Paul Kirk
1898 - Paul Kirk is born in Kentucky, the son of a coal miner.
1914 - 16-year-old Paul leaves home and rides a freighter across the Atlantic. He finds his way to East Africa, where he joins the British forces fighting there.
1919 - 21-year-old Paul remains in Africa after the war ends. He travels across Northern Africa, taking up with smugglers working out of Constantinople.
1920 - 22-year-old Paul first encounters the Order of St Dumas when they kill the captain of his ship. He is allowed to live when he is willing to give his life to protect his dog Thor. He is unaware the Order has sampled his biological material.
1925 - 27-year-old Paul makes contact with the Order of St Dumas. He begins working as an operative for the organization, stopping criminals all over the world.
1929 - 31-year-old Paul goes home for his father's funeral, and chooses to ride the rails across his home country. He says goodbye to Thor, letting him retire on his brother’s cattle farm in Kentucky before he returns to Constantinople.
1935 - 37-year-old Paul rescues a young Australian Cattle Dog from a dog fighting ring. He names her Chase, training her as his new sidekick.
1940 - 42-year-old Paul is injured on an assassination mission for the Order of St Dumas. While unconscious, the Order subjects a slime mold to resonant sonic models of his brain, growing an organic copy.
1941 - 43-year-old Paul is recruited by Uncle Sam for the Freedom Fighters. He accepts, as the Order of St Dumas has vanished during the War.
1942 - 44-year-old Paul begins regularly working on his own to travel across Europe and perform assassinations of nazi leadership. He joins a group of Czech resistance fighters to assassinate Reinhard Heydrich.
1943 - 45-year-old Paul leads the Freedom Fighters through northern Africa as they race Helmut Streicher in pursuit of the Ark of the Covenant. Helmut Streicher
1944 - 46-year-old Paul and a group of Allied military convicts assault a chateau in nazi-held France, killing dozens of German officers before the D-Day invasion.
1945 - 47-year-old Paul tracks Heinrich Himmler, finding him in hiding and garroting him. Assaulting Vandal Savage's secret temporal laboratories with the Freedom Fighters, he sacrifices himself fighting off nazi's to give Roy Lincoln time to destroy the lab.
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.
Paul Kirk actually has less appearances than several other characters using the same name, but is pretty inarguably the most prolific and successful of all the Manhunters, at least until Kate Spencer came along and locked up the legacy. He actually has two very separate eras of influence, which are so distinct from each other that we're actually using them both as essentially two different characters, which means that in this case we get to really focus on the original adventures of Paul Kirk.
Paul Kirk actually has less appearances than several other characters using the same name, but is pretty inarguably the most prolific and successful of all the Manhunters, at least until Kate Spencer came along and locked up the legacy. He actually has two very separate eras of influence, which are so distinct from each other that we're actually using them both as essentially two different characters, which means that in this case we get to really focus on the original adventures of Paul Kirk.
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Paul Kirk's Comic HistoryTechnically, Paul Kirk debuted in Adventure Comics #58 in 1941 in a feature called 'Paul Kirk, Manhunter', featuring a suit-wearing detective. This version of Kirk continued to appear for the next year until issue #73, when a new Manhunter debuted in a Jack Kirby & Joe Simon story; a big game hunter named Rick Nelson chose to use his jungle-honed prowess to stalk criminals. In the very next issue, the same character's name was updated to Paul Kirk, essentially removing the original Paul Kirk from whatever passed for continuity at the time, making this new character the one and only Manhunter. (In DC. Quality Comics had one too.)
While there are plenty of jungle-themed characters of this era, We think that given the design of the character, he must have been loosely based on the classic early comic STRIP character, the Phantom. While the character stopped appearing in 1944, his original adventures were reprinted as backup stories in the New Gods in the early 70s to showcase the early DC work of Jack Kirby. |
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Shortly after the New Gods reprints, Paul Kirk saw a drastic redesign in an extremely innovative new story in 1973 in the pages of Detective Comic in a story by Archie Goodwin and Walt Simonson. This featured Paul Kirk, the character from the classic Kirby/Simon stories, awakening in the modern day (which is to say the 70s). After 'dying' while on safari after World War II, he was placed in suspended animation by a mysterious organization the Counsel, intending to use him as a new operative, before he discovers that they are, in fact, the bad guys, and have an army of clones of him. What follows is a really great 70s era thriller, but one using one of the most audacious costume designs you're ever going to see. It was a deliberate attempt to create a character to share a book with Batman, someone who was his polar opposite in that he was brightly colored and actively used an arsenal of weaponry. It was a concept that could have very easily gone off the rails and been silly, and it's really entirely because of the talent of the creators involved that this was so good. Kirk finally died at the end of this story, but depictions of his classic adventures would continue to appear in books like All-Star Squadron, and of course, his clones would continue to crop up, most notably in Kirk DePaul in Kurt Busiek's Power Company.
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Our Paul Kirk StoryIn a heroic legacy with so many different variations, it's wild that Paul Kirk is not just one of the best versions, but TWO of them. We are going to use a lot of the details from the 70s Goodwin/Simonson Detective Comics in our much more redesigned version of Mark Shaw, so our Paul Kirk is going to be much more focused on his Golden Age appearance. For one thing, we do want to update his design to even more closely mimic the character we believe he was based on... The Phantom. If you just update the Phantom's color scheme, I think that's actually the optimal look for Paul Kirk.
We're tying the history of the Manhunters to the Order of St Dumas, and that really works for Kirk's backstory, making most of his career center around working as an operative for this mysterious organization out of Constantinople in the decades before World War II. We can also use them to eventually clone Kirk to create our version of Mark Shaw. For Kirk's World War II career, we really dug in and created all sorts of Wartime adventures based both on real-world missions and some classic movies. We also made a few references to the other Golden Age Manhunter. We make him part of the wartime Freedom Fighters along with the other Quality Characters, but more importantly we stole the single best thing about Quality's Manhunter and gave Kirk his own dog sidekick. This by itself makes this the coolest character we've ever updated. |
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