I'm very happy to see DC putting out reprints of the Charlton Comics material they inherited when they absorbed most of the Action Heroes way back in the 1980's. They've reprinted most all of the relevant Steve Ditko material, but other artists have been largely ignored. A prime example is the great Pat Boyette, who co-creation with Joe Gill, the Peacemaker finally finds a modern audience. The reputation of the Peacemaker was sullied when first Alan Moore mocked the character with the creation of the Comedian in the pages of Watchmen. Later DC took the actual Peacemaker and made him insane. The Charlton Peacemaker might be unusual and provocative, but he's far from insane.
The Peacemaker appeared in Crisis on Infinite Earths, but it was in the pages of Vigilante that DC really broke the character, so much so that I really had little interest at the time.
Above are Peacemaker's two cover appearances in the magazine, though he featured in many more stories. In all of them he's so off his nut that he makes the bloodthirsty Vigilante seem rather tame by comparison. Perhaps that was the point. The gritty heroes of the era were often hard to root for. Peacemaker in these issues is fully off his rocker and imagines that the ghosts of those he willfully and gleefully kills are nesting in his over-sized helmet.
When he finally gets a limited series of his own, the madness is changed some, and he's presented as still crazy but more functional. I'll have more to say on this in a later post.
Checkmate was the series most closely linked to Peacemaker as he became an operative for the outfit. He was more of an independent contractor but did get drawn into the larger plotlines for a time, including a period when the series crossed over with Suicide Squad.
In the pages of Showcase 93 Peacemaker joined forces with Deathstroke and others to combat the forces of Kobra.
It was in the pages of Eclipso that Peacemaker joined forces with other marginal DC characters to battle the dark menace. It was in these pages that he, for a time, died. But as we know death in comics is far less certain than in the real world.
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