Solomon Grundy

1853 - Cyrus Gold is born

1861 - 8-year-old Cyrus Gold’s father fights in the Civil War. he minds his father’s store.

1863 - 10-year-old Cyrus Gold’s father dies in the Civil War.

1868 - 15-year-old Cyrus Gold becomes the full owner of his father’s general store.

1884 - 31-year-old Cyrus Gold is robbed on the road to Gotham City, killed and dumped into Slaughter Swamp.

1934 - Cyrus Gold is resurrected by the magically mutated lazarus energies of Slaughter Swamp as Solomon Grundy, a plant-zombie. He battles Alan Scott and is driven back to the swamp.

1937 - Solomon Grundy is revived by a pair of escaped convicts. He battles Alan Scott again before turning into a wooden statue.

1943 - Solomon Grundy, still a statue, is treated with concentrated chlorophyll by a scientist. He is resurrected again and goes after Alan Scott. With the help of the entire Justice Society, Grundy is buried so deep into Slaughter Swamp that they believe he'll never escape.

13 years ago - Solomon Grundy is found in the ruins of Wonder City in the abandoned Lazarus Chamber. He kills the workers and hides in Gotham’s undercity.

11 years ago - Solomon Grundy is found in the sewers by Harvey Dent during his escape from the courthouse after being disfigured.

10 years ago - Solomon Grundy is found by Oswald Cobblepot and used to battle Batman. He escapes and attacks Hal Jordan and the Justice League, who sap him of the magic that animates him, returning him to Slaughter Swamp.

8 years ago - Solomon Grundy is resurrected by Johnny Sorrow to join his Injustice Society and attack the Justice Society. He befriends Jade, and is convinced to abandon the battle. He is recruited by Thaddeus Sivana into his Secret Society, fighting the Justice League and nearly destroy them before he retreats to the abandoned Arrow Cave outside of Star City.

6 years ago - Solomon Grundy befriends Jack Knight, but the magic animating him is affected by The Mist. Jack is helped in ending the spell by Richard Swift, driving Grundy back into Slaughter Swamp.

5 years ago - Solomon Grundy is resurrected by the Parliament of Trees. Swamp Thing tries to stop Batman from fighting him so he can become a true tree elemental, but is unsuccessful. Swamp Thing returns him to Slaughter Swamp.

3 years ago - Solomon Grundy is summoned again to life by Kent Nelson, to assist him alongside Arthur Curry, Kendra Saunders & Adam Blake in ending a cosmic demonic cataclysm. In the end he gives his life to save the universe.

1 year ago - Solomon Grundy is raised by Felix Faust to join the Legion of Doom.

Solomon Grundy is one of those characters that's been appearing in DC comics so long he's basically part of the company's DNA. He has so many appearances in so many books that are so different from each other that you wind up with a character that seems to change constantly, but in this case that actually makes a ton of sense. We've actually grabbed a few weird and interesting stories from all over the history of this character to build our own version, and we really like the result.

Solomon Grundy's Comic History

Solomon Grundy first appeared in 1944, in All-American Comics #61, the series that carried the early adventures of the original Green Lantern, Alan Scott. Based on a nursery rhyme, the character was an undead abomination that rose up out of a swamp and fell in with some criminals that used him to rob banks. He came up against Alan Scott and quickly proved to be immune to his power ring. Alan's ring, unlike the later more science-fictiony Green Lanterns of the Silver Age, was unable to affect wood. By the end of that issue, as they discover that Grundy is the animated corpse of long-murdered Cyrus Gold, they use this quote; "Cyrus Gold's skeleton lay in a bog for 50 years and an incredible biological miracle took place! On his bones a pseudo-life was built! Bits of rotten wood and leaves built themselves into the monster of Solomon Grundy!"

Beyond that explanation just being metal as hell, there's also a lot there to unpack. I'm sure most readers will probably recognize a lot of the ideas that would later be used to revolutionized Swamp Thing, so It's really cool that they can date all the way back to the early days of DC.

Like most characters from this era of DC, he would go on to be considered part of "Earth-2" when the multiverse became a thing. He would often be THE character that would represent Earth-2 in stories that crossed over between the universes, because he was so well-recognized... even appearing in episodes of the animated Superfriends. In fact, if I'm not mistaken, he was even in a few live-action adaptations of the animated series.

In the post-crisis DC, Grundy would appear regularly, always showing up as a major, game-changing threat... someone who could consistently pose a dangerous challenge for any character or group of characters. His magical background made him a regular occurance in various Vertigo series, He was a recurring character in the animated Justice League series, He showed up in the Batman: Arkham video games... Basically he's a consistently occurring character in all the best versions of the DC universe.

Over time, as he showed up again and again in so many different stories serving so many different purposes, it became an understood part of his character that he was regularly being resurrected, and each time his form and personality would be a little different.

Our Solomon Grundy Story

We had a lot of fun with this one, picking through some of our favorite appearances both in comics and in wider media to build a timeline for Grundy. The early part of his life, before his death, was actually pretty straightforward. I don't know if we actually know what Cyrus's Gold's life was like, but making him a shopkeeper in Post-War American seemed to fit.

We also took a lot of liberties with the in-world explanation of the magic that revives him. We've invented the idea that Gotham City actually exists as a result of an experiment created by Ra's Al Ghul in the 1800's. This establishes that there is an old Lazarus Pit deep below the city, and so we can invent the idea that Slaughter Swamp is somehow connected to the pit, mutated in some strange way that it leads to the creation of Grundy. It also gives us a cool bridge from the wartime conflict with Alan Scott to the modern era, when he's found in the burnt-out undercity of Gotham.

Grundy had made some interesting appearances in several series that started to make him out to be a more sympathetic character, and we've tapped into that, having him befriended by Jade & Jack Knight.

We 're also adapting a particular story from the Justice League Unlimited series that is actually a little bit of a stretch, but we just enjoy it so much we decided to include it. The episode in question "The Terror Beyond", basically builds Grundy's backstory and features a team-up of characters that loosely mimicking Marvel's Defenders, one of the most eclectic and powerful teams. We basically decided to do the same thing, with Doctor Fate, Aquaman, Captain Comet, Hawkgirl and Grundy standing in for Doctor Strange, Namor, Silver Surfer, Valkyrie , and the Hulk. It's not really a story we have to include, but we're comic nerds, so we love stuff like this.

Even after the parts of Grundy's story where he becomes more sympathetic, the nature of his constantly resurrecting story means that we can actually bring him back for the Legion of Doom, which really wouldn't be the same without him.

Grundy is a great comic book character. On the surface he's just another big, slow-moving bruiser, but over the years he's become such an incredibly versatile tool. He can be violent and scary, he can be slow and sympathetic, he can be big and dumb, he can be clever and scheming, and practically anything in between.

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