Mark Shaw
47 years ago - The Order of St Dumas begins gestating clones of Paul Kirk using his biological material and imbuing them with a model of his skills using forced hypnosis.
22 years ago - one of the 25-year-old Paul Kirk clones survives a near-fatal explosion. Recovering in a hospital in Switzerland, he awakens with no memories. Naming himself Mark Shaw after his doctor, he begins rebuilding a life, attending public university in Berlin.
20 years ago - 27-year-old Mark Shaw, now a student and law clerk, begins having flashes of memories from the life of Paul Kirk. Retracing his footsteps, he starts to reassemble those memories, tracking the Order of St Dumas.
18 years ago - 29-year-old Mark Shaw is captured by the Order of St Dumas. He is subjected to forced hypnosis to restore him to baseline for the Paul Kirk clones, but his Shaw identity remains dominant.
17 years ago - 30-year-old Mark Shaw escapes the Order of St Dumas, his unique Shaw personality allowing him greater access to the experience and skills of Paul Kirk. Hunted by the order, he adopts a new costume as he works to destroy the remaining clones.
14 years ago - 33-year-old Mark Shaw destroys an Order of St Dumas facility in Venice and allows himself to be taken into custody by Argus to avoid being taken by the Order. Amanda Waller offers him amnesty, and he begins working with Argus & the new Freedom Fighters.
9 years ago - 38-year-old Mark Shaw discovers the main cloning facility of the Order of St Dumas in Brazil. The Freedom Fighters are sent to shut them down. Shaw destroys the cloning technology and kills Desmond Bradford, the scientist in charge of the program, permanently ending it. (unaware that Rick Flagg takes the cloning tech information for Amanda Waller )
6 years ago - 41-year-old Mark Shaw received a commission as a DEO operative from Director Bones, moving the Freedom Fighters under their control.
5 years ago - 42-year-old Mark Shaw is targeted as an apostate by the Order of St Dumas and is targeted by their avenging angel Azrael. They are both killed in the ensuing battle.
Trying to summarize the legacy of Manhunter has proven to be one of the more daunting tasks we've attempted for this website, so to keep all the Manhunter pages from being ten paragraphs long I did a blog post giving a whole history of the legacy that is not specific to any one character. I'd recommend that you read that first before you dive in here.
Our version of Mark Shaw actually has very little to do with the comic character, but is instead using a collection of references to elements from across the various versions of Manhunter to create a character that we think really captures exactly what this character is supposed to be... perhaps even better than the comics did? A bold claim, for sure... let us know what you think!
Our version of Mark Shaw actually has very little to do with the comic character, but is instead using a collection of references to elements from across the various versions of Manhunter to create a character that we think really captures exactly what this character is supposed to be... perhaps even better than the comics did? A bold claim, for sure... let us know what you think!
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Mark Shaw's Comic HistoryMark Shaw originally appeared in 1st Issue Special #22 in 1975. Jack Kirby was writing, drawing, and editing this series as a way to quickly introduce new concepts to DC, and in this issue he returned to the Manhunter character he'd essentially invented back in the 40s with Joe Simon. His new version of the character had a much more pronounced Kirby aesthetic, and was built around an ancient organization meant to combat evil. The core premise was less the focus than the overall style, but it was nonetheless a whole new approach to Manhunter.
The whole premise was changed dramatically in its next appearance in Justice League of America, which revealed that the ancient organization of Manhunters were actually androids built by the Guardians. Following this story, Shaw adopted several other identities as a minor recurring Justice League antagonist. The Millennium crossover in 1988 (which is way too needlessly complex to explain here) established that Shaw was now the only Manhunter left, allowing him to star in a new series with a whole new costume. This series ended in 1990, and he would go on to appear, and be killed in, the 1993 Eclipso miniseries... although this was later established to be an imposter in the pages of the Kate Spencer Manhunter series, where it was revealed that he had been active as the villain Dumas, killing other Manhunters. In modern DC, Mark Shaw is STILL active, and in fact has been established as a major espionage-style villain in the crossover Leviathan. |
Our Mark Shaw StoryWhile there are several named Manhunters, the two main names that have been associated with the name (before Kate Spencer) were Paul Kirk & Mark Shaw. Even though Shaw is generally part of an entirely different branch of this narrative, we still like the idea of using both names, so even though this narrative is much more of an extension of Paul Kirk we still wanted to prioritize using the Mark Shaw name.
After Paul Kirk's original Golden Age adventures, he was eventually brought back in the seventies in Detective Comics in new stories by Archie Goodwin and Walt Simonson. These new stories featured a new and incredibly bold costume, and a whole new story involving an evil secret organization and clones of Paul Kirk. Those clones would later be referenced in other books, most notably in a whole new character in the pages of Kurt Busiek's Power Company. There are even some parallels between the Detective Comics version of Paul Kirk and the Mark Shaw Manhunter, in that they both have a secret cult-like organization as their antagonist. |
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None of the Manhunters are actually associated with the Order of St Dumas canonically... they're specifically a part of Azrael's backstory over in the Batman part of DC. However they are an absolutely fantastic example of a secret cult-like organization and will work way better than any of the one-off organizations named in any of the Manhunter stories. (also... Kate Spencer in the comics DOES use Azrael's gauntlets, and one of Shaw's villainous identities WAS "Dumas", so you can argue there's SOME connection?)
So we're making Mark Shaw one of the clones of Paul Kirk created by the Order. He suffered amnesia and created a new identity for himself before he was found by the Order, who attempted to re-indoctrinate him... but in much the same way that Kirk, in the Detective Comics stories, fought clones of himself with all the same skills but was able to outclass them because of his far more extensive experience, our Mark Shaw's unique individual personality allows him a more complex perspective on the experiences and skills of Paul Kirk in his memory. Since our Paul Kirk is part of our Freedom Fighters, it worked incredibly well for our modern version of Mark Shaw to eventually become a part of the modern team, and in that capacity he can eventually defeat the Order's attempts to capture and reprogram him, destroying their cloning efforts completely (although if you look, we're connecting this cloning technology to the one later developed by Cadmus). We can even bring this full circle by making Mark the target of the Order's avenging angel Azrael... leading both to his death and the death of Jean Paul Valley's father. It's a very connected story, one that we agree feels very true to the concept of Manhunter while also keeping the whole legacy much more cohesive. |
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