The Guardian
1906 - Jim Harper is Born in Metropolis Suicide Slums.
1915 - 9-year-old Jim Harper's mother takes ill. He has to fend for both of them on the streets of Suicide Slums
1918 - 12-year-old Jim Harper starts to engage in petty crime in Suicide Slums, alongside his friend Leo.
1920 - 14-year-old Jim Harper becomes the Junior Golden Gloves Boxing Champ. His promising boxing career means he can support his mother without resorting to crime.
1924 - 18-year-old Jim Harper begins boxing professionally. His mother's illness progresses, and she passes.
1928 - 22-year-old Jim Harper returns to Suicide Slum, reconnecting with his friend Leo before he is killed. Wanting to do something about his home city, he gives up boxing and becomes a patrol cop.
1931 - 25-year-old Jim Harper takes on the Guardian identity so he can help a group of homeless teens as they stand up to local organized crime. He dubs them the Newsboy Legion.
1933 - 27-year-old Jim Harper's identity as the Guardian is discovered by the Newsboy Legion, who agree to keep it secret.
1937 - 31-year-old Jim Harper and the Newsboy Legion stand up to Intergang.
1940 - 34-year-old Jim Harper & Patrick MacGuire volunteer for service when Tommy Thompkins & Johnny Gabrielli are drafted. As a police officer, he goes through Officer Candidate School and becomes a second lieutenant.
1943 - 37-year-old Jim Harper writes to the other Newsboys Anthony Rodriguez, Johnny Gabrielli & Patrick MacGuire, so they can all attend the ceremony posthumously awarding Tommy Thompkins' Congressional Medal of Honor. Jim moves Gaby & Scrapper into his unit under his command.
1945 - 39-year-old Jim Harper is part of the Battle of Nuremberg. Both Johnny Gabrielli & Patrick MacGuire are killed in the urban firefight securing the city, both earning posthumous Silver Stars.
1946 - 40-year-old Jim Harper returns to the states after the war. He meets with Anthony Rodriguez, and they drink to the memory of the Newsboy Legion, but discover that there are new groups of kids thriving in Suicide Slums using the name. He returns to the Metropolis Police Force, joining the detective division as a Lieutenant.
1951 - 45-year-old Jim Harper discovers that the New Newsboy Legion is taking on Intergang in the streets of Metropolis in Suicide Slum. He dons his costume as the Guardian again to assist them, helping them carve out territory.
1955 - 49-year-old Jim Harper takes on a case tracking weapon traffickers in the Metropolis docs, and is shot and killed in the line of Duty. His role as the Guardian is kept secret by the Newsboy Legion, who complete his case and see to it that the smugglers are brought to justice.
The first thing almost anyone notices with the Guardian is the shield. This was a more common accessory in the Golden Age, thanks to a character actually called the Shield by MLJ comics, which is now Archie Comics. The visual of the Guardian was originally meant to evoke the idea of a superhero police officer, and I think the badge/shield does that well enough. He's a really simple design, but it's not really his design that's given him an oddly prolific appearance history, so much as his association with Kirby. There's a lot of weirdness here for us to unwind, and even though we ultimately decided to go all the way back and embrace the original version of the character... I hope we can still convey just how much fun all that weirdness is.
Guardian's Comic HistoryThe Guardian is a Golden Age Jack Kirby original, going all the way back to his original work with DC in 1942 with his longtime partner Joe Simon, the same twosome who only a few years earlier were responsible for another certain shield-wielding superhero you might be familiar with. He showed up for the very first time in Star Spangled Comics #7, taking over the cover from the Star-Spangled Kid along with his team of sidekicks, the Newsboy Legion. There was actually a small boom in this sort of thing specifically in 1942, the Boy Commandos (also by Jack Kirby), Mr. Terrific's Fair Play Club... and kind of never again, which is weird. There was a thread in all these groups of juvenile delinquency, where gangs of tough kids are getting to work with a superhero to be good guys. In the case of the Guardian, Jim Harper is an actual police patrolman. He is about as close to just police officer-as-superhero as you can get, so much so that he really is a sort of carbon copy of another popular superhero created by the same guy.
The Guardian and the Newsboy Legion were the cover feature of Star Spangled Comics for more than fifty issues, but as with everything it eventually gave way to the decline of superhero comics. |
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Jack Kirby returned to DC in 1970, starting to work in Jimmy Olsen, Superman's Pal #133 in which he immediately brought back the Newsboy Legion as sidekicks for Jimmy. Jack quickly spins up a whole hidden world of secret societies and superscience, and it's not long at all until we're introduced to a clone of the original Guardian. It's all happening in kind of a whirlwind of Jack Kirby innovation, so the particulars of the story are sort of lost, but the main thing happening here is the introduction of the connection between the Guardian, the Newsboy Legion, and the whole idea of cloning and superscience. This will all be referenced later.
In the meantime, however, there is a surprisingly brief detour that happens in the late seventies. Mal Duncan, one of the first original characters to join the Teen Titans, had gone without a superhero identity for a long time, and in the last year or so of the series it seemed to really want to find one for him. In issue 44 the Titans are confronted by Doctor Light, and Mal decides he needs to go to the Titans trophy room to find some superhero gear to use in the fight. He chooses the Guardian costume, and even refers to himself as the Guardian... once. You see references to Mal Duncan as the Guardian all the time, but as best as I can tell, this one issue is the only time it ever happened. He gets his magic horn in the very next issue. |
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We can fast forward at this point to the post-crisis Superman series, specifically to Superman Annual #2 from 1988. The issue fully reintroduces the new Post-Crisis Guardian and the Newsboys, all tied to the elaborate world of the Cadmus Project and the DNAliens as created by Jack Kirby during his run of Jimmy Olsen. It's a really loving homage and manages to walk a very delicate tightrope of embracing all the fanciful Kirby magic while also giving us a version of the Guardian that seems poised to operate as part of Superman's ongoing supporting cast.
Cadmus would become a huge part of Superman's world, even being responsible for the clone Superboy, and the Guardian would appear quite a bit through this whole era of Superman's stories, even playing a role in the Death of Superman arc. This era kind of culminates in a very fun four-issue miniseries called the Guardians of Metropolis. Jim Harper would continue to appear here and there, but this miniseries puts a nice bow on their whole story. There have been a few more versions of the Guardian since of course. Grant Morrison invented a whole new take on the character in their Seven Soldiers of Victory comic with The Manhattan Guardian, Jake Jordan, and we saw a live-action take on the Guardian in the Supergirl TV show when their version of Jimmy Olsen took up the role. For now, though, let's focus on Jim. |
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Guardian's Comic HistoryThe Guardian is a deeply embedded part of the bedrock of DC's history. He's woven through the work of Jack Kirby and his relationship to Superman, and has been picked up so many times by modern creators with an obvious deep appreciation for what came before. I do love the whimsical superscience world Kirby created around these characters, so it does feel like a little bit of a loss for us to not dive into it. Still, it's not like we don't already have a huge helping of Kirby scifi whimsy in the New Gods, and this is a fun way to show a whole other side of his work.
By focusing on the early Guardian and Newsboy Legion stories, the timelines become infinitely simpler, but in a lot of ways that's kind of more fitting for the character. Modern readers (or at least, readers my age who were around in the early 90s) are probably more familiar with the more science fiction take on the Guardian, and that is often the take you see referenced today, with him being associated with some version of the secret cloning facilities of the Cadmus Project, but truthfully the character kind of makes more sense when you peel all that back and just let him be cop-as-superhero, all focused on protecting the kids of his neighborhood. There's an old school purity to it that frankly gives Jim a lot more character than he has otherwise. |