Gentleman Ghost
1717 - Jim Craddock is born to an aristocratic English family.
1732 - 15-year-old Jim's father abandons his family leaving him and his mother destitute.
1738 - 21-year-old Jim begins committing highway robbery after the death of his mother.
1741 - 24-year-old Jim, carrying himself with the comportment of nobility, is known as the infamous highwayman Gentleman Jim.
1748 - 31-year-old Jim is gunned down and killed. The Nth metal in his antique flintlocks bonds to his soul, causing him to continue to appear around the world for centuries, continuing to stage robberies as the Gentleman Ghost.
1929 - Jim Craddock begins to appear more frequently when Carter Hall & Shiera Sanders open the Nth Metal Armory, causing him to regularly manifest around them and stage his robberies. Although he can be affected by their weaponry, he continually flees from them staying just out of their reach, forcing them to trap him.
1951 - Jim Craddock ceases to appear as frequently once the Nth Metal Armory is sealed, again only appearing periodically around the world.
11 years ago - Jim Craddock begins to appear regularly again when the Nth Metal Armory is opened.
8 years ago - Jim Craddock is summoned by Johnny Sorrow's magic, making him a member of the Injustice Society. During their attack on the Justice Society, Mister Terrific deduces the connection between Craddock and Carter & Shiera Hall's Nth Metal Armory. They return his pistols and are able to sever their connection, allowing him to move on.
You see a lot of Gentleman Ghost recently in several different animated series. Something about the character just seems to translate to animation really well. His general modus operandi is to continually steal stuff and run away from the hero, using his ghost powers to stay one step out of their reach, and that actually works really well for our purposes. We got to rethink his history to make him work with our Hawkman timeline, and this one was a lot of fun.
Gentleman Ghost's Comic HistoryGentleman Ghost's first appearance happened in 1947, in a Hawkman & Hawkwoman story in Flash Comics #88, which is actually pretty late in the Golden Age. He was known as The Ghost and was essentially just a criminal staging heists, the fact that he was a ghost was basically a mystery to be solved. Yes, he seemed to be invisible, but there always seemed to be the possibility that he might actually be a living person staging everything. He continued to appear for the last several years of Flash Comics, continually challenging the Hawks while always keeping them guessing as to whether he was a real ghost or not.
The character returned in 1969 in the Silver Age series The Atom and Hawkman, now confronting the Katar & Shayera Hol Hawks. This is where he starts going by 'Gentlemen Ghost', and we actually get a backstory where we learn that he really is a ghost (maybe), and we see his backstory as English highwayman Jim Craddock, who swore while being hanged that he'd be back, but even with that information, the fact that he was a ghost was still meant to be an open-ended question. He would continue to appear occasionally in the Hawk's stories, up to and including the post-crisis Hawkworld comics. Later, in the Geoff Johns Hawkman stories, when the idea was introduced that Carter & Shiera had been reincarnated across time, we learn that Jim Craddock was actually killed by one of Carter's incarnations and is cursed to continue to walk the Earth until his killer passes on, which would be impossible since his killer is a continually reincarnated Egyptian prince. |
Our Gentleman Ghost StoryWhile the old stories where the question as to whether Craddock is actually a ghost or not were a lot of fun, the modern stories lean more into his ghost-ness, and that gives the character a lot more utility, so we're going to go with him being openly, obviously a ghost... which is a pretty funny decision to need to make about a character whose head is invisible.
Since we're not giving the Hawks a continual cycle of reincarnation, we can't use that explanation for why he's a ghost, or why he's tied to the Hawks. One of the benefits of the changes we made in their history is that Nth metal can be more mysterious and magical since it's an artifact of a long-lost civilization. Most of the Nth metal on Earth that came with the original Tanagarian ship is locked away in their vault, but small amounts of it are out in the world. By binding Craddock's soul to the Nth metal that was used in his antique pistols, we've built a reliable way to explain his existance and his role as an enemy of the Hawks. Craddock He's one of the few characters we can openly skip forward across the timeline without explanation, and we even decided to end his story in the most fun way possible; with a modern character finally solving the riddle of the Gentleman Ghost, allowing him to finally pass on. |