Yesterday's post on the Deathstroke Files titled, "DEATHSTROKE COVERED: Joe Bennett and John Dell's
Flashpoint: Deathstroke And The Curse of the Ravager (2011) #1
," began the spotlight on DC Comics' pirate version of Deathstroke from Flashpoint. Today's SHADES of SLADE post takes a closer look at the alternate Slade Wilson, who was both a scourge of the high seas and a devoted father on a mission.
The Flashpoint Crisis (the fifth of the DC Multiverse's seven official crises), began as the Flash, Barry Allen," in a moment of weakness, attempted to go back in time to prevent his mother from ever being murdered at the hands of Eobard Thawn, aka the Reverse-Flash, aka Professor Zoom. While the Flash succeeded in saving his mother, he also fundamentally changed reality in such a way that while some vestiges of the world he knew where still present, the new status quo had become a nightmare version of Earth-0.
In the new reality of the Flashpoint Crisis, though Barry Allen's mother was alive, Allen himself never acquired superspeed powers thus never became the Flash. Gotham City's Joe Chill did gun down Martha Wayne in Crime Alley, but instead of killing her husband Thomas, Chill murdered her son, Bruce, thus putting Thomas Wayne on the path to becoming a callous and brutal incarnation of Batman. Instead of being raised in the loving arms of a young Kansas farm couple, an infant Kryptonian refugee instead fell into the hands of Gen. Sam Lane who looked at the child as nothing more than a lab specimen ordering experiments to be conducted on the child, depriving him of the humanity necessary for him to become the planet's greatest hero. Wonder Woman and Aquaman were not heroic allies in this reality, but instead were superpowered tyrants engaged in a devastating war, which resulted in the Amazons conquering and annexing the United Kingdon and the cataclysmic sinking of Western Europe into the Atlantic Ocean by Atlantis.
But the global chaos of Arthur and Diana's war brought opportunity to some willing and able to grasp it as a new age of metahuman pirates was unleashed on the high seas. One such metahuman was Deathstroke, Captain of the pirate ship, the Ravager. Deathstroke is an infamous pirate with a well-deserved reputation for brutality, but that reputation is an honorable one. Deathstroke doesn't kill unless it is necessary to do a job and he honors all of his fallen crew members with a dignified burial. Honor is especially important when it comes to his pirate rivals as evidenced from his battles with Travis Morgan, the Warlord to whom he refers as his "esteemed enemy." When he defeated the Warlord on his second ship, the Skartaris, Deathstroke expressed pleasure when Morgan had escaped because he desired a rematch because so he could take the Warlord out on his best ship, the Tara, because "anything less just seems unfair."
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Deathstroke, Captain of the Ravager, along with members of his crew,
Clayface, King Shark, Icicle, and Briggs.
Art by Joe Bennett |
Though he and his crew were pirates out for loot and plunder, Deathstroke had a more pressing agenda. His daughter Rose had been taken captive and his mission was to recover her. The reason that Deathstroke and his crew engaged the Warlord was that Slade had intel that Morgan was transporting a metahuman female in a containment pod, whom he hoped was Rose. I turned out that the pod did have a young female, but it was not Rose, but a young woman named Jenny Blitz, whom I assume was the Flashpoint reality's iteration of the Wildstorm Universe's Jenny Sparks. I won't spoil the remainder of the story, but suffice it to say that more swashbuckling, mutiny, double-crosses, death, and, yes love are all yet to come in this tale (and no I didn't spoil anything, I simply enumerated the required elements of every single pirate story, including this one).
One interesting tidbit about Flashpoint's pirate Deathstroke is that this version also had some legs to it outside of its initial three-issue miniseries. Pirate Deathstroke has made more than one cosplay appearance at different conventions and even at Halloween since his 2011 debut. He even appeared in a short scene from the animated film
Justice League: The Flashpoint Paradox (2013) voiced by
Teen Titans' (2003) Slade voice actor, Ron Perlman. Pirate Deathstroke's look was such a hit that NetherRealm Studios included a Flashpoint Deathstroke skin in a DLC pack. Flashpoint Deathstroke received much love from the fans, and never once had to resort to the worn out "Yar, me maties," shtick. Though, if he wanted to do so, he could have pulled that off too.
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| Flashpoint Deathstroke skin from the video game Injustice: Gods Among Us. |
