip Carter, serving active duty.
39 years ago - 21-year-old Turpin returns to Metropolis when his term with the army concludes. Finding that Sergeant Rip Carter was killed in the line of duty, he enters the police academy and becomes a patrolman.
37 years ago - 23-year-old Turpin's daughter Maisie is born.
30 years ago - 30-year-old Turpin is promoted to Sergeant.
13 years ago - 47-year-old Turpin works with Inspector Maggie Sawyer for the first time. He is hesitant at first but quickly becomes her biggest supporter. He is soon promoted to Inspector Lieutenant
10 years ago - 50-year-old Turpin is the first recruit into Maggie Sawyer's Special Crime Unit.
5 years ago - 55-year-old Turpin starts tracking Intergang’s trafficked Apokolips technology.
4 years ago - 56-year-old Turpin works with Jimmy Olsen to track Intergang's weapons supplier. When Jimmy, having disappeared through a boom tube, is able to send him warnings of the pending invasion, Turpin starts rallying the people of Metropolis. While fighting the invasion he commandeers an Apokoliptan Tank and inflicts heavy casualties before he is killed by Darkseid.
The fun of including Dan Turpin in our timeline is that it's absolutely a way to include Jack Kirby himself, since as we all know Dan Turpin was Kirby's self-insert character in DC, right? Well, in practice, I actually think it's a little bit more fun than that. I don't think Jack Kirby intended Trupin as a self-insert, but over time it's more like he just became a way for all sorts of characters to express their love for the King.
Dan Turpin's Comic HistoryResearching Turpin's first appearance is a little misleading. His ACTUAL first appearance is in the pages of Kirby's 1971 New Gods miniseries, where he appeared in exactly three issues. This is technically the ONLY appearance of Turpin Kirby ever created, but in that brief time, he manages to be maybe the most Jack Kirby-esque tough guy ever; a giant, bowler-hat-wearing, cigar-chomping brick wall for a guy with an ugly mug, fists the size of hams, and the most grizzled attitude you've ever seen. He actually made his way onto the cover of issue #8 when he gets in the middle of a fistfight between Orion & Kalibak, not giving up as he gets the tar beaten out of him. It's great.
We say 'technically' because it was actually later retconned that back in Kirby's earliest work for DC in the 40s, the Boy Commandos, the scrappy American kid 'Brooklyn' was actually Turpin. |
So while Turpin was really only ever written by Kirby for three issues and as a completely different character from the 40s, he's still considered the definitive KIrby character, and that's more to do with what everyone ELSE did with him. In the John Byrne-rebuilt Superman lore of 1987, one element he included was the Metropolis Police Special Crime Unit lead by his original character Maggie Sawyer, and he included Turpin as her second-in-command. This actually accounts for the bulk of appearances for Turpin, standing loyally at Saywers side at pretty much every crime scene or dangerous event across the Post-Crisis. This means that a lot of the best creators of the era got to play with Turpin, and a lot of them leaned very hard into the Kirby references, depicing all the never-back-down toughness and brick-wall strength of the best of classic Kirby characters.
Later on, the Superman Animated Series also included Maggie Sawyer and Dan Turpin, but their version of Turpin just bypassed the allegoy completely and just made their version of the character literally Jack Kirby. When the character died while making a heroic last stand against Darkseid's invasion in the episode "Apokolips... Now!" It allowed the show to create a beautiful memorial service for the character... and for the beloved king of comics. |
Our Dan Turpin StoryWe did get a little bit creative in the way we built our version of Dan Turpin, just because we wanted to make him feel like a full translation of the classic Kirby character, while also letting him feel like the tribute character he's become. We gave him a childhood as a member of street gangs that led to a brief career in the army, all meant as a nod to the Boy Commandos (with their commanding officer Rip Carter as the police sergeant that gave him a chance to turn his life around).
From there, it's all about him becoming a tough-as-a-sack-of-hammers cop and becoming the loyal right-hand man of SCU leader Maggie Sawyer, tracking Intergang's use of weapons of Apokolips, and then fulfilling his role as the leader of Metropolis's resistance and his heroic final stand. This whole character is just a celebration of one of the granddads of this medium we all love, and nobody deserves to be built up into our project more. |