Electrocutioner
39 years ago - Lester Buchinski is born in Star City.
30 years ago - 9-year-old Lester survives being electrocuted.
23 years ago - 16-year-old Lester starts working as muscle for the Star City mob.
19 years ago - 20-year-old Lester builds his electro-shock gloves as an intimidation tactic.
17 years ago - 22-year-old Lester creates his Electrocutioner identity to go after Green Arrow.
15 years ago - 24-year-old Lester is brought in by William Asmodeus Zard to join his Injustice Gang as a foil for Dinah Lance.
12 years ago - 27-year-old Lester is one of the assassins to take the job from Carmine Flacone to kill Batman.
9 years ago - 30-year-old Lester returns to Star City and becomes the William Tockman's chief enforcer.
6 years ago - 33-year-old Lester survives the Quaroc Bombing.
5 years ago - 34-year-old Lester becomes an enforcer for Roland Desmond, Forcing Nightwing to fully insulate his costume.
2 years ago - 37-year-old Lester Buchinski fights Stephanie Brown, and beating her nearly to death before she's saved by Batman. He is ruthlessly hunted by Robin, and is left hospitalized and imprisoned.
Electrocutioner was conceiver as a sort of dark reflection of the heroes. It sounds cool, but falls apart pretty quick. He's basically used nowadays as another vaguely superpowered assassin/hitman who is just dangerous enough to threaten the hero, and to be fair that's how we're using him too. It's the sort of character comics thrive on. We actually wound up getting a lot of mileage out of him.
Electrocutioner's Comic HistoryElectrocutioner appeared for the first time in Batman #331 in 1981, a complete throwaway villain in a filler episode. He was a character that wanted to execute criminals, and was using electricity to do it. He wore what amounted to a full body executioner's hood with a couple lightning bolt accents, and probably would never have appeared again without a pretty thorough redesign.
That came in the pages of Vigilante, a series by Marv Wolfman. Vigilante was a series from 1983 that was very much a product of that era, with it's Dirty Harry sensibility. It brought up a lot of questions about where the lines were for a person operating outside the law, and over time did a really good job of forcing series star Adrian Chase to confront the fact that he was basically everything he fought against. Early on, they did this by pitting him against another character that was, arguably, doing the same thing he was, although using deliberately lethal force. This take on the Electrocutioner had the benefit of being in a book by a very high profile writer with a much better design, and soon you started to see him show up in other series. While for a time he continued to be depicted as a lethal vigilante himself, eventually he was seen more as just another violent bad guy for hire. |
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Our Electrocutioner StoryMost of Electrocutioner's modern appearances all stem from his role in the 2013 video game, Batman: Arkham Origins. (I just wrote a quick blog post about the appearance). This characterization completely skips over his history as a murderous vigilante, and frankly we agree that that's probably the best route to take. There might be characters out there for whom that idea works, but the guy whose whole deal is that he likes to electrocute things just seems like more of a blunt object.
To that end, we're building him a backstory that involves Lester as a career enforcer for various crime bosses. He actually fits in pretty well in the world of Green Arrow, who could use a few more baddies. We included him in our take on the Arkham Origins story, the night when Carmine Falcone put a hit on Batman, which does establish that he's something of an assassin as well as just a mob enforcer, which also makes him a great candidate for the Ravens; the team of contract killers we build to be lead by Deathstroke and lead into the events of the Quaroc bombing. |
Electrocutioner's CostumeLester's Arkham Origins costume seems to have taken over as his default appearance in the comics; his most recent appearances at the time of this writing all seem to feature either approximations or direct copies of it.
Personally, though, if you're going to use a video game appearance of this character as the basis of his costume, I'd like to at least suggest that we try this one. Electrocutioner was a level boss in the Batman: The Video Game in 1989 on the NES, alongside Killer Moth and Firebug. While to my knowledge Electrocutioner has never had a mohawk and electrified arm-blade... We should at least consider how dope this looks. In the meantime, however, my favorite take on his costume is the black and red ensemble he's worn for most of his appearances. He wore it when he fought Batman, and Nightwing... this is the look he should be using. |
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