Scrapper
1921 - Patrick MacGuire is born in Metropolis, Suicide Slums.
1931 - 10-year-old Patrick MacGuire and his fellow newsboys, when they are confronted for protection money by local organized crime, choose to stand up to them with all sorts of hijinks. They are assisted by the Guardian, a new vigilante, who dubs them the Newsboy Legion.
1933 - 12-year-old Patrick MacGuire and the Newsboy Legion discover Jim Harper's identity as the Guardian, and agree to keep it secret.
1937 - 16-year-old Patrick MacGuire and the Newsboy Legion stand up to Intergang with the help of Jim Harper.
1940 - 19-year-old Patrick MacGuire enlists in the army when Johnny Gabrielli and Tommy Thompkins to join them in Europe.
1942 - 21-year-old Patrick MacGuire unit enters the European Theater in North African Theater in Belfast.
1943 - 22-year-old Patrick MacGuire, & Johnny Gabrielli & Anthony Rodriguez are contacted by Jim Harper to attend the ceremony posthumously awarding Tommy Thompkins the Congressional Medal of Honor. They are moved to Jim's unit.
1945 - 26-year-old Patrick MacGuire & Johnny Gabrielli are killed in the urban firefighting of the Battle of Nuremberg, both earning posthumous Silver Stars.
Scrapper's StoryThe four original Newsboys all fell into some classic Kirby archetypes, but none of them are quite as classic as Scrapper, the tough kid of their kid gang. While the pages of the comic themselves really don't attempt to explain who these characters are so much as just let them do their thing, but Scrapper is almost immediately recognizable to anyone with any familiarity with Kirby at all. He's their Ben Grimm, their Rocky Davis, their Dan Turpin (who we all know was also Brooklyn from the Boy Commandos) It's a well trod archetype, mostly because we all imagine this is the closest we got to Kirby himself.
Like all the Newsboys, their perpetual timeless childhood makes it hard to adapt them to a flowing timeline. It doesn't really work for these characters to grow old. We did deliberately make him the youngest of the Legion, which means that of the three Newsboys to serve in World War II, he actually volunteers rather than be drafted, because he's too young to be drafted at the time. Like the others, he serves valiantly alongside his fellow Newsboys. He and Gabby are among those lost in the Battle of Nuremburg, but it feels to us that, if we can make their heroic sacrifices happen together, and to bring them together, then it feels like an ending worth of this scrappy bunch of kid heroes. |
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