Peacemaker loves peace so much, he's about to make war on HBO Max in the second season of his own streaming series spin-off of The Suicide Squad.
With a brutal combat style and a strangely silly demeanor, John Cena's Peacemaker stands out among modern superhero adaptations for the bizarre dichotomy of his personality, and his four-color-fueled, comic book-inspired look.
John Cena's Peacemaker has now appeared in multiple installments of James Gunn and Peter Safran's new DC Universe, including, most recently, a brief but memorable cameo in this summer's blockbuster Superman film written and directed by Gunn himself.
So how does Cena's version of Peacemaker match up with the comic book version, who has his own extra weird and oddly violent past? And what's going on with the live-action Peacemaker going into season 2? We'll break it all down right now.
Who is Peacemaker?
At first glance, Peacemaker may seem a bit like DC's Punisher (though he does predate Frank Castle by a decade) - a violent, gun-toting vigilante with an almost inscrutable code of personal honor. But Peacemaker's past has some particularly dark twists that make him somehow even more bizarre and brutal than his most obvious comparison.
First appearing in 1966's Fightin' 5 #40, not from DC but from Charlton Comics (we'll explain in a moment), the original Peacemaker was Christopher Smith, a pacifist whose dedication to his idea of 'peace' led him to take up arms and violently suppress those he deemed warmongers alongside his peacekeeping organization the Pax Institute.
However, those origins were changed slightly when DC purchased the rights to the superheroes of Charlton Comics, including Peacemaker, Blue Beetle, Captain Atom, The Question, Nightshade, Thunderbolt, and Judomaster. Designated as residents of Earth-4 in DC's Multiverse, the Charlton heroes were folded into DC continuity following the collapse of the Multiverse in 1985's Crisis on Infinite Earths.
Though he retained his look and some aspects of his character, the rebooted version of Smith, introduced in his own Peacemaker limited series, is a violent vigilante who has a psychological break when he discovers his father was secretly a Nazi who ran death camps during the Holocaust.
Believing himself to be haunted not just by the ghost of his Nazi father but by the ghosts of everyone his father ever killed, Smith also believes his distinctive helmet is a receptacle for all those spirits - who sometimes speak to Smith and offer him wisdom or strategy.
Despite his mental state and extreme violence, Smith is recruited as an operative of shadowy DC organization Checkmate as an enforcer, though he quickly proved too erratic and violent even for them, apparently dying in a suicide mission against the villain Eclipso.
This is the version of Peacemaker on whom John Cena's portrayal of the character is based, though with a few changes to help the show fit into modern continuity, most notably Peacemaker's father being changed from a Nazi war criminal into a white supremacist supervillain.
Peacemaker has appeared in the DC Universe a few times since some of these aspects of continuity were dropped and rewritten in 2011's 'New 52' reboot, most notably in Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely's Multiversity: Pax Americana one-shot (more on that shortly), and in Doomsday Clock, in which the DC Universe and the continuity of Watchmen crossed over.
Which brings us to Peacemaker's connections to Watchmen, and to a character many readers might be more familiar with than the long-dormant DC vigilante: the Comedian.
Peacemaker and Watchmen
A hit since its initial publication in 1986-1987, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' postmodern deconstruction of the idea of Silver Age superheroes has become a household name in the intervening decades thanks to its film adaptation, TV sequel, comic book prequel, and continued acclaim as a seminal work of modern comic books.
Many of the characters of Watchmen have also become popular on their own, especially the core cast of Nite-Owl, Silk Spectre, Ozymandias, Rorschach, Doctor Manhattan, and, of course, the Comedian. But the weird thing is, the cast of Watchmen was almost totally different, without any of the same characters.
Initially, Moore and Gibbons planned to use the characters DC purchased from Charlton Comics as the cast of their story. And though DC initially allowed the use of the Charlton characters for the mature, alt-universe story, the creators and publishers came to disagreement when DC incorporated the world of Charlton Comics into the DC Multiverse as Earth-4, with plans to subsequently bring the characters to the mainstream DC Universe.
As a result, Moore and Gibbons decided to use original characters who would not later appear in other DC stories, with the intent that Watchmen would stand alone (this concept was later totally undone when DC created the comic book prequel Before Watchmen, and when the Watchmen characters and DC heroes actually crossed paths in Doomsday Clock).
To wit, they created analogs of the Charlton heroes they initially planned to use, with Blue Beetle becoming Nite-Owl, Nightshade becoming Silk Spectre, Thunderbolt becoming Ozymandias, The Question becoming Rorschach, Captain Atom re-envisioned as Doctor Manhattan, and finally, Peacemaker was remade as The Comedian.
Perhaps most interestingly, The Comedian, a violent vigilante who becomes a war criminal in Vietnam as well as a sexual predator, predates DC's reboot of Peacemaker as a violent extremist who himself committed war crimes as a US operative in the Vietnam war - meaning the remade Peacemaker and his own 'variant' (to borrow an MCU term for an alt-Universe version of a character) developed basically the same way at the same time.
Later, things came even fuller circle in the aforementioned one-shot Multiversity: Pax Americana, in which Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely re-established Earth-4 in DC continuity - and in which the new Earth-4's versions of the classic Charlton heroes are, essentially, dark reflections of their Silver Age counterparts inspired by the original intent of Watchmen.
Peacemaker in the movies
Peacemaker's DC Universe story is very similar to his role in modern DC comic books, as he grapples with his own willingness to do violence and the twisted legacy of his evil father (in this case transformed from a WWII Nazi officer to a racist supervillain).
One of the big differences is Peacemaker's time on Task Force X rather than Checkmate, a different shadowy government organization with its fingers in world affairs. Peacemaker's actions in The Suicide Squad, in particular murdering Rick Flag, Jr., will come back to haunt him in season two, in which Frank Grillo's Rick Flag, Sr. goes on the hunt to get revenge for the death of his son.
Another big difference between Peacemaker's comic book history and his history in the DC Universe is that, in comics, Peacemaker really only wears one helmet and it's not usually imbued with superpowers. The character's variety of helmets, each with its own special weapon built in, are a creation of the show, designed by Peacemaker's father.
On that note, it looks like Peacemaker's dad's tech goes even further than that, with his secret lair also containing a portal to another reality, as shown in the most recent trailer for Peacemaker season two.
Peacemaker season 2 premieres August 21. In the meantime, fill out your watchlist with our guide to all the upcoming DC movies and shows.
