Speed Saunders
49 years ago - Cyril Saunders is born in Midway City.
34 years ago - 15-year-old Cyril Saunders becomes a local boxing champ, where he's given the nickname "Speed".
31 years ago - 18-year-old Speed Saunders attends college, studying archeology & anthropology.
27 years ago - 22-year-old Speed Saunders begins grad school, focusing his studies on the reign of Prince Khufu Kan-Tarr.
21 years ago - 28-year-old Speed Saunders earns his masters degree. He begins developing his theories of the connections between Prince Khufu Kan-Tarr and the WWII hero Hawkman.
17 years ago - 32-year-old Speed Saunders unlocks the crypt of Khufu Kan-Tarr & Chay-Ara Thal. He begins working to understand the Thanagarian text around the Hawks Nth Metal Armory
14 years ago - 35-year-old Speed Saunders niece Kendra Saunders moves to Egypt to be a part of his archeological dig.
11 years ago - 38-year-old Speed Saunders unlocks the Nth Metal Armory. Carter & Shiera Hall are awakened, return to their role as heroes and join the Justice League. Speed agrees to become the caretaker of the Hawks Armory. His niece Kendra Saunders begins training with their Thanagarian weapons.
4 years ago - 45-year-old Speed Saunders's brother and sister-in-law are mysteriously killed shortly after Carter & Shiera Hall retire. His niece Kendra Saunders steals an Nth Metal Harness & becomes Hawkgirl to bring in their killer.
Sometimes, while we're assembling our timeline, we'll grab a character who we might not have been using otherwise and rebuild them into something slightly different so that they can serve our story. The funny thing is that occasionally you'll actually see the comic writers do the same thing. Our take on Speed Saunders is a bit of a departure from his role in the comics, but it's actually not the biggest change the character has undergone.
Speed Saunders's Comic HistorySpeed Saunders is one of the very first featured characters in Detective Comics, debuting in the very first story of the very first issue in 1937. He was some sort of "ace investigator" with an unspecified job that let him operate independent of the police and yet still give them orders. He was the first character featured in the comic to actually show up on the cover, and was in every issue all the way until #58 in 1941. Weirdly, that's actually IT, he never turns up again, even in Detective Comics #500 from 1981 when they brought back all the classic Detective Comics sleuths for one story. For whatever reason, Speed wasn't among them.
It wasn't until 1999, when James Robinson created Kendra Saunders in the pages of his new JSA series that we were introduced to elderly adventurer Speed Saunders who was, we discover, the cousin of the original Hawkgirl, and the great uncle of Kendra. |
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Our Speed Saunders StoryThe new version of Speed didn't show up a LOT, but it was a complete revision of a classic character that was created just for a specific role in the story. We've done this ourselves a ton of times, and it's just so immediately obvious that this is exactly what they were doing; the needed a person in the story to give Kendra her connection to the legacy of Hawkgirl, so they just grabbed a classic character and made him what they needed. It's fun to see it.
So what do WE need Speed to be? It's a little broader, because we're actually having the Hawks survive from the Justice Society era in suspended animation in their armory, so we need him to be not just an adventurer, but a full-on archeologist. He's spending YEARS building up the dig where he is exploring and cataloging the Tomb of Khufu, and becomes the caretaker of their armory when the Hawks are awakened. He's also still the connection for Kendra, as she actually spent years of her childhood growing up at the site of his dig. Kendra actually gets to be much more tied in with the Hawks while she was growing up, and its entirely because of this new role we've constructed for Speed. |