King Faraday
52 years ago - King Faraday is born in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
34 years ago - 18-year-old King goes to college studying criminology & political science.
30 years ago - 22-year-old King graduates and is recruited by Argus into an elite military intelligence training program.
28 years ago - 24-year-old King becomes a Argus tactical operative.
25 years ago - 27-year-old King is selected for Team 7.
23 years ago - 29-year-old King, Christopher Chance & Cole Cash become full-time DEO operatives after Team 7 is shut down. They infiltrate the underground casinos of Stephen Sharpe, taking him into custody.
21 years ago - 31-year-old King recruits Ben Turner & Richard Dragon as tactical assets for the DEO, working as their handler.
19 years ago - 33-year-old King discovers the alien identity of J'onn J'onzz. They agree to help each other,becoming partners working for the DEO.
15 years ago - 37-year-old King's daughter Emma is born. He contacts Dinah Lance to take freelance work for the DEO, stopping Nathan Prince from assassinating a state senator.
6 years ago - 46-year-old King blackmails Christopher Chance into taking a job to get him back to work.
4 years ago - 48-year-old King temporarily serves in Luthor's cabinet but quickly steps down.
3 years ago - 49-year-old King introduces his daughter Emma to M'gann M'orzz
Anyone who has read any comics from the Golden Age will tell you, comics used to be packed to the rafters with the adventures of a hat-wearing crime-solving adventure men with clever names. Some of them are still around, the Slam Bradleys and Speed Saunders, but there are literally hundreds that are lost to the ether. This is the stuff that started to get real traction in the post-war Atomic Age of comics as supeheroes slipped in popularity, before the fifties wave of interest in sci-fi took over.
Faraday wasn't originally a spy, that came later, but the role grew around him in a way that has made him indispensable in DC's worldbuilding. This is a character that COULD be used for his own stories, but more often we see them as a supporting character for others, so we're going to lean into that here, with the understanding that he's also out there having his own spy adventures .
Faraday wasn't originally a spy, that came later, but the role grew around him in a way that has made him indispensable in DC's worldbuilding. This is a character that COULD be used for his own stories, but more often we see them as a supporting character for others, so we're going to lean into that here, with the understanding that he's also out there having his own spy adventures .
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King Faraday's Comic HistoryKing Faraday appeared for the first time in 1950, in the first issue of Danger Trail, as the cover feature. It was a slightly more mature story than the two-fisted adventurers of the Golden Age, with a very deliberate Sam Spade / Phillip Marlow voice. He's created by Robert Kanigher, who was an absolute juggernaut in this post-golden age era of non-superhero characters, and Carmine Infantino, giving him a more mature look than similar characters. This is clearly part of comics maturing for a maturing audience, telling stories that might appeal to older readers. It only went for five issues, but is clearly an important chapter in DC's evolution.
Faraday made another appearance in the Silver Age in a two-issue 1964 feature called I-Spy in Showcase #50-51, again by Kanigher and Infantino, showing more hard-boiled spy adventures. The cover says "back by thunderous demand", but given how obscure the character was at that point I imagine it was really just the creators really liking this premise. It's clearly done with a lot of love, with some gorgeous art and really fun worldbuilding. This appearance meant that Faraday would appear again in Showcase #100 in 1978 which brought back every Showcase character ever. At this point he started to be used pretty often, pretty much whenever anyone needed a spy or government agent character who wasn't explicitly a bad guy. |
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Faraday was secure enough as part of DC's worldbuilding that he appeared in the Secret Origins issues post crisis, helping to establish the new origins of characters being adapted into DC from other companies. We even got a new four-issue Danger Trail miniseries in 1993 by Len Wein.
The big turning point for King Faraday's profile within the DC Lexicon happened in the 2004 Elseworlds story DC: New Frontier by Darwin Cooke, the masterfully plotted exploration the Silver Age DC set during the actual era in which it was published. Faraday's role in this story is as the enigmatic G-Man pulling strings behind the scenes, but we see him interact with Martian Manhunter and eventually become one of the heroes that helps save they day. This doesn't really change his persona as the good-guy government agent, but it certainly increased his visibility. From this point forward Faraday is pretty thoroughly cemented as a permanent fixture in DC's worldbuilding. He's not a main character, instead always appearing as a guest, although he is pretty consistently part of most Suicide Squad series. Even into the new 52, he has continued to be a bedrock part of DC's world of espionage. |
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Our King Faraday StoryWe's going to use King Faraday in a few different ways. His career is long enough that we can break it up into different eras, and his role in DC has always been as a sort of foundational element in other character's stories, so this is absolutely the right tack to take with him.
First and perhaps most important, we actually are going to draw from the interaction between Faraday and Martian Manhunter in New Frontier as a way to make him a more important part of J'onn's story. We wanted J'onn to have a period where he is actually working as detective, since this really is where the character comes from, and we can get that by making Faraday one of his earliest allies. He'll help J'onn hide among the humans, and even work as partners for a while. Later, when J'onn needs to hide M'gann, Faraday will help, and M'gann will even base some of her human personality on Faraday's daughter. We're also going to make Faraday a part of a few other characters stories. He'll be Richard Dragon & Ben Turner's handler while they are working for the DEO, he'll be part of the government operative Team 7, and from that group he will continue a personal, if not professional, relationship with fellow Team 7 alum, Christopher Chance. This is really where Faraday shines; it's understood that he's having his own ongoing spy adventures, but we mostly see him popping up as a supporting character all over the place. |
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