Marauder
45 years ago - Wade LeFarge's mother Francine has an affair with Charles Wilson, the father of Slade Wilson. Slade threatens to tell his mother about the affair, and Charles abandons a pregnant Francine. Wade is born in a homeless shelter.
27 years ago - 18-year-old Wade enlists in the army in an attempt to be more like Slade Wilson.
23 years ago - 22-year-old Wade learns about the military adrenocorticotropic hormone experiments Slade Wilson participated in. He steals an unfinished version of the hormone & goes AWOL.
22 years ago - 23-year-old Wade pays the Brain to subject him to his unfinished adrenocorticotropic hormone, enhancing his body but leaving him dangerously unhinged. He begins working as an international mercenary.
12 years ago - 33-year-old Wade is stalked and captured by Mark Shaw. He becomes a subject of the First Strike Program where the adrenocorticotropic hormone in his blood is extracted. He quickly proves too unstable to be of benefit, and is sent to prison.
7 years ago - 38-year-old Wade escapes from prison. He trades his knowledge of Kobra to earn a place on Slade Wilson's Ravens.
6 years ago - 39-year-old Wade & the Ravens attempt to steal a group of nuclear warheads from Kobra but when Jade Nguyen goes rogue & detonates a stolen warhead in Quarac, Wade is horribly irradiated, surviving only because of his enhanced biology. Driven completely insane, his obsession with Slade Wilson turns to hatred as he plans to kill everyone Slade cares about.
5 years ago - 40-year-old Wade LeFarge stalks and kills all of Slade Wilson's contacts, including William Randolph Wintergreen, whose body he strings up as a message to Slade. He kidnaps Slade's former lover Lillian Worth with the intention of torturing her, but is stopped by her daughter, Rose Worth. He stalks Rose, but she manages to fight him off. Ultimately Lillian sacrifices herself to ensure Rose's safety, leading to Rose cutting his head off, killing him.
You're 100% forgiven if you have no idea who this is. First of all, we changed his name. Marauder is the name of a few incredibly obscure one-off characters in DC canon, I believe the most prominent one is a Hawkman villain. This is actually Ravager III, the third person to become Ravager, we're just trying to simplify the legacy of that name a little by not having a bunch of Deathstroke antagonists taking the name before it's passed down to Rose Worth.
Despite the name change, this is already a fairly obscure character. We got pretty creative with this timeline to integrate them into the larger story a little more thoroughly, which we'll get into. He's really just featured in one story ever, but once we decided we wanted to include a version of that story, we set out to find a way to make this character feel like he belongs.
Despite the name change, this is already a fairly obscure character. We got pretty creative with this timeline to integrate them into the larger story a little more thoroughly, which we'll get into. He's really just featured in one story ever, but once we decided we wanted to include a version of that story, we set out to find a way to make this character feel like he belongs.
|
Wade LeFarge's Comic HistoryIn 1994, following the Zero Hour crossover, every single DC series published a #0 issue, including the Deathstroke ongoing series. This was the start of the arc The Hunted, in which a mysterious masked figure started to show up and murder all of the people closest to Slade, gunning them down while talking about how much he hated him. It was a mystery who this person was, of course, but the book managed to somehow split it's attention. Slade himself seemed to be so busy exerting a violent masculine rage at the idea of being attacked that he couldn't actually bother to save any of the people that were still being threatened, most notably his daughter Rose, who was kidnapped and menaced by the murderous killer. It fell to Wintergreen & Rose's mother Lilly to track and save Rose, leading to a wild confrontation on the side of a mountain leading to Lilly's death and to Wintergreen taking Rose to stay with the Titans.
Eventually, the killer finally confronted Slade himself, and was revealed to be his half-brother Wade LeFarge, and to have been secretly involved in all the goings-on between Slade and his ex-wife and the deaths of their kids. It was staged as a big reveal, but given that we had no idea who this character was beforehand, it all fell pretty flat. Wade showed up one more time in the Wizard Magazine Teen Titans # 1/2 special, where he tries to kidnap Rose again, who this time kills him in return. |
Our Wade StoryLet's just get the obvious part out of the way; yes, I imagine this character was intended as a pastiche of Deadpool. This is 1994, remember: the screwball version of the character we all love was still years away. At the time, Deadpool was still a Rob Liefield creation over in Marvel's New Mutants that was pretty much a whole cloth ripoff of the Titans arch nemesis, so it absolutely tracks that Wolfman would just rip them off right back.
So, given how minor and essentially ignorable this character was in canon, why are we including them? Well, it is very specifically for the climax of the Hunted storyline, where he is the one who kidnaps Rose and kills her mother, an incredibly traumatic event that is largely responsible for setting her on the path that eventually leads to her being the cool assassin we all enjoy. For her story to work, we need this catalyst. Which means we needed to find a way to make Wade a little more interesting. We DID make him Slade's half-brother (we took the Prince of Thieves Christian Slader vs Kevin Costner approach), which gave us a little framework for his obsession, but we wanted to make it all a little more pervasive. We gave him a flawed version of the same adrenocorticotropic hormone that enhanced Slade, but most importantly we made him a part of the Ravens and a victim of the Quroc bombing, finally giving him what feels like a solid (albeit insane) motive to become the crazed killer we need him to be. |
|