Deadshot

38 years ago - Floyd Lawton is born the son of industrialist, weapons contractor & champion hunter George Lawton.

26 years ago - 12-year-old Floyd's mother Genevive reveals to her sons that her father abuses her, asking them to kill him. He refuses, but his older brother Eddie locks him in a boathouse to keep him from interfering with the murder. He escapes and tries to stop it, but his rifle misfires and he accidentally kills his brother while his father is paralysed.

21 years ago - 17-year-old Floyd joins the army to escape his father, and becomes a sniper.

18 years ago - 20-year-old Floyd goes AWOL from the army to become a mercenary & assassin.

17 years ago - 21-year-old Floyd performs several key assassinations for Kobra, who equip him with his signature armor & wrist guns. He first uses the name Deadshot.

14 years ago - 24-year-old Floyd has an affair with Michelle Torres, who does not tell him he has a daughter, Zoe Torres.

12 years ago - 26-year-old Floyd competes for Carmine Falcone's 50 million dollar bounty on Batman.

8 years ago - 30-year-old Floyd discovers, when his mother dies, that he has a daughter; Zoe Torres. Wanting to keep her away from him and out of his life, he nontheless goes to war with a local crime lord to keep her safe. They hire Lady Elaine Marsh-Morton to kill him, but he manages to incapacitate her, and they part professionally. He ultimately puts his families entire fortune into a trust for Zoe, and and gives himself up to Black Lightning in exchange for his protection of her.

6 years ago - 32-year-old Floyd is recruited into the Suicide Squad.

5 years ago - 32-year-old Floyd first meets Thomas Blake when he is recruited into the Suicide Squad. They try to kill each other, but soon build a begrudging respect.

3 years ago - 35-year-old Floyd is denied his early release for killing a senator. He stays with the Suicide Squad's new membership.

1 year ago - 37-year-old Floyd learns that his daughter Zoe Torres ran away from her mother's protection and was taken by agents of Kobra intent to use her to force him to do several jobs for them. He tracks and kills all the men responsible with the help of Thomas Blake. Zoe is the first to recognize their clear chemistry.

It is always interesting how DC seems to have a standing hierarchy of assassins in it's world. There's the league of assassins, of course, but there are a few characters that stand out even above that benchmark. Deathstroke's whole deal is that the's the most lethal killer-for-hire in the world, but the fact is that he was created with that in mind. Deadshot, by contrast, didn't actually get built for any role in particular. As we'll get into, he kind of happened by accident. The fact that he's regularly depicted as being virtually Deathstroke's equal, or at least the number two guy, is just a result of the really interesting stories that have been told with this character.

Deadshot's Comic History

Deadshot's first appearance actually might suprise you; He was a one-off villain all the way back in Batman # 59 in 1950. It was a story that's been used many times before and since; as a new character stepped into Gotham to compete with Batman as it's protector. Floyd Lawton was a expert marksman who wore a pair of six-guns along with domino mask and a very snappy tuxedo, and fought crime with clever trick shots, none of which killed anyone. Commissioner Gordon was so impressed with Deadshot that he actually built a bullseye signal to go along with with bat signal.

Eventually, Batman deduced that Lawton was actually deliberately running a scam to take over as Gotham's only hero so that he could then become a crime boss. Batman managed to catch him in the act by altering the sights on his pistols so that the next day when Lawton was literally trying to shoot him to death, he would miss... which is a completely insane plan, but I guess that's why he's Batman. Deadshot was briefly mentioned in a single panel of Detective Comics # 169 the next year when we see him in a jail cell, but after that he basically vanished completely for several decades.

The return of Deadshot was part of one of the very brief but beloved Steve Englehart run on Detective Comics in 1977, specifically in issue # 474; the Deadshot Ricochet. The original version of Deadshot with his top and tails is completely acknowledged as we see Floyd Lawton finally escaping prison. When he comes after Batman for revenge his looks is completely different, with a colorful costume featuring a super-cool full-face metal mask and arm-mounted guns. He was essentially an entirely new character with a new motivation, and while you could definitely argue that his new costume was hardly practical, it was an absolutely fantastic comic book design.

Despite how clever and well-designed this new take on Deadshot was, he didn't appear again until 1982, starring in an ongoing story in both Batman books by Gerry Conway. He was well recieved, and was now essentially a regular part of Batman's rogues gallery, but the early 80s were an era of heavy transition for DC and lots of characters were shuffled around to find new paradigms as the post-Crisis dust settled.

For Floyd, that meant the Suicide Squad.

John Ostrander's Suicide Squad was an incredibly clever new series when it debuted in 1987, and Deadshot was one of it's core members from the very beginning. In fact, you could argue that he was THE core member. He's gone on to be a major character in practically every version of the team since. Practically his entire characterization was developed here, as he desplays icy professionalism and fearlessness matched only by his slowly revealed death wish. Deadshot became a very interesting, complex guy here, even though he was still clearly not someone we were supposed to like.

One of Deadshot's most prominent qualities actually came about in a self-titled five issue miniseries from 2005 by Jerry Ordway, when Floyd discovers that he is actually a father, and fights to protect his daughter from the gangs in the neighborhood where she lives. It's a great action-movie premises for a very cool little series, even if it did manage to forget some old Suicide Squad stories that referenced his son from another marriage.

This desire to protect his daughter even amidst his own death wish has remained a major part of his characterization, even during his long run in the pages of Gail Simone's Secret Six, where we watching him develop a long (hetrosexual?) relationship with Cat Man... and in the New 52 Suicide squad, where he became the post-Joker, pre-Poision Ivy partner of Harley Quinn.

Our Deadshot Story

The really interesting thing about Deadshot's role in the larger DC Continuity is that you can't really point to any one appearance and say that this is where the character started. His first appearance might as well be a different character entirely, of course, but his costume, personality, and defining story element (his daughter) all show up in drastically different eras, and yet they form such a cohesive whole that it's really hard to say when he began.

Our take on Deadshot is focused, as much as we can, on getting that completed version of the character in play tight away. We incorporated his strange, tragic backstory that leads to his intense sense of self-loathing, make sure we introduce his daughter into his story as early as we can, and use her as the catalyst for his defining role in the Suicide Squad. He's a mainstay in our version of the team, serving from it's inception right through to it's latest incarnation. I really like the idea of this self-hating, violent, remorseless killer somehow slowly becoming the begrudging father figure to a younger generation of young reprobates.

Of course, We're also making a point to include his relationship with Thomas Blake. Gail Simone found a really interesting balance between these two that was clearly somewhere well beyond a platonic friendship. While I don't think either of them is quite capable of acknowledging their own bisexuality, We at least wanted to create a moment where his daughter can acknowledge it for them.

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