Peacemaker
41 years ago - Christopher Smith is born in the isolated Swiss chateau of his father, Wolfgang Smith, the leader of the Pax Institute, a research facility & think tank dedicated to his father's teachings on moral and social objectivism.
36 years ago - 5-year-old Christopher's mother, having asked some questions about some of the practices of the Pax Institute, disappears from the chateau. His father never mentions her again.
30 years ago - 11-year-old Christopher,.embracing his fathers teachings, chooses to train himself to defend the ideals of peace and battle forces that would attempt to disrupt them.
21 years ago - 20-year-old Christopher first dons the helmet and weapons built by the Pax Institute to shut down Kobra's attempts to replicate their designs, using weapons of violence to bring about peace. He calls himself Peacemaker.
16 years ago - 25-year-old Christopher's personal secretary Emily Blair tries to convince him that the Pax Institute is evil. He does not listen, turning her in to be re-educated. She escapes & flees to the authorities. Checkmate stages a raid on the Pax Institute, which they fight with their airships. Chris defends the institute by jetpack. His father commits suicide when they are overrun, and Chris is sent to prison to await trial.
13 years ago - 28-year-old Christopher is exonerated when it's proven in international court that the mountain chateau of the Pax Institute was sovereign land, protecting him under the laws of war. Released from prison, he is approached by General Wade Eiling to become the head security officer of Eiling's First Strike Program, which Chris accepts when he recognizes as being in support of the same ideology as his father.
6 years ago - 35-year-old Christopher is ordered by General Wade Eiling to lead the Americommandos to arrest the Justice League after the Chemo disaster. He shoots Guy Gardner and shatters his femur, but ultimately loses to him. He is sent to prison where he meets Monsieur Mallah, who tells him of his old patrner who had devoted his life to the same ideals as Chris's father.
4 years ago - 37-year-old Christopher helps Monsieur Mallah escape prison when they learn from Emil La Salle that Mallah's old patner is still alive. They travel to a hidden lab which they work together to access, only for Chris to discover that Mallah's old partner, and the ultimare expression of his father's beliefs, is the Brain. Mallah kills Chris.
We actually have been getting questions about adding Peacemaker to the timeline for a while, ever since James Gunn's movie The Suicide Squad in 2021 created a really bizarre but clever take on the character. At the time, we were pretty adamant that that was very specifically Gunn's version of the character, and it wouldn't really work outside of his world. For our purposes, the initial paradox of the character was just too odd, he was a square peg that we didn't have a square hole for.
With time, however, and with some examination of the original character the DC version is based on, we believe we came up with a sense of a character that actually told a really interesting story. It's a lot to try to squeeze into one of our timelines because it's really about what this guy believes and why he believes it. I hope we've managed to convey that on this page, we'd love to hear what you think.
With time, however, and with some examination of the original character the DC version is based on, we believe we came up with a sense of a character that actually told a really interesting story. It's a lot to try to squeeze into one of our timelines because it's really about what this guy believes and why he believes it. I hope we've managed to convey that on this page, we'd love to hear what you think.
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Peacemaker's Comic HistoryPeacemaker first appeared as a backup in the Fightin' 5 #40 by Charlton Comics before starring in his own ongoing series for five issues. Charlton was mostly a publisher of magazines that left its presses on at night as a money-saving venture and used that printing time to make war and romance comics, but in the 60s as interest in superhero comics boomed, they tried their hand for a brief while at making their own superheroes. Their most popular by a mile was Blue Beetle, but there were a few other notable characters. Peacemaker, for his part, was a Swiss diplomat who lived in an isolated chateau where he built an advanced array of non-lethal weapons as a hobby, and chose to use them to defend peace. The original concept had a notable glossy conceptual sheen, as though a Flash Gordon character was being produced by Ikea.
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Once managing editor Dick Giordano left Charlton, their superhero characters quickly stopped publishing, although fan interest specifically in the Blue Beetle continued. Years later, when Giordano became the managing editor at DC, they actually aquired the Charlton characters, who all merged into the main DC timeline during the first Crisis of Infinite Earths. Blue Beetle and Captain Atom were integrated right away in their own series, but DC seemed a little more hesitant to use Peacemaker, perhaps not quite sure what they were going to do with him. Famously, Alan Moore's Watchmen was originally intended to use the Charlton characters before changing to original ones, where the gun-toting Comedian was based on Peacemaker.
Just how DC eventually chose to use Chris is probably heavily influenced by the book in which he debuted; Marv Wolfman's Vigilante. It was a book very much about violence and the toll it takes on people, and Peacemaker launched into it almost as a strawman argument. He was a man who killed for peace, who was so lost in the conflicting ideologies of the vigilante characters of the series that he was a danger to everyone, even himself. He now heard the voices of the people he killed talking to him from his helmet. In short, he was a lunatic. He went on to get his own miniseries where we discover that his father was actually a nazi, whose ghost he believes he sees everywhere. He made a few more appearances in books like Eclipso, but for the most part DCs version of the character was just a crazy person. |
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Peacemaker's TV HistoryA huge change came about for Peacemaker when he was included in the 2021 movie The Suicide Squad, and then in his own self-titled HBO series, all starring John Cena. Writer-director James Gunn made some very specific choices with the character, first moving his origins from Switzerland to an American trailer park, and changing his dad from a literal nazi to an American neo-nazi, specifically the known DC character White Dragon. He didn't shy away from the inherent ridiculousness of the concept of a man so dedicated to peace he's willing to kill for it, but he also really leaned into the idea of just what sort of person would be so caught up in his own self loathing & desperation for affection from his hateful father that this ideology would somehow make sense. It's honestly a great show.
DC has started to adapt this version of Peacemaker into the comics; including him in the new Suicide Squad series, an actually really intense Garth Ennis one-shot, and a charming but buffoonic take in his own miniseries that we are probably going to draw from more than we mean to. |
Our Peacemaker StoryWhile the idea of transposing Peacemaker's story to America does feel very correct in a lot of ways, we just couldn't shake the idea that we're missing something in the original concept of Chris in that Swiss chateau, just believing that he is living a morally pure life as he measures ingredients for chemical grenades. It is very important that he be indoctrinated into a very blind-to-the-harm-its-doing ideology, but we didn't actually believe that it needed to specifically be a cartoonishly evil idea like comic book nazism. It actually made more sense for it to be something more insidiously believable... the belief that the world is inherently peaceful as long as everyone just knows and keeps to their place. Reinforced by the Pax Institute, a pseudo-scientific think tank where dissenters are sometimes peacefully vanished from the premises... that seems like the sort of ideology that could lead a young man born into the privilege of the system to fight in its defense.
After the Pax Institute is brought down by Checkmate, the rest of Chris's life is largely about looking for other ways to defend the same ideology he was raised to believe. He follows Wade Eiling, even when doing so brings him into conflict with the Justice League. He latches onto the idea that his cellmate Mallah actually follows the same belief, even escapes with him... only to finally, tragically, be confronted with the reality of just how evil those ideas actually are. |
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