Justice League Of America #7.1 Deadshot

[superfangirl1]

Floyd as a adult locates the two men who killed his parents/sister and kills them. They are his first assassinations.

Comments

[filthysize]

This is his new origin? Doesn't seem nearly as tragic as his previous one.

[espanolbot]

His previous one didn't really take a turn for the tragic until he actually openly became a superhero... at least the version I read wasn't.

It had him coming from one of Gotham's established families (yeah, they're all evil except for Bruce's and parts of Kathy's, go figure) and becoming a vigilante who disarms crooks with trickshots, generally non-lethally using guns in a way that even Batman couldn't really object to.

Only it seemed he was only faking being a vigilante, and was infact using it as an excuse to rob criminals, which Batman got him imprisoned for, leading to Lawton taking up his traditional look when he came back for revenge.

[filthysize]

I'm talking about the reason Floyd became an experts marksman.

In his previous origin, he had an abusive father, who was so bad that his mother asked Floyd and his brother Edward to kill him. Floyd and Ed loved each other more than anyone in the world, and Ed locked Floyd out of the house when he was about to kill their dad. Floyd didn't want any killing so he tried to stop Ed by grabbing a rifle and trying to shoot the gun out of Ed's hand through the window. But he missed and shot Ed in the head instead, saving the father he hated from the brother he loved. That's when he vowed to never miss again.

[lultam]

So much cooler, so much more interesting.

[mistervader]

My only positive takeaway? One less "abusive parent" origin for our villains.

Of course, they replaced it with five hundred new ones, so... :|

[cainofdreaming]

Other than change just for the sake of change, what does this new origin really bring to the table? Floyd already had a working one.

[shadowpsykie]

well i kinda like that this one has him, for lack of a better term, honoring his targets (in less creepy way than zzazz)....

[terrykun]

As far as I know, Zsasz doesn't honor his victims with the scarification. He's honoring himself. Has it been stated otherwise? Would be interested in reading that.

[shadowpsykie]

hmmm i kinda like this... though i also kinda like the Deadshot with a deathwish....

[lucean]

It seems DC wants to push Deadshot as a more heroic character with this origin, by saying that he became that good of a shot so that there would never be any collateral. While I understand why they did it, Deadshot was rising in prominence even before DCnU, I still prefer the old approach to this.

[bizarrohulk]

He still executes the villain's innocent, unarmed son, just on the off-chance that he'll grow up to seek revenge for his father's death. He's hardly "heroic".

[lucean]

Ah, I didn't know that as I was commenting on the comments on the scans. Thanks for the heads up and yeah, that's actually farther from heroic than the previous incarnation, which I didn't know was possible.

[icon_uk]

Was the first guy about a foot and a half shorter than the second one? Otherwise, I'm not quite sure how a headshot for the first guy became a chest shot for the second.

[avantre]

Clearly Deadshot has become so good by that point that he angled the bullet to richochet off the inside of the first guys skull so that it would exit and hit the second guy in that way.

[espanolbot]

Training with either Lee Harvey Oswald or that character from Alien Resurrection apparently.

[blueprintstyles]

I think they were trying to avoid the abusive parents origin story which has been done a lot, while giving him more of a heroic shine. Even in the joker's oneshot; I don't think any of those flashbacks actually happened, I think he just remembers his past differently from time to time.

[timefire]

This origin seems to me as a deliberate Batman-mirror. Hmm.

I don't know much about pre-N52 Deadshot. Does the old one also go with this angle?

[silicondream]

So is he supposed to be a tech wizard now? This issue had him building his own bullets to phase through a villain's super-armor.

[bizarrohulk]

It didn't phase through. It was a custom-made armour-piercing bullet. From the artwork, it appears to be some kind of sabot-discarding round, like a conventional anti-tank shell (albeit shrunk down to the size of a rifle bullet). The text explicitly states that it has the momentum to punch through the villain's armour, but not to do any actual damage, hence the need for a second shot.

The real "WTF?" moment in that sequence was Deadshot somehow managing to put two shots in the exact same place while *freefalling*. I don't remember him being THAT good before.

[silicondream]

The text talks about it "dissolving" this "impenetrable future-tech" armor "at the speed of sound", which sounds to me like it's doing something a little more complicated than the average armor-piercer. (Though I think I was misled by the fact that the "dissolving" line was on the same panel where the armor is temporarily drawn as transparent, I guess just as an educational-for-the-reader schematic.) And it's a round he had to make himself because it was impossible to buy ammunition that could penetrate this armor...even for a well-connected guy in the DCU with money to burn.

All of which makes Floyd sound like a pretty adept engineer, at least in this one area. I don't have a problem with that, it's just not something I'd seen of him before.

[sadoeuphemist]

Well if the bullet only creates a hole in the armor that you afterwards need to shoot another bullet through, it might not even be that technologically advanced. It's just that no one ever bothered to invent a bullet like that before because who on earth would use it.

[sigma7]

The Ostrander/Yale Deadshot miniseries was one of my absolute favorites. Glad DC editorial thought highly enough of it to can it for Generic Origin Story #4.

It's like watching an attic of all my favorite things from my youth slowly burning up.