Icon

1830 - Arnus is born on the Planet Terminus, among the survivors of a war with the Ghunds. While evacuating the planet, his ship is destroyed, and his lifepod crashes in a cornfield in the American South. As they both lay dying, the ship bonds him with its own bio-synthetic core, rebuilding him to mimic the first sentient lifeform he encounters, an enslaved black woman named Miriam, who adopts him as her son Augustus.

1836 - Augustus Freeman discovers his Terminan ability to absorb, store, and redirect energy.

1850 - Augustus Freeman works as an abolitionist on the underground railroad.

1857 - Augustus Freeman sees the Missouri Compromise declared unconstitutional in the Dred Scott Decision. He flees him home to settle in the western territories, bringing his mother with him.

1861 - Augustus Freeman returns to the Eastern US after the death of his mother to join the Union Army.

1865 - Augustus Freeman abandons his identity after the war and becomes his own son, Augustus Freeman Jr, passing the bar and opening his own law firm.

1870 - Augustus Freeman Jr passes the lifespan of the oldest Terminan, his body sustained by bonding to his ship's core, allowing him to absorb energy for far longer than any previous Terminan.

1877 - Augustus Freeman Jr is pressured to give up his legal practice after the withdrawal of federal troops from the South.

1883 - Augustus Freeman Jr is a victim of Jim Crow Laws, closing his law practice.

1917 - Augustus Freeman Jr enlists to fight in the Great War in Europe, seeing the moral obligation to fight oppressors, but witnesses horrors on the battlefield.

1919 - Augustus Freeman Jr returns to the states traumatized, using the war to discard his identity, having revealed his powers. He becomes Augustus Freeman III.

1921 - Augustus Freeman III is forced to reveal himself again when his home in the Greenwood District of Tulsa, Oklahoma is beset by White Supremacist Terrorists. He saves hundreds of lives, and then goes into seclusion, moving across the country to Harlem.

1941 - Augustus Freeman III does not want to fight in World War II after the destruction of WWI, but is recruited by Jenny Sparks, assisting her on missions across Europe.

1945 - Augustus Freeman III returns from the war posing as his own son, Augustus Freeman IV. He returns to seclusion.

5 years ago - Augustus Freeman IV meets Raquel Eruin when she and her boyfriend break into his house. They become friends, and she convinces him to come out of seclusion as the superhero Icon.

4 years ago - Augustus Freeman IV operates alone at Raquel Eruin's insistence while she has her baby, but is less effective, needing her guidance and perspective.

3 years ago - Augustus Freeman IV & Raquel Eruin seek out Jenny Sparks when she returns, Joining her as she starts the new Stormwatch.

1 year ago - Augustus Freeman IV and Stormwatch make themselves public when they join the battle against Mageddon.

now - Augustus Freeman IV helps Raquel Eruin publish her book of poetry, her work inspiring him to start construction of his community center

Milestone comics are the real deal. They're the perfect cross-section of 90s bombast and really classic, almost timeless superhero storytelling... all with a unique look and perspective that you just absolutely have never gotten before. Lots of people grew up with Static Shock so of course that's the property everyone gravitates to... for good reason, it's absolutely phenomenal... but I would absolutely recommend Icon to pretty much everyone. Including this character is a no-brainier and is also a really fun character to adapt, but we really want to make sure we do this in a way that supports everything this character is. I hope you like it!

Icon's Comic History

Icon was one of the four initial books launched with the new Milestone Comics imprint in 1993. A creation of beloved writer Dwayne McDuffie, Icon is an unabashed Superman allegory. This is a pretty common comic archetype at this point, but I would maintain that no one has ever managed to take that archetype and find such a clever angle on it, such a unique spin on the concept, and used it to tell more unique stories. I maintain that, by a wide margin, Icon is one of the best and most innovative Superman allegories that's ever existed.

McDuffie's innovation was that his hero, Agustus Freeman, actually crashed in the deep American South in the early 1800s, and as such has lived through the history of the Black experience in America. He's withdrawn, and uninterested in helping, planning to instead wait out the time until he's able to return to his own planet. He's not even the main viewpoint character in the book. That would instead be his sidekick, Rocket. An idealistic young woman who insists that Agustus can create a positive change in the world not just by being a superhero, but also by being a role model and inspiration. It does this really awesome thing to the book to have the big over-powered hero not be the main characters, because it means his involvement in the story is not guaranteed, allowing the drama to develop more organically.

Icon went on for a full 47 issues, and he also appeared as a member of the Shadow Cabinet in another of Milestone's series. Because it was published and distributed by DC, the Milestone characters could occasionally appear in crossovers, but unlike so many other companies they were never outright acquired, so if they ever appeared in each other's media, it was always on Milestone's terms, There were a few crossovers in the 90s, and then when McDuffie had his brief run on Justice League in the 2000s, he introduced Icon into the mainstream DC Continuity.

It's really in animation where we see him treated as a standard part of continuity, in the Young Justice animated series. He doesn't do a lot, as he's really just there to explain why Rocket is on the team with the younger characters, but he's still fully a member of the Justice League.

One of the New 52 launch titles was Static, so it's understood that Icon and the rest of the Dakotaverse are now DC canon, but it wasn't until 2022 when a new DC imprint reintroducing the Milestone characters into DC that we got a new Icon & Rocket series fully establishing their status in the continuity.

As much as I wish we got more of these REALLY fantastic characters and their unique storytelling perspective, the fact that their scarcity is a result of them NOT being exploited is pretty cool.

Our Icon Story

Timelines like this are among my favorite timelines to build, where we get to actually do a little reading into history and figure out how this character would interact with it. Given that Icon is meant to be a witness to the whole history of black people in America, that meant we get to weave his story around the Dred Scott verdict, the Civil War, Reclamation, Jim Crow... Not so much that he's INVOLVED in these things, but that they all effect him in really dramatic ways. We do make a point to include him in the Tulsa Race Massacre... we're literally saying that in our timeline, that event played out differently, because Agustus was there, and he stopped the worst of it from happening. From there, we can basically follow the comic continuity verbatim.

One thing we do need to do, though, is deal with the fact that this is a Superman-level character, so we just can't have that be the status quo for his entire species. There needs to be something unique about him that allows him to reach those power levels. We know that his ship interfaced with him when he crashed and rewrote him so he appeared human, and we know that his people can absorb and store vast amounts of energy. What we've done is suggested that his people are traditionally short-lived but in being rewritten, Agustus has lived far longer than any of his people ever did, allowing him to store vastly more power than any of them ever have or could. It lets Icon be as powerful as you want him to be, but also lets him be unique.

We also make one crucial change to both Icon and Rocket that might seem a little out of left field, but I think if you consider it even a little you'll agree that this carves out space for these characters in a way they've never canonically had within DC, and also establishes the amount of power at play here.

Even though these aren't Image characters, they are still 90s era heroes established outside of DC who were later adapted to be included in the timeline. The biggest difference, I would argue, is that Icon and Rocket are just flat-out better characters than ninety percent of the Image characters that made the same transition. They feel more inherently at home here, and elevate almost everything they appear in. So when looking for characters to include in our version of Stormwatch, Icon and Rocket fit in surprisingly well. The Authority, the comic team our version of Stormwatch is largely based on, actually has a deliberate Superman in Apollo, but that character is notably (and by design) lacking any sort of internal life or backstory. Icon serves the same role but is infinitely more interesting as a character, and brings with him one of the best sidekick characters introduced in the last several decades. He has just the right amount of distance from the traditional DC mythology to fit in perfectly with a team deliberately designed to do just that. It's not even that hard to justify including them, because Agustus's long life can easily give him a history with team leader Jenny Sparks. Not a change I think even I would have predicted, but I really love what it does for us, for Stormwatch, and for these two.

Related Characters