Deathstroke
56 years ago - Slade Wilson is born.
45 years ago - 11-year-old Slade Wilson's father Charles has an affair with Francine LeFarge. Slade threatens to tell his mother about the affair, and Charles abandons Francine.
40 years ago - 16-year-old Slade lies about his age to join the Army.
37 years ago - 19-year-old Slade is accepted into an elite operative unit.
31 years ago - 25-year-old Slade is promoted to lieutenant commander under Adeline Kane.
30 years ago - 26-year-old Slade first meets British Intelligence operative William Randolph Wintergreen when they are assigned to work together.
29 years ago - 27-year-old Slade's superior officer Adeline Kane gives birth to his son Grant Wilson.
27 years ago - 29-year-old Slade is recruited by William Randolph Wintergreen for his tactical rescue unit. Slade saves his life several times over.
25 years ago - 31-year-old Slade is selected to join the elite covert ops unit Team 7.
24 years ago - 32-year-old Slade is shot by fellow Team 7 member Amanda Waller to stop him from killing a prisoner, costing him his eye.
23 years ago - 33-year-old Slade is the subject of a military adrenocorticotropic hormone experiment that enhances his mental capacity after Team 7 is shut down.. He hides the results & leaves the service to become a mercenary. approaching William Randolph Wintergreen to manage his business and affairs.
17 years ago - 39-year-old Slade is injured & stranded in Cambodia during a military coup. Lillian Worth shelters him in her brothel & helps nurse him back to health. They become lovers.
12 years ago - 44-year-old Slade competes for Carmine Falcone's 50 million dollar bounty on Batman, marking the first time he meets an opponent he considers his equal.
10 years ago - 46-year-old Slade is barely stopped from taking out the Teen Titans after Grant Wilson dies fighting them, overtaxing his enhancements and dying of a heart attack.. William Randolph Wintergreen tries to convince him not to seek vengeance against the Titans for Grant's death. He meets Tara Markov, a wannabe teenage mercenary, and chooses to take her in as an apprentice in a plan to use her against the Titans, manipulating her romantic fixation on him.
8 years ago - 48-year-old Slade attacks the Teen Titans through Tara Markov. When William Randolph Wintergreen discovers Slade's manipulation of Tara, he leaves his employ.
7 years ago - 49-year-old Slade Wilson, seeing 32-year-old Nathan Prince successful multi-person political assassination begins building the Ravens, a group of elite mercenaries & assassins.
6 years ago - 50-year-old Slade & the Ravens take a job to steal a group of nuclear warheads from Kobra but when Jade Nguyen goes rogue, steals a warhead and detonating it in Quarac it destroys the team.
5 years ago - 51-year-old Slade's contacts all over the world are stalked and killed by Wade LeFarge, including William Randolph Wintergreen, whose body is strung up as a message, and Lillian Worth, who sacrifices herself so her daughter Rose Wilson can kill LeFarge. Seeing Rose's near-photographic reflexes, he realizes that she is his daughter, and when she runs away from the Titans he takes her in, beginning her training as an assassin.
3 years ago - 53-year-old Slade & Rose Wilson fight the new Teen Titans. He shoots Bart Allen in the knee with a shotgun.
2 years ago - 54-year-old Slade is hired by Noah Kuttler to attack the Justice League to rebuild his database. He almost takes them all out.
1 year ago - 55-year-old Slade realizes that Rose Wilson is becoming dangerously unstable when she cuts out her own eye. He abandons her. He accepts a job from the Monkey Fist Cult, tracking David Cain and bringing him to their tournament. He enters the tournament himself, cutting a swath through the contestants until he is stopped by Dinah Lance.
There are bigger villains in the DC pantheon. Some of the biggest bad-guy archetypes in all of FICTION are in there; the Jokers and Lex Luthor's are huge. But there's a very real reason that Deathstroke is the very first villain we incorporated into our timeline. This guy is absolutely everywhere. He was introduced as a Teen Titans villain, but over the years he's fought almost everyone. Recently when we posted a poll for what character people wanted to see updated, this was the unequivocal favorite.
He's certainly a popular character who has tons of appearances under his belt, but at some point you do have to ask what really is the story of this incredibly prolific villain? Hopefully we can get to the truth of what really makes him tick without frustrating a lot of his fans, because, spoiler alert... he might not actually be as cool as they'd like you to think.
He's certainly a popular character who has tons of appearances under his belt, but at some point you do have to ask what really is the story of this incredibly prolific villain? Hopefully we can get to the truth of what really makes him tick without frustrating a lot of his fans, because, spoiler alert... he might not actually be as cool as they'd like you to think.
Deathstroke's Comic HistorySlade's first appearance was in the opening story arc of the New Teen Titans in 1980, all the way back in issue #2. He's presented as the greatest assassin in the world, whose abilities the H.I.V.E. replicate to create their own agent to take out the Titans. Their agent was Grant Wilson, Slade's son, and when he dies on the mission, Slade swears vengeance against both H.I.V.E. and the Titans, setting him up as a recurring villain for what would go on to be the greatest comic book team DC has ever produced. He would absolutely deliver, featuring in several of their stories, most notably in the absolutely legendary Judas Contract... which we'll go deeper into in a bit.
Deathstroke was so popular that he actually got his own ongoing series by Marv Wolfman, very much in the same vein as the currently ongoing Punisher series over at Marvel. He would sometimes come dangerously close to being an antihero of sorts, even appearing with the rest of the heroes in crossovers like Panic In The Sky, but it never kept for very long. Deathstroke continued to appear in every corner of DC, quickly establishing himself as one of the premier villains in practically every hero's rogues gallery. |
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As time went on, Deathstroke became less and less of a central figure in his own stories and was instead one of the most prolifically featured characters in the larger DC canon. Since it was understood across the board that Deathstroke was the absolute top assassin in the world, he would continue to appear in practically any series, his mere arrival enough for any story to suddenly get serious.
He did still have some major story roles to play; he continued to be a Titans villan first, serving as a major antagonist to every version of the team. When a new Secret Society of Super-Villains unified all of DC's baddies in the lead-up to Infinite Crisis in 2005, Slade was among the leaders of the entire organization. He's had several new series launced both before and after the new 52, becoming more and more rediculously badass. As time has gone one, he's actually gotten so popular that he's almost ceased to be a character in the traditional sense, and is almost more of a totemic figure. He's featured in practically every live action verion of DC that's been made in the past 20 years, and has become the driving force of the recently published Dark Crisis crossover event. There's such a riot of content here, it actually becomes a bit of a struggle to parse it all down into a usable character. |
The Problematic PartDeathstroke's popularity, even his whole characterization, is built on his role as the ultimate antagonist to the Teen Titans, and he won that title because of Judas Contract. The story is an absolute gut punch because of the betrayal of Terra, which Slade orchestrated. When it was written, I sincerely believe it wasn't intended to be as unbelievably problematic as we can now all very clearly see it was. It was intended to be salacious melodrama, and was written from within a huge blind spot. Now we all look back at this story and see an adult man grooming a teenage girl, and it is stomach-turningly unpleasant. Oscar winning screenwriter John Ridley IV wrote the recent miniseries The Other History of the DC Universe where he summed up the reality of this relationship.
There's just no way this can stand. Obviously, any sexual relationship between these two has to be completely excised from canon, it just has no place in any story any of us want to be a part of. Thankfully, it actually doesn't HAVE to be there. The idea that Terra was manipulated by Deathstroke is a core part of making the Judas Contract story work, and that can absolutely happen without including any of the unconscionable content. This still becomes a foundational element in Slade's story, though, and it informs so much of who we understand him to be. Deep down, despite all his bravado and fighting prowess and posturing as the toughest, most dangerous man in DC, this guy is clearly a coward. He regularly victimizes children, including his own, in pursuit of his own glory. I totally understand the instinct to prop him up as this ultimate badass, but in the end the only way he functions as a character is as someone who is actually kind of pathetic. |
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Our Deathstroke StorySo, now that we've thoroughly alienated all the fans of this character... what do we actually want our version of Deathstroke to do? Yes, he absolutely needs to be the toughest, most dangerous man on the planet, but if that's ALL he is then there's really nothing more to him than any other gun-toting machismo brick meant to appeal to emotionally-stunted teenage boy power fantasies. In fact, you could argue that the actual point here is that Deathstroke is meant to show exactly how shallow and pointless that sort of character actually is.
To that end, while we are going to have him be a part of groups like Team 7, where his inclusion goes a long way to illustrate the role they play in the world, his story is going to be largely defined by his constant taking on and abandoning of allies. He is driven by revenge for the death of his son Grant, even though he is very likely just as responsible for that death as anyone. He manipulates and abandons poor Terra. He takes on a group of assassin trainees, but doesn't aid them when they are falling apart. He kidnaps and grooms his own daughter, and then abandons her when he realizes how damaged she is. This is a cycle this character lives in, and combined with his continued antagonism of a team of teenagers, really illustrates how a character can be the absolute height of supposed rugged toughness, and still be an absolute dreck of a human being. |
Deathstroke's FutureDeathstroke absolutely has to have a huge role to play in the larger DC mythology, but exactly what the role should be is a little hard for us to all agree on. He keeps being set up as this major leader of all the villains of DC, so much so that he was essentially the core antagonist of the recent Dark Crisis, but that never quite actually works for a character that's always been so wildly selfish. Even in his early appearances, when they were trying to suggest that he operated with his own moral code, they also established over and over again that that was all bull, that his morals were nothing, and he served no cause greater than himself.
So that is, I think, what we are probably going to do with him. There is no reference in the current timeline for what he will do next, but in the pages of his original series he found himself going up against a high-tech criminal organization called Shadowspire. While DC already has an allegory for GI Joe's Cobra in it's terrorist organization Kobra, Given his constant attempt to build something around him to expand his reach, it feels very appropriate for Deathstroke to start building up his own organization of high tech spys and soldiers, all working toward some lie about some moral purpose, but all just in service of this one man's ego. |
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I've been kind of hard on Slade here because he's so often presented as some sort of noble or great figure even if he's not a good person. The truth is that he's a great CHARACTER to illicit so complex a response, but we want to make sure we are unequivocal about just what sort of person this great character is.