Missing the Target: The Problem with Deadshot

Deadshot is one of the most fascinating antagonists in the DC Universe. So, why is Warner Bros. and DC Comics so intent on destroying what makes him special?

Like many other superhero animation fans, I first became interested in Deadshot following his appearance in the Justice League episode “The Enemy Below.”  Not revealed by the creative team at the 2001 San Diego Comic-Con panel, Deadshot was the first legitimate surprise guest star to appear on the then-fledgling series.  In a December 4, 2001 interview with Comics Continuum, Producer Bruce Timm explained the significance of the cameo:

One of the cool things we’re doing is any time we need a secondary villain—along with a major villain, we’ll have a secondary villain who has a plot twist or something in the show to spice it up—instead of creating a villain, we’re using old DC villains that we don’t necessarily consider major.  They’re not A-list villains, but we’ll stick them in the secondary parts. […] They’ll be a bunch of cool DC villains. (qtd. in Allstetter)

Now, I was already familiar with the character—I had seen him previously in his various ‘90s DC Comics appearances—but the updated costume and Michael Rosenbaum’s Kevin Spacy-esque vocal work made me a fan, and I eagerly dug into Floyd Lawton’s history to learn more.  However, while I’ve come to better appreciate the lore of the costumed assassin, I’ve also noticed that, in the past twenty years, he has had a target on his back placed there by DC’s parent company in an attempt to make him more marketable.  As a result, the character has often been changed for the worse as he’s been adapted for film, video games, and DC Comics’ own relentless, unceasing reboots.

Happiness is a Warm Gun

While gaining prominence during the Bronze Age of Comics, Deadshot actually made his debut in Batman #59 (June 1950) in the short story “The Man Who Replaced Batman.”  Created by Bob Kane, David Vern Reed, and Lew Sayre Schwartz, the original Lawton was a tuxedoed, gun-toting criminal posing as a vigilante in order to take over the Gotham underworld.  Recognizing Deadshot for what he was, the Dark Knight tampered with his equipment prior to their final confrontation, resulting in the marksman missing his target.  Experiencing discharge dysfunction rattled the aspiring supervillain, resulting in his arrest and imprisonment.  Looking back at their initial encounter in Secret Six #15 (January 2010), Lawton confessed that he was impressed with Batman’s foresight, admitting how “you gotta respect” how he took him down (Ostrander, “Control” 24).

His next full appearance would take twenty-seven years to come to fruition, and it came about in an odd way.  According to Comic Book Resources’ “Comic Book Legends Revealed” column, Batman Editor Julie Schwartz sought to avoid a situation where both Batman and Detective Comics had Joker stories running the same month, so he requested that Detective writer Steve Englehart provide an additional script, thus allowing them to push his Joker issue to the following month (which turned out to be the classic “Laughing Fish” story).  Decked out in a new costume designed by Marshall Rogers, the Batman villain returned in Detective Comics #474 (December 1977) seeking long-overdue revenge for his years of imprisonment.

In the stories to follow, this era of storytelling made further use of one of Deadshot’s favorite tactics:  using elaborate ricochets to attack his targets.  Initially done in non-lethal ways (killing your opponents was frowned upon that late in the Golden Age), the late ‘70s / early ‘80s time period permitted Lawton some leeway in terms of whether his victims could live or die.  In Batman #369 (March 1984), writer Doug Moench artfully described the assassin’s perchance for indirect assault in “Target Practice”:

Death by violence usually rides a direct line between murderer and victim, but then there is the domino theory, whereby violence is set in motion from afar, to follow an indirect route of chain reactions which nevertheless result in downfall no less final.  The theory in action:  bullet is fired at suspension-brace; brace snaps, releasing sign; and sign, like a mammoth electrified domino, tumbles down at Alfred and Julia Pennyworth.  It misses by inches—and the Montreal street corner explodes under a sizzling crash of sparks and flying glass. (138)

The costumed assassin made several notable appearances in the years prior to Crisis on Infinite Earths, but while initially unchanged by the continuity-altering crossover event, Deadshot would evolve as a character thanks to a subsequent crossover event.

Suicide Solution

After a nearly thirty year absence, Deadshot was back on the radar.  While not A-list in terms of popularity by any means, his presence in the Batman titles got him noticed.  This led to an appearance in Who’s Who:  The Definite Directory of the DC Universe (March 1985 - April 1987), which—in turn—brought him to the attention of writer John Ostrander, who was developing a reboot of Suicide Squad, which had its origins in The Brave and the Bold #25 (September 1959).  This new incarnation, featuring a government black ops team made up of supervillains participating in suicide missions to erase time from their sentences, needed bodies—many of them disposable—and the creative team found their marks by reading Who’s Who.  In a July 1, 2013 blog posting by then-Suicide Squad Editor Robert Greenberger, he recalled how they decided to include the World’s Greatest Marksman in their series:

When John Ostrander and I were looking to fill out the roster for the forthcoming Suicide Squad, he was flipping through Who’s Who, and [Marshall] Rogers’ art caught his eye.  He decided then and there to include the character, delving into the psyche of a man who would become an assassin for hire.  From the first issue, Lawton was clearly one of the most intriguing members of the team and one Ostrander loved to explore.

Later, in an August 2021 interview with GateCrashers, John Ostrander himself discussed Floyd Lawton’s appeal to him:

He originally had a half-page in the Who’s Who, and I used him when Marshall Rogers and Steve Englehart were finished with him in Detective Comics, I think, it was one of the Batman titles. They redesigned the costume, and I thought the costume was really cool, and the Who’s Who only had a paragraph on his background, so I could extend it further.

The main thing I had with Deadshot […] was two things. I had seen a special with a hitman who had been incarcerated; he had the coldest eyes I had ever seen. His whole attitude was “I don’t care if I die, so why should I care if you die?” It’s not that Lawton was suicidal; it was just that he just didn’t care whether he lived or [died]. As a result, if his life didn’t mean anything to him, yours didn’t mean anything to him either. (qtd. in Edwards)

Appearing during the Legends crossover event (November 1986 - April 1987), the new Suicide Squad made their official debut in the subsequent spinoff Suicide Squad #1 (May 1987), and Ostrander immediately began to reimagine Deadshot. Laying the groundwork for Floyd‘s alleged “death wish” in Legends #3 (January 1987), the writer formally established his mindset in the first issue when Dr. Marnie Herrs—one of the Squad’s in-house psychiatrists who determine if candidates for Task Force X are mentally fit to serve—provides a summary of Deadshot’s psychological profile to her immediate supervisor, Dr. Simon LaGrieve, as well as Amanda Waller herself: “Mr. Lawton’s history suggests a strong self-destructive urge.  He may be looking for a way to die and thinks the Suicide Squad will provide one.  Yet, there’s another side to him, I think, that wants to be well, and doesn’t know how!” (Ostrander, “Trial” 60). Of course, it should be noted that Dr. Herrs was already well on her way to becoming emotionally involved with her patient at that point.

Even with this diagnosis, however, the status of Deadshot's “death wish” was debatable, depending on the story. For example, in Deadshot #1 (November 1988), Lawton had no problem whatsoever opening fire inside a pressurized air cabin in flight, killing drug kingpin El Jefe, as well as everyone else on board. On the other hand, Floyd also showed signs of survival instinct, such as in Suicide Squad #7 (November 1987) where, following a botched mission in the Soviet Union, he intends to kill a group of American tourists to cover for stealing their passports in an attempt to flee the country. Over time, the character developed as a man who was cavalier with his safety, but not stupid. And certainly not suicidal.

Gradually, other details began to emerge. In Suicide Squad #5 (September 1987), we learn that, while Squad members are permitted to acquire quarters “off base,” Lawton is the only one on the team who elects to live in Belle Reve Prison, telling Captain Boomerang, “A bed’s a bed.  Don’t see a difference between one there and one here” (Ostrander, “Flight” 146). For a man known as “the World‘s Greatest Marksman,” in Suicide Squad #10 (February 1988), Batman accuses Deadshot of pulling his shots intentionally whenever they face off, a plot thread later explored in the aforementioned Secret Six #15 (January 2010). And, in Suicide Squad #14 (June 1988), Dr. Herrs confronts Floyd with her discovery that he was married and has a son. Unwilling to go into his divorce, all he would tell her is that “I never pretended with her I was anything but what I was.  She could never see me except as she wanted me to be” (Ostrander, “Slipping”). Of course, this was all prelude to his first solo miniseries, which debuted later that year.

Point Blank

One year into the Suicide Squad series, John Ostrander teamed up with his wife, comics writer (and frequent collaborator) Kim Yale, to write Deadshot #1 (November 1988), a dark story that, among other things, introduced readers to the Lawton family. Born in the town of Lawton, “the town my great-grandfather founded and the old man owned” (Ostrander, “Control” 16), Floyd grew up a scion of old money fifty miles outside of Gotham City. The second child of George and Genevieve Lawton (their names were added by later writers, as Ostrander and Yale kept them nameless), he grew up in a family with two parents who hated each other and who doted exclusively on their first son, Edward Lawton, who they saw as everything Floyd was not. Floyd, however, did not resent his brother, and they had a very close relationship until the day that their mother—sick of years of infidelity and otherwise cruel treatment—asked her two sons to kill their father. Floyd refused, but Edward agreed to do it, and he locked his brother in a boathouse before Floyd could warn him. Kicking down the boathouse door, Floyd grabbed a hunting rifle (he always had a proficiency with marksmanship) and, finding himself locked out of the house, climbed a tree just in time to see Edward confront their father in the library. Not wanting to seriously hurt his brother, Floyd attempted to shoot Edward in the arm—to make him drop his gun—but the tree branch he was sitting on gave way, dropping Floyd and making his shot go bad. In the end, Edward succeeded in shooting his father through the spine, paralyzing him from the waist down, but he was shot dead the next moment by his brother’s errant bullet. Seeking to avoid a scandal, the surviving Lawton family lied about Edward’s death and used their influence to squelch the investigation, leaving the murder unsolved. Still, the damage was done, and Floyd—tormented by his brother’s death—developed a powerful sense of self-loathing. Always the black sheep in his parent’s eyes, his father later cut him out of the family fortune after marrying “beneath” him (Ostrander, “Control” 12) and having a son. It was this ex-wife and child that he sought to distance himself from after starting his career as a costumed assassin but, unfortunately, it was not far enough.

Years later, Genevieve Lawton—separated from her husband and forced to live on a small pension from him—attempted to get Floyd to “finish the job” by abducting his son (her grandson!) and holding him until he murdered his father. Instead, after promising his ex-wife that he would “deal with this […] my way” (Ostrander and Yale, “Suffer” 33), Deadshot went on a rampage, apparently more interested in killing everyone involved in the plan rather than simply rescuing his son, whom he named after his brother. Unfortunately, he was unable to save his son’s life, and—during a confrontation at his mother’s house with Dr. Herrs as a witness—he realized that, like himself, his mother also had a “death wish” and, now that her initial plan had failed, she was now goading Floyd to kill her as an escape from her marriage and impoverished lifestyle. Recognizing the pattern, he shot her near the spine, paralyzing her as Edward did to their father years before. Afterwards, during what would become their final therapy session at Belle Reve, Dr. Marnie Herrs and Floyd Lawton shared this exchange:

DR. MARNIE HERRS: Well, Floyd—I talked with Dr. LaGrieve, and he said if you were willing, I could start sessions with you again. Is that all right with you?

FLOYD LAWTON: No.

DR. MARNIE HERRS:  I … I don‘t understand! Floyd, now that the matter of your family is out in the open, we could make some real progress…!

FLOYD LAWTON:  And I could be cured? That‘s yer problem, lady. You believe people can be cured, be made healthy, be made normal—that they can be saved. That they should be saved. But maybe the only way to cure some people is with a bullet between the eyes. People like Wes [the man who killed his son]. Like me.

DR. MARNIE HERRS:  Do you hate yourself that much?

FLOYD LAWTON:  Let me tell you something about me. Life is the most valuable thing we have, right? When you take a life that should mean something, right? When I killed my brother, I felt nothing. No guilt, no remorse—nothing. And he was the one person in this world I ever gave two damns about. They lied to me—about the importance of life. The only life anybody really cares about is their own, and I don‘t even care about that. You understand? I‘m just killing time, waiting to die.

DR. MARNIE HERRS:  Of course. That‘s why you killed all those men who were responsible for your son‘s death.

FLOYD LAWTON:  I was just protectin‘ my rep. That‘s all.

DR. MARNIE HERRS:  Bull! You‘re rationalizing so you don‘t have to face the anger—the grief—you‘ve got sublimated deep down.

FLOYD LAWTON:  You think so, huh? You shrinks are all alike! You think facts explain things! You could know everything there is to know about me, and you still wouldn‘t be able to explain me—to yourself or anyone else! That‘s why I put up with these bull sessions! Keeps [Amanda Waller] happy, and you think you‘re getting somewhere! But they don‘t really tell you nothin‘! What you can‘t deal with is maybe—just maybe—some people can‘t be cured. That there really is something that is evil.

So, all this is a dead end. Like you and me are a dead end. Because there‘s really no place for anything to go.

DR. MARNIE HERRS:  You won‘t risk it, will you? Risk that you‘re wrong about yourself. Risk you might have to change.

FLOYD LAWTON:  I am who I am. I am what I am. The cards are dealt. Let ‘em lie. (Ostrander and Yale, “Astride” 94-97)

It is through this series that Ostrander and Yale establish what I consider to be the definite Deadshot: a sociopath so convinced of the worthlessness of human life, and his own damnation, that he has no problem putting himself into life-or-death situations because of his own self-loathing and, apparently, a desire to use his continued existence as a form of self-flagellation. In fact, after reading this miniseries, I‘m convinced that he allowed his son to die because, deep down, he wanted another reason to torture himself.

After Suicide Squad ended its initial run after sixty-six issues in June 1992, Deadshot occasionally appeared in guest spots in other books and crossover events, mainly whenever the Suicide Squad made a guest appearance in a DC title. However, while the 1990s were a lull in his comic book career, he was soon to gain a presence in animation.

I‘ll Sleep When I‘m Dead

As stated above, Deadshot was introduced early on into the Justice League series, as the creative team wanted a variety of DC supervillains to appear in supporting roles. In adapting the character, they streamlined his design—dropping the chest emblem, the shorts, and the color yellow from his costume—into a slick, minimalist composition in silverish-gray and a dark red that resembles the velour, rim-lit look worn by the Flash. Initially ignoring his backstory from the Ostrander and Yale comics, Deadshot was relegated to supporting roles in “The Enemy Below,” where he was an assassin hired by Orm to kill Aquaman, and “Hereafter,” where he appeared as part of a crowd of supervillains taking advantage of the chaos in Metropolis following the apparent death of Superman. It didn‘t have much depth, but for a mercenary like Lawton, it was work.

However, when the series shifted into Justice League Unlimited (JLU), and their two season arc featuring the League versus Amanda Waller and the Cadmus Project, Deadshot was granted a new lease on life. Returning in the episode “Task Force X,” a costumeless Lawton found himself drafted into a heist story filled with familiar faces (Squad regulars Col. Rick Flag and Captain Boomerang, for example) and heavy with references to John Ostrander and Kim Yale‘s original series. Sadly, this would be the final appearance of Deadshot in the DCAU, though he would make an appearance in the second volume of Batman Adventures, the 2003-2004 animated Batman comic book whose run coincided with the Justice League series.

Above left: the cover to Batman Adventures #5 (October 2003). Above right: Deadshot concept sketches by Rick Burchett, with notes by Ty Templeton.

After a few more years of obscurity, Justice League and JLU introduced a new generation to Deadshot. In the long run, however, this may have been more of a curse than a blessing, as the next few years would bring conflicting visions of the World‘s Greatest Marksman to the masses.

For the Soul of a Killer

The troubles began in late 2004 with the release of Deadshot #1 (February 2005). Written by Christos N. Gage (best known at the time for being a writer on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit), the series sought to reinvent a character that was, frankly, just fine the way he was. Dressed in an inferior update to his costume (above left), the series follows Deadshot as he discovers that he has a daughter—Zoe Torres, the product of a tryst with a Star City sex worker—and then moves into her neighborhood to eliminate the organized crime that plagues it. Suddenly, an original character in the DC Universe with a unique backstory was reduced to an action hero cliché: the reluctant hero who resorts to violence to save his daughter. While a popular series in some circles, I always felt that it diminished the character we all knew and loved from the Suicide Squad era.

Fortunately, the pendulum would swing the other way with the release of Villains United #1 (July 2005), a six-issue miniseries that reintroduced the Secret Six in a similar manner to how the Suicide Squad returned twenty years prior. Written by Gail Simone—best known for her stellar runs on Deadpool and Birds of Prey—the series featured the assassin (back in his classic costume) forced into service by the mysterious Mockingbird to combat the Secret Society of Supervillains, run by Lex Luthor and a cabal of major level threats. Initially partnered with second-string Batman villain Catman (aka Thomas Blake), recurring Teen Titans adversary Cheshire, and newcomers Ragdoll, Parademon, and Scandal, this sinister sextet bonded through shared trauma and, continuing through a second miniseries and an ongoing, coalesced into a formidable mercenary team that, at various times, included the likes of Bane, King Shark, and Harley Quinn. In an April 19, 2008 interview with Newsarama, Simone discussed the appeal of the team she described as “the anti-JLA”:

[I]t is just the unbridled lust to live their own way. They care primarily for themselves. They aren‘t heroes. At times, they aren‘t even likable. I kind of like that it‘s a superhero comic about desperate people. They all know their lives aren‘t going to end well. […] I also find the chemistry between them fascinating. The core members, to a man, including Catman, are selfish, spoiled brats to some degree, and they are always thinking about themselves, primarily. But in that mode, they still somehow have come to like and trust each other, which they all hate to varying degrees. It‘s not their nature. They‘re the anti-JLA in that regard. You can‘t really call them friends, but they‘re the closest thing to friends any of them have ever known.

[…] They‘re together because they reluctantly enjoy working together, and because Scandal‘s talent for hunting up big money merc jobs is making them all rich. The roster will always change a little, that‘s part of the fun of it, but most often, the core four [Scandal, Catman, Deadshot, and Ragdoll] will always be there. […] But the Six are mostly about getting laid and getting paid. I think it‘s fun to watch their behavior like it is to watch, say, The Sopranos or something of that nature. Bad is awfully charismatic. Plus, I think they‘re unpredictable. You never really know which side of the coin toss they‘ll end up on. Do they help someone, or do they shoot them? (qtd. in Brady)

Recognizing the issue with Lawton‘s new daughter, Simone wisely dropped her as a supporting character during the first miniseries (titled Six Degrees of Devastation) following an attack by assassins seeking to take him out. Realizing that 1) being near him put a target on her back and 2) he didn‘t want Zoe to see him kill someone in front of her, potentially kickstarting the next generation of death wish assassins, Deadshot cut ties with his daughter and her mother, a move that, I‘m sure, gave him another reason to hate himself.

Fortunately, this storytelling decision did not impede the character‘s growth as, over the course of Simone‘s original run on the property (July 2005 to October 2011, collectively speaking), Deadshot‘s storyline allowed him the chance to evolve in ways not seen since Suicide Squad. In the first ongoing arc—where the Six are transporting an artifact that turns out to be a “Get Out of Hell Free” card (a plot appropriated for 2018‘s Suicide Squad: Hell to Pay animated film), thus attracting the attention of every supervillain on the planet—Deadshot, convinced of his own eventual perdition and seeing how it was making his teammates turn on each other, assaults his team and takes the card to deliver himself. Though initially seen as a self-serving act, it could be interpreted that he did so to finish the job and protect his friends from the inevitable bloody outcome. Quite open about his preference for prostitutes over traditional relationships (“Real pros make you pay only once. Not all your life”; Ostrander, “Personal” 224) during the original Suicide Squad days, Lawton began an actual relationship with Jeannette (aka “The Last Victim”), a banshee who was attracted to him because he literally reeked of death. And, of course, there was his long-running, if not complicated, friendship with Thomas Blake, who was reimagined by Simone from a joke into the DC Comics‘ equivalent of Kraven the Hunter.

And while Simone crafted her tales of criminals and monsters, a funny thing happened: John Ostrander, who was struggling to pay medical bills at the time (Simone), was brought in to do some freelance work, writing Secret Six #15 and, later, co-writing the Blackest Night tie-in Danse Macabre, finally allowing a crossover between the Secret Six and Suicide Squad. In regard to the former, which allowed Ostrander to return to Deadshot for the first time in years, he said how “I‘ve been wanting to re-look at his origin, to update and retell it since we (Kim Yale and I) redefined the character in the Suicide Squad and his first miniseries. Bring it more up to date and maybe throw a few new wrinkles into the guy” (qtd. in Simone). To promote the issue, Gail Simone interviewed Ostrander for Newsarama, where they discussed, among other things, their thoughts about Deadshot and his legacy:

GAIL SIMONE: Well, let‘s be honest, I think every writer who has done a half-decent job with the character is essentially writing your version of it. Mine varies a little bit, because his motivation for staying with the Six is different from his motivation for staying with the Squad. But yeah, Ostrander and Deadshot is one of those creator / character combinations that you can‘t improve on, the best you can hope to do is not embarrass yourself trying. But if I may, what is it about Floyd that you think makes him so fascinating?

JOHN OSTRANDER: I think it‘s his detachment. It makes him cool but also makes him dangerous. Yes, he‘s willing to shoot you. He‘s also willing to die. That‘s not to say that he‘s a sociopath. He does have feelings, but he is detached from them. It‘s his survival mechanism. He had a terrible childhood, and he wound up accidentally killing his own brother, whom he loved. How does he cope? He detaches from his feelings about it. It‘s enforced by the fact that every time he does admit a feeling for someone or something, he gets hurt again. And I think it‘s on that level that we can relate to him and why readers do—we‘ve all had that sort of feeling at some time or another. Not to Lawton‘s extent, but to some degree. We relate, and we identify. And the fact that he‘s so cool at other times helps as well.

GAIL SIMONE: Yeah, I‘ve often said what makes the character fun for me is that he doesn‘t care which end of the gun he‘s facing. But speaking of multiple writers, I sometimes find it‘s hard to read other writers‘ versions of characters after I‘ve worked with him for a long time. It‘s nothing against the writers or the work they do, it‘s just like seeing someone else dance with your ex-spouse. Had you been familiar at all with the Secret Six books, and were you aware of the obvious Suicide Squad connections?

JOHN OSTRANDER: Oh yeah. I like it a lot. My basic feeling is that I had a free hand to do with the characters like Deadshot what I wanted and others should have the same right. It‘s nice to see what I did incorporated into somebody else‘s version but, unless I own the character, I always assume somebody else will write it the way they want. Especially if I‘ve done my job right! I‘ve always tried to get to the essence of the characters, as I saw it. I think that the only thing I ask is that while I‘m working in a character that, if somebody else uses it in another book, they stay consistent to what we‘re doing. Other than that—if DC owns the character, for example, they can do what they want. I‘m just happy to have had a shot at playing with the character as I wanted.

GAIL SIMONE: I‘m just glad you haven‘t shot me. One benefit I had with Deadshot and Bane and even Harley Quinn‘s brief appearance was the ability to talk to the people who made these characters great. So, again, thank you for the support. But Deadshot‘s still your guy. I told Dan DiDio that if a Suicide Squad book ever made the line-up again, I would find a way to remove Floyd from the Six immediately, not out of professional courtesy, I just want to read more Ostrander Deadshot.

JOHN OSTRANDER: Well, thanks, Gail. But he is your character right now, and you have things to bring to him that only you can because you are Gail Simone. Writing a franchise character is like running a relay race; you take the baton as far as you can, but then you pass it on and root for the next one to go as far as they can. I respect Steve [Englehart] a lot as a writer but, when I started writing Deadshot, I wasn‘t writing his Deadshot; I wrote mine. What you‘re doing with the relationship between Deadshot and Catman is all your own and very important in the development of the character. I want to read more Gail Simone Deadshot! (qtd. in Simone)

And he did … until Secret Six #36 (October 2011), when the series was cancelled to make room for the New 52, another DC Comics reboot that was presumably done to prepare their catalogue of characters for adaption to television and film. In Deadshot‘s case, a movie version of Suicide Squad was officially announced in February 2009 (Kit; McNary), and he was now in the studio‘s crosshairs.

Dead Man Walking

To paraphrase That Guy from the Futurama episode “Future Stock,” the New 52 was a chance for DC Comics to update their company‘s stodgy image and give it the sleek, dazzling veneer of 1990s Image Comics (not surprisingly, since Image Comics founder Jim Lee was an architect of the revamp), and that ethos could be plainly seen when it came to the relaunch of Suicide Squad #1 (November 2011). For example, the normally plump, but imposing, Amanda Waller was redrawn by artist Federico Dallocchio into a supermodel waif better resembling Halle Berry. New recruit Harley Quinn became a psycho killer dressed as a fetish model wearing too much eye makeup (this was before her 2013 Deadpool-esque revamp at the hands of Amanda Conner and Jimmy Palmiotti). King Shark became a hammerhead shark … for some reason. And Deadshot was stripped down to just the name, introduced (as seen in Justice League of America #7.1; November 2013) as a child from a poor Gotham City family who becomes an assassin following their murders. Armored in an excessively complicated-looking outfit with a mask resembling the undercarriage of a blue crab, the only person that this Floyd Lawton cares about is his daughter. And while much of this revamp has since reverted to pre-New 52 formulas, this focus on Zoe has become a raison d‘etre for Floyd Lawton, with him either going on missions to save her or to simply shave time off his sentence in order to see her. This is the version of the character that has been popularized in multimedia in recent years, both in animation—Batman: Assault on Arkham (2014) and the aforementioned Suicide Squad: Hell to Pay (2018)—and the 2016 feature film, starring Will Smith playing himself in a Spirit Halloween costume.

Excerpts from Suicide Squad #1 (October 2016), featuring the DC Rebirth version of Deadshot.

Look, I understand the impulse that DC Comics is following: in order to make Deadshot a candidate for movies, television, and video games, they have the unenviable task of making the character—an emotionally-detached monster who kills for money—into a likeable, if not sympathetic, character. The easiest way to do that is to give him a loved one to care about but, in doing so, it goes against the nature of the character created and shepherded by John Ostrander, Kim Yale, and Gail Simone … the one that got popular in the first place. And I‘m not saying that Zoe Lawton has to go out the same way as his first child, Edward—God forbid!—but the overreliance of his daughter as a plot device weakens Deadshot by sandbagging a formerly original character with a one of the biggest action hero clichés. And while I agree with Ostrander that every writer has the capacity to write the character as they see fit, but I do believe that this new version is not “consistent” with the version that they made famous (qtd. in Simone).

The DC Universe is full of interesting costumed mercenaries and assassins. Lady Shiva. Constantine Drakon. Merlyn. Cheshire. Lobo. The KGBeast. And, of course, Deathstroke, the Terminator. To stand out from the pack, a character needs to be distinctive, both in terms of costume and character, and Deadshot—in his original form—had that. However, by adding the threat of his child being endangered by his merc work as an ongoing plot point, it makes him less unique, as Deathstroke, Lady Shiva, and Cheshire have already had previous stories similar to that. Now, he‘s just another hitman in the crowd, and the perfect example of why that matters can be seen in James Gunn‘s The Suicide Squad (2021) reboot. When Will Smith bowed out of the film due to scheduling conflicts (Kroll), Gunn replaced Deadshot with Bloodsport (a Superman villain who was originally more of an armed lunatic than an actual assassin) and, in the film, Gunn literally gave Idris Elba‘s character the same motivation as Smith‘s Deadshot: joining the Squad because of a familial relationship with their child. The only difference was the name and costume—they could have replaced Smith with Elba as Deadshot and the film would have been the same, and a character like Deadshot should never be that replaceable.

Still, to quote Neil Gaiman in Sandman #13 (February 1990), “[t]he Great Stories will always return to their original forms,” as we have seen this summer with the release of new, yet familiar, incarnations of Fantastic Four and Superman, the latter written and directed with James Gunn himself. Perhaps, when the time is right, the new DC Universe will recast Floyd Lawton and, if we‘re lucky, bring back the distinctive assassin with the death wish that John Ostrander and company made famous, and maybe the comic books will follow suit. And while Deadshot may do heroic things if properly motivated, he‘s not a hero, and he should not be written as one.

Works Cited

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Brady, Matt. “NYCC ‘08: Gail Simone on the Return of the Secret Six.” Internet Archive. Internet Archive. 5 Dec. 2008. <https://web.archive.org/web/20081205065728/http://forum.newsarama.com/showthread.php?t=154269>. Accessed 9 Aug. 2025.

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Images courtesy of Warner Bros. Discovery, Warner Bros. Home Entertainment, Warner Bros. Animation, and DC Comics.