The Terror & Triumph of Trigon

New Teen Titans by Marv Wolfman and George Perez, one of my favorite and most well-regarded comic book runs of all-time, featured a varied and wonderful cast of heroes as well as villains, without any of whom the end product would not be so special (maybe Azrael), but at the end of the day, it’s the story of Raven. She’s the first presence we sense in the first story (not New Teen Titans #1, but the preview in DC Comics Presents #26), she brings the team together, and the scope of her story and the threat she’s on the run from immediately established that this iteration of Teen Titans were more than just the Justice League’s sidekicks, they were the gateway to worlds and stories not yet explored.

In that very first issue of NTT, the Titans ostensibly come together to rescue Starfire from the alien Gordanians, but Raven’s foreboding concern over a larger evil sets the stage that this is an epic in the making; a crafted piece of serial storytelling, not just the relatively standalone adventures of past Titans series and really of the JLA as well up to that point (it was closer to Chris Claremont’s Uncanny X-Men than anything, hence the years-long battle the two titles would wage through the first half of the 80’s for the top spot in the hearts and wallets of discerning readers clearly eager for this type of fare).

Over the next three issues, the Titans would face Deathstroke the Terminator for the first time and have their initial skirmish with Dr. Light’s Fearsome Five, but every step brought them closer to confronting Raven’s greatest fear: her father Trigon.

Short form on Trigon: he’s an incredibly powerful demon from another dimension formed from an entire race’s cast-off evil who killed his mother and everybody around him at birth, destroyed a planet as a toddler and has conquered millions of worlds by adulthood. He comes to Earth at one point as the result of a Satanic ritual, disguises himself, seduces a human woman who gives birth to Raven, then heads back home, occasionally murdering from afar anybody who threatens his daughter. He’s an imposing, impressive, downright scary character created from the combination of Wolfman using his horror writing background and pushing religious aspects generally shied away from in comics at the time, and an unsurprisingly dynamic design from Perez.

Raven is unable to get the Justice League to fight Trigon (Zatanna senses bad mojo about her), so she recruits the Titans, and in issue #5, they fight his henchman, Goronn, who they only barely defeat (not sure if Wolfman intentionally echoed Silver Surfer/Galactus there, but it worked for me), before getting annihilated by Trigon. Raven sacrifices herself and agrees to return home with her father if he leaves Earth alone. The next issue, the Titans pursue their teammate, get beaten by Trigon again, but are able to rescue Raven when her mother, Arella, basically distracts Trigon long enough for them to run back to Earth and close the dimensional portal behind them.

So what’s important to note is that the good guys do not win; they don’t even come close. They’re able to save Earth only because one of them basically surrenders, and then claim a small “victory” not by defeating the villain, but by turning tail and essentially lock the door behind them, keeping the killer outside the house for a bit.

What’s even more important is the restraint Wolfman and Perez then proceed to exercise with Trigon. The Titans escape him in New Teen Titans volume one #6, published in April 1981; he does not appear again until the kickoff of their second volume, over three years later in August 1984.

Between the two Trigon stories, the Titans battle the gods of Olympus, find the Doom Patrol, go to outer space, take a new member into their midst, lose two of their founding members—one of whom comes back with a new identity—get betrayed by that new member who then dies and see one of their own get married. They fight Deathstroke three times, Brother Blood twice, the Fearsome Five and Brotherhood of Evil a couple times apiece and take down the H.I.V.E., who had been orchestrating against them for over two years (our time).

All of this goes down without Wolfman and Perez giving into temptation and bringing back the most powerful Titans adversary. Instead, they namedrop him every so often and in both narrative and visually (seriously, pay attention to the art) show that something is up with Raven.

They had a plan and they did not deviate.

When it did come time from Trigon’s second act, he didn’t need to be revitalized or amped up, because in his original form, he had never been beaten. Indeed, with his first appearance showing off only a fraction of Trigon’s full power, it merely whet the appetite for what he could do unleashed—namely show up on Earth, handily run through the Justice League and transform the planet into a burnt out husk in moments (the most lasting image of the Terror of Trigon story for me is likely Superman turned to stone, an expression of eternally agony etched across his face, as we pan across the destruction).

The Titans are humanity’s last hope, not because they’re the most powerful group out there, but because of their ties to Raven, Trigon’s one weakness, the daughter he continues to believe will be his heir. It’s a touching coda in a way to Wolfman and Perez’s larger story and one of the big points they’ve been trying to make: it’s not about how much power you have, it’s about being there for your friends and family; ultimately, because the Titans focused on looking out for each other first and foremost, they’re the ones in a position to save the world when those who usually would are out of commission.

But they still can’t.

Trigon is way too powerful for the Titans and Raven ends up being corrupted by him. Rather than kill his daughter’s friends, Trigon infects them with his evil as well, creating spooky four-eyed demonic versions of Nightwing, Wonder Girl, Starfire, Cyborg, Changeling and Kid Flash who run their good sides through nightmare scenarios so they can take control. And then, in sharp contrast to the whole “friends and family” trip I was on before, the Trigon Titans turn on Raven and kill her…which allows her to defeat Trigon, though no plan of her own or of her friends’.

The souls of Azarath, the good side of all the evil that created Trigon, have been manipulating the whole thing all along, making sure the Titans got possessed and killed Raven so she could be transformed into a force of purity powerful enough to destroy her father. She does so and then disappears in a blinding flash of light, smiling for the first time and not to be seen again for 17 issues or so.

And Trigon is done.

There’s stuff to talk about there, like how the Titans lost more than they gained in this battle, how no heroic action could defeat the villain and so forth, but the important note for this particular essay is that Trigon perishes due to Raven’s sacrifice and that’s the last we see of him. The final issue of Wolfman and Perez’s initial collaboration, which yielded over 50 issues of story, concludes with the menace they started with being defeated; a perfect circle.

Now of course with comics being serial fiction, the story didn’t end completely, but for the most part, creators have been restrained and respectful when it comes to Trigon. Wolfman bent a few times as he remained on the title over a decade longer, with the seeds of the Trigon story coming back around in the form of the corrupted souls of Azarath, the return of Raven’s dark side and more, but the big red guy stayed buried. Geoff Johns reanimated Trigon’s skeleton to show that the new Brother Blood meant business when he took over the franchise, but he left the real deal deceased. In the first issue of Phantom Stranger from a couple weeks back (which kind of prompted me to write this), Trigon made his first New 52 appearance, but that’s a whole other discussion.

The point is that at the end of the day, Trigon appeared in two stories proper, never lost cleanly, and has never been brought back. If he were to come back, it’s been established that it takes a miracle that goes beyond the combined might of the DC heroes to defeat him, so that right there sets the stage for a whopper of a story (that probably shouldn’t be told).

I believe Wolfman and Perez’s best intentions for The Terminator (he wasn’t really Deathstroke aside from as a fleeting nickname until he got his own book over a decade later) were similar to Trigon in that he had a super arc with a definitive beginning, middle and end. As I said, he was introduced in the second issue wherein we also met his doomed son Ravager who tried and failed to destroy the Titans, dying in the process and honor binding his old man to take on the contract. Slade and the Titans clashed a few times over the next four years, like Trigon with him never really going down in full defeat, but unlike Trigon without him dominating so thoroughly that he couldn’t show up again a couple issues later.

The big showstopper for Terminator is of course The Judas Contract, where he plays the Terra card, delivers the Titans to the H.I.V.E., and then is pretty much ready to coldly walk away from the whole thing, his duty done, until it blows up in his face. His subsequent trial is the cool down and as I’ve said before, “Shades of Gray!” from Tales of the Teen Titans #55, where Changeling is prepared to kill Terminator and Slade says go ahead, willing to pay for his crimes, but they instead end up talking things out and understanding each other, is one of my favorite stories ever. That should have been the end for The Terminator; his story was done, and indeed apart from a Crisis cameo he stayed gone (as far as I know) for around four years before Wolfman brought him back just before Titans Hunt and to set up his solo book as a protagonist.

Part of me likes the idea of Slade Wilson playing his part and then exiting with dignity, but the larger part understands why it makes more sense for Deathstroke to be a larger part of the DC Universe, because he’s a great character who as opposed to Trigon can realistically appear without jeopardizing all of reality. Also, whereas The Terminator was originally the sole property of the Titans book just like Trigon, he’s been able to branch out since, which has led at times perhaps to overexposure, but also some really great stories extending far past Judas Contract.

Ultimately, the comic book medium—or at least the mainstream super hero part of it—needs good recurring villains who can jump around a shared universe, as it’s that larger ongoing narrative that demands servicing. But stories like what Wolfman and Perez did with Trigon demonstrate that finite threads can exist and thrive beyond creator owned and genre comics, and that when done right they can elevate the craft and create villains and stories that further the heroes that survive them better by being closed and gone.

The Definitives: Hawkeye

Tom Brevoort once told me that Hawkeye was “the Wolverine of his day” (he was actually talking more about The Thing and using Hawkeye as a supplementary, but as said supplementary example better serves this post, that’s what I’ll be going with). Basically what he meant is that when the Avengers weren’t far from their founding and Marvel hadn’t gone too long into the Silver Age, Hawkeye was the rebellious voice questioning Captain America’s more conservative values in the same way Wolverine would later chafe against Cyclops and so on as this is a dynamic you’ll find in just about every super hero team past the Justice League from the 60’s.

Like Wolverine, Hawkeye was the loose cannon who did what he wanted despite the rules and did so with a brash tone, loud mouth and often disregard for the safety of himself and the property around him (he’s always been pretty good about shielding teammates and civilians though). Also like Wolverine, Hawkeye became pretty popular as a result of this; not three or four ongoing solo series at once popular (he’s had his books here and there, but I’d say general consensus is the character works better with others to play off of in a team setting), but he did ok.

Unlike Wolverine and his more modern ilk, Hawkeye was the bad boy of a more traditional time, so he talked a big game, but he still adhered to a relatively traditional moral code that excluded killing and extreme violence; in the recent past, some writers have had him walk the line of violating that, and an argument could be made that his experiences have led him that way, but I believe deep down Clint Barton still finds murder to be anathema, regardless of the reason why.

I think the combination of Hawkeye’s similarities to the loose cannon characters he’s something of the godfather to with the contrast against those that came later is why I like him so much. I’ve always been partial to the wisecracking smartass super hero, but I also like the swashbuckling romantic vibe of years gone by; Clint Barton combines the best of both worlds on that score. He will always speak his mind, he falls in love too easily and he’s far from fully matured emotionally, but he’ll also do the right thing when the chips are down, and even though he’ll drive Captain America nuts, he’ll also be the first to come to his defense when anybody else does it.

Gotta love the guy.

I should offer the disclaimer that I was not an avid Solo Avengers or West Coast Avengers reader growing up and have never really caught up on either, so I’ve got a pretty sizable Hawkeye blind spot (though I have read Hawkeye: Blind Spot), but here are my favorite stories featuring the Avenging Archer that I’d recommend to anybody looking to learn more about that dude with the bow and arrow who Jeremy Renner is playing.

HONORABLE MENTION: AVENGERS #223
A classic to be sure, as Hawkeye heads back to his old carnival stomping grounds and clashes with Taskmaster, who’s holding the show hostage, leading to the seminal shrunken Ant-Man on an arrow routine. It’s a fun story, and I’m a fan, but I think it’s actually a better Ant-Man and even Taskmaster yarn, not quite capturing the essential Hawkeye.

AVENGERS: EARTH’S MIGHTIEST HEROES
I love this series on the whole, and every character gets their time in the sun, but really Hawkeye’s story is my favorite part. Joe Casey really nails how the bulk of the early Avengers were good guys (and one girl), but thrown together by circumstance as a team and in many cases only acting as heroes because an accident led them to their situation (Iron Man and his shrapnel, Thor and his exile, Hulk and his…being The Hulk); even Captain America became an Avenger mostly because they found him and he needed guidance in a strange world. Hawkeye’s the one guy who actively seeks to become an Avenger, because even though he started as a villain, it’s never what he wanted. Casey’s story captures the driven desire of Clint Barton to do the right thing even when conventional wisdom stacks the odds against him, plus there’s an excellent relationship between him and Jarvis, and Scott Kolins draws one of my favorite Hawkeyes.

AVENGERS #189
Hawkeye gets tossed off the Avengers by Henry Peter Gyrich in order to fill a government quota (also, Gyrich doesn’t really like Hawkeye since the first time they met Clint tied him up, thinking he was an intruder in Avengers Mansion), but rather than mope for too long, he decides to show them it’s their loss. He swoops into Cross Technological Enterprises and auditions for their Head of Security gig by foiling their current system. Clint kicks back and looks forward to a relatively easy new occupation, only for Shi’ar super villain Deathbird to show up looking for trouble. Hawkeye is totally outclassed against a cosmic-level threat like Deathbird, but that’s when he’s at his best, using his wits to get through the situation, smiling as he does it and then stealing a kiss from the alien cutie when he’s done. This issue is basically a capsule bio for everything cool about Hawkeye (plus great John Byrne art).

HAWKEYE (1983)
The first true solo Hawkeye adventure, both written and drawn by the late, great Mark Gruenwald, who it turns out was a heck of an artist! Uncovering corruption at CTE, Clint investigates alongside former S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Mockingbird and runs afoul of the dude who would become his archenemy, Crossfire. It’s a fun caper that packs tons of action into only four issues and allows Gruenwald to widen Hawkeye’s range a bit, playing him as devil-may-care adventurer and hothead, but also delving into his deeper emotions and giving him a deep romantic subplot. Speaking of which, the chemistry between Hawkeye and Mockingbird is dynamite right from the start; you’re rooting for them from the get-go, and the end result doesn’t disappoint.

AVENGERS & JLA/AVENGERS BY KURT BUSIEK & GEORGE PEREZ
When Kurt Busiek and George Perez brought Avengers back from Heroes Reborn, establishing Hawkeye as a key member of the team was clearly a top priority. When everybody gets mind wiped and sent to Morgan le Fay’s crazy Camelot world, Clint is the first guy Captain America “wakes up” because he recognizes that Hawkeye is the heart of the Avengers. During the roster-building issue, you get the great thread of Hawkeye taking Firestar and Justice under his wing, and then doing the double take when Cap messes with him by offering them his spot on the team. And from there, the Avenging Archer departs in pretty rapid fashion, shuttled over to Thunderbolts by Busiek, where he did more great stuff with him and stayed true to another core element of the character: he goes where he is needed, not necessarily where he wants to be. Busiek and Perez reunited years later on JLA/Avengers and made this fan smile by having Hawkeye and Flash (not Wally West, but still) be the guys to pull the classic against all odds save when all seems lost.

HAWKEYE & MOCKINGBIRD
I don’t feel it’s favoritism at all to put my buddy Jim McCann’s series on here, because his passion for the character of Hawkeye (and of Mockingbird) in my mind created a fun arc that will hold up nicely in an evergreen sense, and the best thing is it was born out of love. You won’t meet a bigger Hawkeye fan than Jim, and his desire to do right by the character, not only telling the kinds of stories he loved but that can spread the appeal to a new generation, went a long way in my book. It’s a nice bookend to Mark Gruenwald’s series, with lots of callbacks, plus several love letters to the Marvel Universe along the way. It also doesn’t hurt that artist David Lopez is a gem and that Mockingbird’s brother’s name is Ben Morse; a great easy-to-acquire gateway to Hawkeye.

CAPTAIN AMERICA & THE AVENGERS
Hawkeye’s video game debut! Super fun, tons of characters, rad graphics, and the suspension of disbelief that Hawkeye’s bow when held horizontal is an equally powerful protector to Captain America’s shield, Iron Man’s armor and the Vision’s intangibility. Also: sky sleds!

First Impressions (and more): Wonder Woman

My first memory of Wonder Woman (as a comic book fan—blah blah blah usual disclaimer about how I saw her on Super Friends and lunchboxes as a kid) is her wearing a baseball cap and serving tacos at a fast food joint. I’m referring to the Brian Bolland cover pictured above to Wonder Woman #73, an issue set in the midst of William Messner-Loebs’ mid-90’s run with the character.

I didn’t read Wonder Woman growing up so my exposure came solely from DC house ads and seeing the covers, which more often than not featured her doing stuff I’d more expect out of Batman like fighting the mob or posing for sight gags like the aforementioned waitressing gig or having a delicious pasta dinner with Flash.

As a reader (rather than a cover viewer), I made Wonder Woman’s acquaintance when she became leader of the Justice League following the death of Superman. Now this was a ways before I understood what “pre-Crisis” and “post-Crisis” meant, so the concept that Wonder Woman wasn’t part of the Justice League already and further that her joining was a big deal first time thing baffled me a bit, but I rolled with it. More puzzling to me, I suppose, was how she come off almost as a bit of a wallflower with super strength. Fun Bolland covers aside, my abstract concept of Wonder Woman was still that she was a bad ass—she was an Amazon warrior after all—yet to my mind she was written in Justice League America as a figure whose name and reputation intimidated those around her, but she would then win them over with how down to Earth she was, which was a perfectly valid characterization, but seemed still off to me. I wanted to see her punching Guy Gardner in the face like Batman did, showing him there were women who could stand up to him physically as well as verbally, but instead she tended to reason with him.

Not long after this, Wonder Woman had her Death of Superman/Knightfall/Emerald Twilight prerequisite mid-90’s DC shakeup storyline wherein she was replaced in her role by a redhead named Artemis and took to just calling herself Diana and sporting a leather jacket and biker shorts as her look. I read the stories years later, and as is generally the case with Messner-Loebs (along with a young Mike Deodato) it was solid stuff, but again, at the time it was strange to me how there seemed to be this trending pattern toward making Wonder Woman/Diana “just one of the gang,” and humanizing her whether through comedy, fast food jobs, complacency on a team or losing her status; even at that age, I held the opinion—even if I couldn’t articulate it yet—that Marvel characters fit the “feet of clay” mold better while DC heroes were cool when they were aspirational, so humanizing Wonder Woman didn’t really work for me personally.

Apparently, somebody at DC in the late 90’s thought teenage me was right on, as the next era of Wonder Woman—which coincided with my getting out of comics temporarily, so I didn’t witness it first hand—brought her back in the direction of being a formidable and imposing figure who commanded respect through words as well as actions, both in her solo title under the reins of John Byrne and particularly as Grant Morrison penned her in JLA. Morrison’s Diana was certainly more along the lines of what I always expected, with her being an advocate for peace, but also somebody who understood it may take a smidgen of aggression to get there, at least in the short term. I dug how Wonder Woman fit into the team dynamic, with Superman and Martian Manhunter as her buddies, holding even Batman’s respect, flirting with Aquaman and then reducing Flash and Green Lantern to nervous man-children with her beauty/brassiness combo (Mark Waid was pretty great at writing that last one as well).

I finally jumped into the Wonder Woman well as far as her solo title when my good friend (not then, but now) Phil Jimenez was serving as both writer and artist. I’m a little nervous about using hyperbole here, particularly since I’m talking about a pal, but honestly, Phil’s Diana was the one I’d been waiting for.

Initially I picked Phil’s Wonder Woman up for the art—I’d been a fan since he did Robin fill-ins for Tom Grummett when I was a kid—but I stayed for an endearing take on a character I’d always been flummoxed by in regard to where her following came from. Ok, first off, the art was gorgeous, but I’ve talked about that before. What worked for me was that Phil was able to make Diana the fierce warrior I’d read about in JLA but also give her the softer side I’d always understood she was meant to have without having her roll over when challenged by her friends and teammates or depowering her. The key as I saw it and see was that where past creators had tried to make Wonder Woman more relatable in some way by “humanizing” her and attempted to bring her closer to somebody we felt like we knew, Phil made her empathetic by playing up that while the world may see her as a goddess, this can often make her feel more apart than embraced.

(This is about when I’ll get an e-mail from Phil explaining who this isn’t what he was going for but he can totally see where I’m coming from because he’s the nicest, most charitable person in comics)

She appreciated and loved the people who stood in awe of her, but felt a sad distance from the friends who had grown old while she remained young, the supposed peers who got weak-kneed around her, and the family she had reluctantly put at a distance so she could do her work. Phil’s Wonder Woman was powerful, regal and graceful, but she also had a loneliness in her eyes that made me feel like I knew her more than wearing a baseball hat ever would. This was a woman who could stare Lex Luthor in the eyes and not be intimidated, but didn’t know how to ask a normal man out on a date and was devastated when he said no (both scenes and several other terribly insightful ones occur in Wonder Woman #170, an issue narrated by Lois Lane who follows Diana around for a day and jots down observations, many of which I’ve cribbed for this article; I consider this essential reading for anybody who wants to tackle the character).

I would later read George Perez’s late 80’s reimagining of Wonder Woman—which came directly before the Messner-Loebs run—and see where Phil got a lot of his inspiration from. Perez brings Diana to Man’s World for the first time and grounds his story in her journey of discovery and her relationships with ordinary people. She is very much the foreign exchange student who is fascinated by everything around her and makes mistakes because she doesn’t understand, but she’s also still definitely Wonder Woman, able to stand up inspirationally to any challenge through strength and wits; just because she may be naïve doesn’t mean she’s not plenty clever. It was certainly a far cry from the Wonder Woman I remembered playing second fiddle to Captain Atom in my Justice League comics.

When Allan Heinberg launched a new Wonder Woman series back in 2006, I did a retrospective piece on the character speaking with him, Phil, Greg Rucka and others who had worked on her. It was an article about what was upcoming and what made Diana tick, but inevitably a lot of the familiar questions about her relative lack of commercial success against Superman and Batman came up. I explored the gender issue—character and fanbase—as well as the lack of a “Dark Knight Returns” (i.e. classic pivotal story), but also examined the other side of the coin: when Wonder Woman was a success. Two points came up specifically: Wonder Woman was a hugely popular character in the Golden Age, specifically during World War II, and that the Lynda Carter TV series remains a fondly remembered and cherished piece of Americana. While the character has been around over 70 years and had some great stories (and not so great stories) along the way, my conclusion was that her prominent place in the public consciousness came from images ingrained by those earliest tales and her multimedia portrayals in animation and live action TV shows.

I’m no expert on Wonder Woman, I’m just a guy who can kill an evening rambling 1500 words about her while waiting for the new episode of Happy Endings. But the take away I got from that article and really all my experiences reading the character is this: On Wonder Woman either go big or go home (coincidentally enough, a patented Phil Jimenez expression). She succeeded in the 40’s because perhaps even more so than Captain America she was over-the-top American propaganda, but also plain fun. She succeeded on TV because Lynda Carter embraced the role quirks and all. I love the work Perez, Jimenez, Morrison and others did because they enjoyed the fact that they were writing an Amazon princess who had a magic lasso and fought Greek gods; they didn’t feel like they needed to ground her in mundane trappings so readers wouldn’t be intimidated.

I’ve said it before, but it applies double to Wonder Woman: You don’t want to relate to every comic book character, sometimes you just want to read about them having crazy adventures. I’d much rather watch Wonder Woman hanging out with centaurs and fighting Joker with snake hair than serving fast food in a leather jacket.

My Five Favorite Wonder Woman Artists

Back during my Wizard days, somewhere in the neighborhood of 2006, I got assigned—or pitched, I can’t remember—a piece on Wonder Woman, a character I didn’t know all that much about aside from what everybody knows. The article was examining why a property as universally known as Wonder Woman had trouble sustaining the commercial success of contemporaries like Superman and Batman or even the burgeoning Green Lantern. I recall not being entirely happy with the finished product mainly because I found it to be a huge topic and couldn’t condense it into the space allotted, but I really enjoyed working on it because I got to chat with intelligent folks like Phil Jimenez, Greg Rucka and Allan Heinberg to get insight into the subject and learned a lot.

(NOTE: You can have a good conversation with Phil Jimenez about pretty much anything, but ask him about Wonder Woman and prepare to have your mind blown—also don’t plan to get anything else done that day)

The ultimate conclusion I reached on the question posed was that in many ways Wonder Woman had peaked early. More than any other character created in the 1940’s—including Captain America—she was very much of the era in terms of being designed with a specific purpose and thriving in a particular environment. There have been many great Wonder Woman stories told in print as well as through other mediums; in particular the classic Lynda Carter television series, but it was interesting to find how fondly remembered her Golden Age stories were by true fans of the character. With most properties, you find the 30’s and 40’s were a formative period but not so technically proficient; the original Wonder Woman stories have an undeniable energy to them and it also happened to be when the character achieved her greatest commercial success.

Basically, Wonder Woman got a reputation for being an equal point of DC’s “big three” triangle out of the gate and has been struggling to justify it ever since without the timelessness Superman and Batman seem to enjoy.

However, as I said, there are a lot of good Wonder Woman stories out there. In researching that article, I got to read quite a few. What I came to appreciate even more than the writing though was how challenging it must be for an artist to approach this icon and how impressive it is when they succeed. Created to be the female role model girls were lacking, Wonder Woman is the embodiment of feminism, but she’s also a beautiful woman in a form the idealizes—and often exaggerates—the female form. For an artist to walk the line between archetype and sex appeal with this character is an achievement that demands recognition.

Honorable Mention

HARRY G. PETER
The man who started it all deserves to be credited for a great design.

ADAM HUGHES
The most prolific Wonder Woman cover artist I can think of, and more or less defines the character for many, but I want to see interiors.

J.G. JONES
He can depict her as a beauty, as a fighter, and as a horror—see Final Crisis; one of the more versatile Wonder Woman artists for sure and he just misses the cut.

5. FRANK MILLER
Nobody draws Wonder Woman like Frank Miller. His bold choices when it comes to the costume or how he composes her face are undeniable. His Wonder Woman is not a lady you mess with. She’s got a primal energy that speaks to her status as a warrior princess. He’s number five only because I see too much of too many of his Sin City vixens in his take; if he had an extended run to make a mark on the character, he’d most likely be higher.

4. MIKE SEKOWSKY
As the designer of the bold “Mod Wonder Woman” redesign of the 1960’s, there’s no denying Mike Sekowsky has a major spot in the character’s visual history. Though I think it was definitely a good short term look rather than long term given the strength of the typical design, I look back at the “New Wonder Woman” as an era that featured very pretty art. Sekowsky had a knack for making something as simple as a white or black jumpsuit come alive through a strong use of basic shapes, dynamic inking and bold colors in the background to accentuate the figure. He drew great action sequences as well, really hurling Diana into the thick of it. Even before he took on Wonder Woman solo, Sekowsky spent years defining her look in Justice League of America and I would presume influenced many who came after.

3. DOUG MAHNKE
For a guy who made a lot of at least his early reputation on doing exaggerated extremes when it came to super heroes with The Mask, Major Bummer, etc., Doug Mahnke for my money draws a great Wonder Woman because he makes her look down to earth. When Mahnke was on JLA, I loved his mammoth Martian Manhunter and his ever-shifting Plastic Man, but I always thought the way he managed to make Diana look pretty in a relatable way as well as dangerous but not bloodthirsty was pretty neat. I dug the little things, like how he drew her with straight hair that matted down—as hair would when it’s fairly consistently drenched in sweat—as opposed to the wildly curly or silky smooth manes other artists give her. He gave her a nose that made her seem both unique and exotic; her eyes were a bit haunted. He was also able to balance her figure between sexy and sturdy; he used smooth, heavy lines to convey that this was a woman who had honed her body as a weapon, but possessed a more grounded strength as opposed to a bodybuilder’s physique. To describe Doug Mahnke’s Wonder Woman in a word, I’d go with “enchanting”—she’s a lady you admire from afar, but think twice before getting too close to.

2. PHIL JIMENEZ
I’ve encountered no bigger Wonder Woman fan than Phil Jimenez, and he brings the enthusiasm as well as the work ethic that comes with that distinction whenever he works on the character. He doesn’t draw every wisp of hair or every star on her costume because it’s his job, he does it because he loves it and he’s afraid to do her a disservice. During his run on Wonder Woman—notably as writer as well as artist—his Diana always seemed to tower over the rest of the cast—as she should—but as every bit the Amazon princess she is, not an awkward giant. He was—and is—excellent at framing the scene, her posture and her outline so as to emphasize her strength without detracting from her beauty. Phil doesn’t skimp when it comes to using as many lines as it takes to tell the story of the characters he’s drawing, but with Diana he also knew when to stop and let what he had on the page finish the job; he does a tremendous job of getting her face to “act,” whether it’s anguish over the loss of her mother, joy at the prospect of a new love, or rage en route to delivering an ass kicking. In his Wonder Woman stories—which are among my favorites—Phil seemed to delight in bringing in huge ensembles, be it dozens of Amazons or every female hero and villain in the DC Universe, but he never let the guests overwhelm his star; there was never a question that Diana was front and center and you believed she belonged alongside Superman and Batman. It was also Phil’s birthday yesterday—he only gets better with age!

1. GEORGE PEREZ
When I spoke at the beginning about the Wonder Woman stories I read while researching her that really made the character shine for me, I was talking about a few, but mainly George Perez’s run on her title. Rebooting her post-Crisis, Perez didn’t just make some costume tweaks or a change to the origin, he reinvented the entire world of Wonder Woman from the ground up. If you’ve followed George Perez’s work—and I have—you know among his many incredible qualities as an artist, perhaps nothing stands out so much as his unparalleled attention to detail. He will draw every piece of rubble in a fight scene; he will squeeze a hundred characters into a panel where most would put two. He brought this all-or-nothing approach to Wonder Woman as both writer and artist, mining every aspect of the character for story—warrior, teacher, ambassador, foreigner, daughter, hero—and sparing nothing when attacking her visually. His Diana was one who possessed statuesque and intimidating beauty, but a naive innocence in her eyes that made you trust her and want to protect the most powerful woman in the world. In battle, he made her formidable, with a grimace that you believed would scare a war god, but at peace he bestowed upon her a smile that said everything would be ok. My descriptions are lapsing into pretty sappy poetry here, but frankly that’s what Perez’s brilliance inspires in me as a fan. He also never settled to depict Wonder Woman in merely her iconic costume or to make a change and stick with it; he drew the heck out of the classic look and owned it, but he’d also create variation both subtle and bold as the occasion required, be it armor for war or a stately look for diplomacy. George Perez imbued every single character that appeared in his vast Wonder Woman cast with a singular energy and vitality, creating a diverse gallery of faces rather than an army of clones, but none shone brighter than Diana herself; nobody touches the master on this one.

The Definitives: Dick Grayson

A couple months back, I wrote about the evolution of the Robin character, in the course of doing so hitting largely on the progression of Dick Grayson, the original Boy Wonder as a character.

Whether as Robin, Nightwing or currently Batman, Grayson has always been one of my favorite comic book heroes. This is a bit a departure for me as I’m generally more beholden to the snarky rebel types as my touchstones, but there’s also that well-concealed nice guy side of me who really roots for the true blue Heroes with a capital “H” of comics. With Dick Grayson, he’s a guy who represents both sides of my fandom there, as he’s certainly among the more wholesome good guys even in the virtuous DC Universe—particularly when you consider his mentor—but also has that devil-may-care swashbuckler attitude born of the carnival.

Perhaps the most impressive thing about Dick Grayson is that in addition to his longevity, he’s probably been successful in more diverse identities than any other major character in comics as noted above. Sure lots of heroes and villains undergo the occasional name or costume change, but Dick has full-on reinvented everything about himself twice now and not really missed a beat as far as remaining at the forefront of the DCU as one of its most popular leading men.

Given that Dick Grayson has a history stretching back to 1940, I certainly make no claim to have read anywhere near even a majority representation of his appearances—I haven’t really read any Batman comics pre-dating the 80’s, including the crazy Silver Age stuff and really good 70’s stuff—but even so, I’ve got quite a few stories that spring to mind when thinking about why I dig comics’ original sidekick.

ROBIN: YEAR ONE
Few writers of the modern era have more familiarity with Dick Grayson than Chuck Dixon, who spent over five years writing him on the Nightwing ongoing title. Here, Dixon teams with co-writer Scott Beatty and artist Javier Pulido not to re-tell Robin’s origin story, but to flesh out his earliest days with Batman. Pulido’s art is perfect here, as he nails the brightly-clad figure of the Boy Wonder but drags him into the slightly darker situations Dixon and Beatty have concocted without dimming his luster. This is a great coming-of-age story that sees young Dick Grayson attempting to prove himself worthy of the responsibility given him by Batman—your basic father-son dynamic cranked up to superheroic proportions—by taking on way more than he probably should be on his own and coming up against Two-Face, foreshadowing later feuds between the two characters across various identities. Dixon and Beatty also show Robin’s nascent relationship with Batgirl and emotionally explore his connection with Alfred, the series’ narrator.

“The Murder Machine” (NEW TEEN TITANS ANNUAL #2)
The climax to the simmering storyline that introduced Adrian Chase into his costumed role as Vigilante is also an extremely important chapter in the life of Dick Grayson, as he reaches his final days as Robin. Having grown distant from Batman, the now-Teen Wonder finds himself partnering with Chase for a harder-edged war on crime and searching his soul for what kind of man he wants to be as he draws closer to true adulthood, seeing both positive and negative reflections of himself in his new ally. This extra-sized tale by the superlative Titans team of Marv Wolfman and George Perez sees the crew team with Vigilante against an army of assassins in an action-packed thrill ride, but more importantly it is for all intents and purposes one of the last true Robin stories as far as Dick Grayson is concerned and key reading if you’re looking to understand the character.

“The Judas Contract” (TALES OF THE TEEN TITANS #42-44, ANNUAL #3)
Maybe Wolfman and Perez’s greatest Titans opus—and that’s saying something—this one has it all, from the origin of Deathstroke to Terra’s betrayal to Jericho’s introduction and much more, but for our purposes, no aspect of the story is more important than Dick Grayson’s dynamic debut as Nightwing. Even before putting on his new disco-collared duds, the former Robin proves the only Titans capable of eluding The Terminator, an impressive feat when one considers his teammates, but also a reminder of what makes the character so special. Again, a crucial stage in the larger Dick Grayson tapestry, not to mention of the best comic stories of all-time, so call this a win all around.

“Nightwing: Year One” (NIGHTWING #101-106)
Wrote a whole entry on this one.

“Wings Over Gotham” (ROBIN #13)
The conclusion of “Prodigal,” the 1995 storyline that saw Bruce Wayne temporarily hand over the role of Batman to Dick Grayson while recovering from a prior ordeal that saw Jean-Paul Valley sullying the mantel. This issue, written again by Dixon, has Bruce returning, ready to be Batman again, but Dick not quite ready to give up the cowl until they have a conversation years in the making that has been building ever since he abandoned the Robin persona. It’s another big growth moment for Dick as he stands up for himself against his father figure and asserts not only his independence, but calls Bruce out on his lapses in judgment; for his own part, the original Batman stands his ground, but admits he has sold his protégé short more than once. It’s a watershed encounter that re-establishes the Nightwing-Batman relationship more as one between equals and alters their dynamic moving forward (also, Tim Drake fights a bad guy, but that’s pretty secondary).

“A Knight in Bludhaven” (NIGHTWING #1-8)
Dixon and Scott McDaniel’s kickoff to their lengthy run on Dick Grayson’s first ongoing series and they hit the ground running, creating a brand new playground for Nightwing to establish himself in Bludhaven, a sort of mini-Gotham that’s even more gruesome than the original in some ways. For the next several years, Bludhaven would serve a key role in giving Dick Grayson his own identity separate from Batman or the Titans, complete with his own rogues gallery, supporting cast and unique locales, but especially establishing him as the sole guardian of a place that needed him, not just a stand-in or supporting player. The first eight issues have Nightwing setting up shop and declaring war on Blockbuster, the bulky and brilliant mastermind who would become the Kingpin to his Daredevil, so to say. My personal highlight from this initial run is “The Visitor” from issue #6, in which Tim Drake drops by and the two “brothers” spend a night talking over Dick’s latest adventures as they hop across rooftops and moving trains, really giving McDaniel a chance to show off.

“Till Death Do Us Part” (NIGHTWING ANNUAL #2)
You could argue all day whether Dick Grayson’s true destined love is Starfire or Barbara Gordon, but Marc Andreyko and Joe Bennett make a pretty heartfelt case for the latter in this touching, sweet and often heart-wrenching one-shot covering the “missing year” from after Infinite Crisis and what became of Nightwing’s marriage proposal to Oracle. As the star-crossed duo recovers from the latest upheaval and mull over what’s next for them, Andreyko revisits the high and low points of their lengthy courtship in great detail. That Robin-Batgirl kid crush that became something more is something I feel like is almost woven into culture beyond just the DC Universe, and it’s certainly one I feel like I can relate to, so to see it so thoroughly dissected here and ushered into adulthood not only makes for a good story, but feels integral to who Dick Grayson is. The creative team here does an excellent job showing why this may be DC’s best couple, and at the same time why they can probably never be together for too long.

“Batman Reborn” (BATMAN AND ROBIN #1-3)
Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s first arc in this brave and bold new era of Batman showed once and for all that Dick Grayson was more than fit to wear the cowl, but also that he’d be a very different kind of Dark Knight—and that’s a good thing. I remember being really impressed with how Morrison acknowledged every stage of Dick’s past, from jubilant sidekick to defiant young hero, and made this very much the logical destination for the character. Quitely’s art is dynamic and the creative duo usher in wonderfully creepy new villains and a nicely refined status quo for the latest Dynamic Duo.

Cruel Summer: Ultron

Most killer robots that populate the ranks of villainy in comics and just about every other form of action fiction come across their creepiness by being cold and emotionless; terrifying because there’s no way you can hope to reason with them.

Ultron goes the other way.

While he may come across visually with the best of science fiction’s malevolent automatons thanks in large part to his simple but sinister design by the great John Buscema, Ultron is brimming over with emotion. This is a case where the book not even remotely matching its cover defies your expectations and makes for a great villain.

Ultron is Oedipus in the Greek tragedy that is the life of Hank Pym (aka Ant-Man, aka Giant-Man, aka Goliath, aka Yellowjacket, aka The Wasp). Created as a stab at artificial life by Pym using his own brain patterns, Ultron would rebel beyond the control of his “father” and spend the rest of his “life” hating him in a slightly more extreme fashion than most angsty teenagers do their parents. Ultron would go on to try and create progeny of his own in The Vision as well as two would-be brides in the forms of Jocasta (whose brain patterns he based on Pym’s wife, the original Wasp, thus going back to the whole Oedipal thing) and Alkhema; all three would turn against him, with Vision and Jocasta both becoming part of daddy’s team, the Avengers.

Every time Ultron shows up, he’s seething with rage; anger towards Pym, toward the Avengers, towards his “children” and against humanity and general. He really is the classic adolescent dressing in all black and listening to Nine Inch Nails except he’s got adamantium skin and several death rays in place of Hot Topic accessories.

The artists who best portray Ultron—Buscema, George Perez, etc.—have gotten a lot of mileage out of the fact that his expression never changes and holds the same Jack o’ Lantern shape as he screeches “Die Avengers!” or cries out in agony because The Scarlet Witch is hexing him to “death”; it’s quite haunting.

As I’ve mentioned more than a couple hundred times on this very blog, I grew up reading comics in the early 90’s, and for me, that meant not too much Ultron to be seen. The Avengers comics I read had them battling Proctor and only Proctor pretty much every issue with occasional respites to team with the X-Men against Fabian Cortez or battle pissed off Kree and Shi’Ar expatriates. Ultron may have appeared in Avengers West Coast, but I didn’t buy that book until the last issue; I also know he played some role in a Vision series that came out at around this time, but again, I didn’t read it.

So I more or less had no idea who Ultron was outside of the passing mention in a Wizard article or Official Index to the Avengers. Sure, I fought him in the Captain America & The Avengers video game, but I didn’t know him as Ultron, just a weird-looking robot who had a strange laugh. I was also out of the comics game by the time Avengers: United We Stand—currently airing on Marvel.com—where he was the main villain took the airwaves, so no dice there either.

My first genuine exposure to Ultron was Kurt Busiek and George Perez’s “Ultron Unlimited” which was one of the bigger epics from their golden period on Avengers in the late 90’s. The story unfolded in 1999, though I wouldn’t read it until a few years later, picking up the trade as I was trying to assemble the whole run.

The entire first issue of the arc is the Avengers and special guests Black Panther and The Wasp running around chasing leads after Hank Pym gets kidnapped by a robot army. One of the cooler things about the first chapter is how hesitant the Avengers—a group that is at full power and includes Thor, Iron Man and Captain America at this point in time—are to even mention Ultron by name, because they’re that scared of him and you can really feel these fictional characters clinging to some hope against hope that he’s not the guy they’re up against; the anxiety crosses the line and even makes you pretty tense with anticipation.

The Avengers actually end up finding Alkhema first and for a second almost breathe a sigh of relief because maybe she’s behind it all (and she’s not so tough)—then they turn on the TV and see Ultron massacring the entire nation of Slorenia, lighting fires across the country in the shape of his face. The whole story is full of powerful imagery like that, and of course nobody does it any better than Mr. Perez.

As we learn, Ultron has kidnapped Pym, as well as The Vision (his “son”), The Scarlet Witch (Vizh’s ex-wife), Wonder Man and The Grim Reaper (Vision’s “brothers” and thus family in some weird way to Ultron). He also grabs The Wasp for good measure and we’ve got a family reunion. The endgame for the bad guy is that he’s going to swipe the brain patterns of his “relatives” to program a new species of self-aware robots that he’ll use to replace humanity. It actually sounds like a standard super villain plan except that fitting with our theme it’s more akin to a kid who feels neglected wanting to run away from home and finding refuge with replacement family figures be they rock stars, movie idols or just like-minded teens.

Also, Ultron committed genocide just to provide a distraction, so there’s that.

As you’d expect, the Avengers end up spoiling Ultron’s fun, battling through a literal army made up of his previous models in a great action scene then busting down the wall so Thor can get the great line, “Ultron, we would have words with thee…” off. In the end, Pym himself gets to score the much-needed kill shot with an assist from Justice, who figures out Ultron has a weakness to vibranium and tosses the good doctor a pair of knucks made from the stuff so he can pound the crap out of his “son” and vent about how he’s not a failure in a most cathartic manner.

“Ultron Unlimited” is certainly Ultron at his best: Shell of a killer robot, insides of a disenfranchised youth and power of a small army, not to mention a well of resentfulness and ruthlessness that can never run dry.

But while Ultron has traditionally been an Avengers heavy through the years given his close ties, he has branched out elsewhere in the Marvel Universe as well pretty successfully. I loved his run as a cosmic big bad during Annihilation Conquest where he took over the Phalanx and led them on a campaign to assimilate the cosmos; the motivation from “Unlimited” remains the same, as he’s still searching for that surrogate family, he’s just widened his scope on a massive level.

It’s fitting that Ultron has expanded beyond the Avengers in terms of who he’s willing to fight, as he’s a unique take on a common theme whose look has become fairly iconic and whose anger towards his “dad” can pretty easily be redirected at whoever is standing in his way as easily as the kids I’ve been referring to this whole entry seem to be fairly pissed at the entire world.

Of course in most cases, disgruntled young adults grow out of that phase and move on into either grown up happiness or dissatisfaction depending on the situation, but Ultron being a robot—and a comic book character—will never get over it, which is just another way he’s one of a kind.

Cruel Summer: Deathstroke The Terminator

When I first started taking an active interest in DC comic books in the early to mid-90’s, I thought, despite his name, that Deathstroke the Terminator was a super hero.

On the surface, it certainly seemed that way. For one thing, he had an ongoing series, and as far as I could tell, villains didn’t get those (Eclipso was an anomaly to me and I figured that was why Venom only got minis). I also remember reading bits and pieces of Panic in the Sky and seeing that Deathstroke was in there fighting Brainiac alongside Superman and the Justice League, pretty vigorously at that. Heck, I think he even wore a black arm band when Superman died.

And it was the 90’s, so “Deathstroke” was hardly the worst name I saw affixed to a good guy.

Imagine my surprise several years later reading Marv Wolfman and George Perez’ seminal New Teen Titans and learning that The Terminator—who they never really called Deathstroke even though that name was used at some point briefly in his early appearances—was a bad guy!

To be fair though, Slade Wilson wasn’t really that bad a guy. Well, he was. I’ll try to explain.

The thing that pushed The Terminator from vigilante to villain particularly in his earliest appearances weren’t just that he was pretty hard line about the ends justifying the means; it was that his ends were pretty unimpressive from a moral compass standpoint. The guy was a mercenary; end of the day, he was looking to score a pay day, and thus whatever he did to you along the way was cool. It wasn’t personal, but it was still pretty douchey.

Of course the whole genesis of Slade’s introduction to the DC Universe and grudge with the Titans was that his son got killed trying to collect a bounty he turned down from the H.I.V.E. for the teens’ heads so now he feels obligated to finish the contract. On the one hand, it’s honorable in a sense that he’s doing this for his kid; on the other, he’s still trying to ice a bunch of teenagers. And the really nasty stuff he did—primarily using and bedding a (maybe) barely legal sociopath as part of his master plan—code of honor or not was pretty darn inexcusable.

However, The Terminator’s motivation wasn’t really power or even money-driven when it came to the Titans; it was about preserving his family name, which sets him apart from a lot of the villain set similarly to what I was talking about with Kraven recently.

Ironically or appropriately—probably a little of both—perhaps my very favorite Terminator story is entitled “Shades of Gray” and comes from Tales of the Teen Titans #55 by Wolfman and Ron Randall. It’s after Slade has fulfilled his contract and gotten away with it after being acquitted thanks to friends in high places, so Changeling comes after him for revenge over what happened to Terra. Terminator beats the crap out of Changeling but doesn’t kill him, then calmly invites him to join him for breakfast, where he more or less says it sucks that Terra is dead, but he was just doing his job and now that it’s over he’s not going to bother the Titans anymore because he’s got no issue with them.

It’s a pretty awesome issue and a pretty awesome scene. It was also the perfect cap to The Terminator story because there really was no motivation for him to keep coming after the Titans or any other heroes as his story was over and his goal accomplished. Wolfman provided a great coda to the saga of a wonderfully complex character he’d begun five years earlier.

Unfortunately, Deathstroke couldn’t fade quietly into the night because he was too darn popular. To his credit, Wolfman held off bringing him back for a solid few years, and then when he did, he didn’t just invent a new reason for him to oppose the Titans, he brought him back as their ally, which made sense as his son was a member of their team.

At first, Deathstroke was kind of cool as a bad ass pseudo good guy with a distinct dark side. Reading the full Panic in the Sky story, I dug how he’s the guy Superman doesn’t want to go to for help because of his past, but needs for his military experience. He did ok for a bit on the outskirts of the DCU.

But more and more, Deathstroke the headliner became contrived and forced. The guy was a mercenary, yet he wasn’t taking assassination jobs on a monthly basis because stars of their own books just didn’t do that (even with Deadpool, who’s had a much longer shelf life, you notice he always has the heroic impulses creeping up every few issues as opposed to actually being a straight up “Merc with a Mouth”).

So Deathstroke’s book got cancelled and he became a bit of a toxic character for a bit because he was so far afield from the guy he started out as. I think he had a few cool appearances in the Batman books as a dude just taking money to kick the crap out of Batman, which is really the perfect use for him, but they were few and far between.

Then along comes Brad Meltzer’s Identity Crisis in 2004 and the inspirational rebirth of Deathstroke as a viable ass-kicker. In issue #3, Slade takes on the bulk of the Justice League—no big three—in a matchup fans had dreamed of back in the 80’s yet never saw and he dismantles them with precision and forethought, immediately bumping him back up to A-level baddie. Admittedly some of the ways he took out the heroes could be seen as a bit contrived—I never really bought that he took control of Green Lantern’s ring by just “out-willing” him—but Meltzer wrote the sequence with such obvious enthusiasm and it was so well-laid-out by Rags Morales that the cracks were pretty hard to see beneath the fun.

Suddenly, Deathstroke is back and Deathstroke is cool and everybody wants to use Deathstroke again. Out of all this we get some pretty neat comics, but also some that just seem to miss the point; that point being that Slade Wilson is not a moustache-twirling, cackling, out-and-out villain, he’s shades of gray, baby.

Meltzer had Deathstroke as the “bad guy” in Identity Crisis in the sense that he’s beating up the Justice League, but he’s really more of a set piece than anything else; near as I can tell, Meltzer didn’t really have any sort of goal as far as stripping down Slade Wilson and telling some broad character arc, he just had an idea for a great fight scene and pulled it off nicely.

But in the ensuing half-decade, I feel like we’ve seen too much of Deathstroke as just a plain old super villain who takes things personally and goes after heroes just cos. It’s the flipside of why he didn’t work in the 90’s as a hero.

That first run of Titans stories was awesome because it gave The Terminator a clear mission statement and reason for doing what he did: he was going to finish the contract his son took on to deliver the Teen Titans to H.I.V.E. no matter what he had to do in order to accomplish that, and then he was going to move on. It was nothing personal; they were just a mission.

The Deathstroke of today, in my opinion, takes things way too personal. He’s not a pro anymore. He attacks guys because they pissed him off, not because of any debt of honor or because there’s money to be made; that’s not Slade Wilson to me, that’s just a super villain. You make Deathstroke just another bad guy who holds grudges and has archenemies, you take away what makes him unique and cool.

To be fair, some excellent stories have been written with Deathstroke as a bad guy (I dug his Judd Winick-written appearances in Green Arrow myself) just as some awesome stories were written with Deathstroke as a good guy, but I maintain the best stories have The Terminator awash in shades of gray. It will always be tough to reinvent Slade beyond where those first five years of his existence had him just because Marv Wolfman really did give him a perfect beginning, middle and end, but I also understand there’s too many cool aspects to the guy—his rad costume not being the least among them—to just let him sit in limbo, so I heartily root for those who take on the challenge of taking him into the future.

Ultimately, Slade Wilson is a decent hero and an ok villain, but he’s an excellent character.