Deadshot

• 1. Introduction

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  Deadshot, the DC Comics assassin whose real name is Floyd Lawton, makes one boast again and again: he never misses. Comics have given him a chest emblem shaped like a reticle, a mask with a sight built into it, and a pair of guns strapped to his wrists. Yet the man who claims perfect aim also carries what the comics call a death wish. He draws a target on his own chest and goes looking for an enemy good enough to use it. Where did that aim come from? Why did a villain meant to appear once survive for decades among Batman's enemies? And what is a man who cannot miss really aiming at?

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• 2. The Shot From the Tree

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  At about twelve years old, Floyd Lawton climbed a tree outside his family's home with a hunting rifle and fired at his own brother. The Lawtons were wealthy and powerful. Father George held interests in much of the local real estate and had sway over the police. Mother Genevieve, a prize-winning sharpshooter, controlled the Pitt banking businesses. Behind the polished image, the parents had grown to hate each other, and the boys felt the pressure of being compared. Floyd was judged for failing to match his older brother Eddie in academics and sports.

  Then Genevieve told her sons about George's infidelities and the abuse she suffered, and asked them to kill him. Eddie locked Floyd in the boathouse. Floyd escaped, climbed the tree for a view through the windows, and saw Eddie enter the library with a gun. Floyd fired, hoping only to disarm him. The branch gave way beneath him and threw off his aim, and his bullet killed his brother.

  Eddie's own shot went wide of its mark, and the bullet shattered George's spine instead. George then arranged with the police to bury the truth. The official report blamed an unknown sniper and called Eddie a hero who died diving into the second bullet. Genevieve was forced to live on a small allowance in a smaller house on the edge of town. Floyd left home after high school. He later claimed he felt nothing about Eddie, yet he showed anger whenever he recalled that day, and he swore that from then on, when he fired a gun, he would never miss.

  The comics leave the following years vague, but they do reveal one teacher. David Cain was a skilled assassin of the League of Assassins who had once helped train Batman. He taught Floyd marksmanship, hand-to-hand combat, martial arts and military tactics, and Floyd later called him his best teacher. Floyd became a hired killer in Europe and South America. He married a woman named Susan and they had a son named Edward, after the brother Floyd had lost. Floyd eventually divorced Susan and left the boy's life, saying his presence endangered them. Then he arrived in Gotham City.

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• 3. The Tuxedo Sniper

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  In Batman #59, published in 1950, a gentleman in a tuxedo, top hat and domino mask stepped into Gotham as a self-styled vigilante. Writer David Vern Reed and artist Lew Sayre Schwartz created him from a concept by Bob Kane. Lawton had settled in Gotham with a valet, planning to build a criminal empire the way his parents had run their hometown. After watching Batman stop a group of thieves at a charity ball, he saw a rival. His plan was to weaken the hero's influence first. He used his aim to disarm criminals without killing them, and the public cheered.

  Batman grew suspicious and worked out who Deadshot really was. When Deadshot finally tried to kill him, every shot missed. Batman had reached the weapons earlier and altered their sights, then taunted Deadshot for lacking the nerve to face an opponent properly. The exposed villain went to trial and prison. He was meant to be a one-off, and for 27 years nothing suggested otherwise.

  In 1977, writer Steve Englehart and artist Marshall Rogers brought him back in Detective Comics #474. They rebuilt his look from scratch with the wrist-mounted guns, the reticle emblem on his chest, and a mask with a targeting sight over his right eye. This version of Lawton resented being forgotten while the Penguin and the Riddler won fame. He broke out of prison to prove himself against Batman with the new gear, and lost again. After that, he settled into life as an assassin for hire and a fixture of Batman's rogues gallery.

  In 1987, in Legends #3, writer John Ostrander launched a new take on a team that would change Deadshot's fortunes again.

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• 4. Expendable Men

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  Belle Reve, a prison in Louisiana, doubled as the secret hub of a reborn Suicide Squad. Government operative Amanda Waller had won permission to revive Task Force X, a special operations group. Under her, it stopped being a team of government and military operatives and became mostly incarcerated super-villains. They were considered expendable on dangerous missions and promised shorter sentences in return. After the Flash defeated Lawton and sent him back to prison, he was moved to Belle Reve and recruited by Waller. He became one of the squad's best-known and longest-serving members.

  Inside the team, Deadshot clashed often with Captain Boomerang. He developed a grudging respect for the field leader, Rick Flag. Soon after Lawton joined, Batman learned the team existed and confronted them. He threatened to expose a government that was using super-villains for covert and possibly illegal missions. Waller answered with a threat of her own, saying that exposing Task Force X would force her to reveal Batman's true identity.

  The team's most chilling moment came on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. A US senator had threatened to expose the squad, and Flag decided to assassinate him. Deadshot was ordered to stop Flag. He shot the senator himself, arguing that this met the letter of his orders, since the senator would no longer be killed by Flag. DC police gunned Deadshot down on the spot. He survived his wounds and went back to active duty.

  Waller's therapy sessions with her prisoners revealed another reason she picked him, and it had little to do with his rifle skills.

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• 5. The Death Wish

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  The therapist Dr. Marnie Herrs noticed something troubling in Deadshot's sessions. He sometimes seemed to hope that a worthy enemy would end his life in a dramatic battle. Batman had reached the same conclusion on his own, remarking that Lawton always "pulls" his shots when they fight each other. Herrs agreed that he sometimes sabotaged himself, as if inviting opponents to kill him. The same reading was applied to his second costume, with its target on the chest.

  The idea took full shape in a self-titled limited series that ran from 1988 to 1989. It was written by Ostrander and Kim Yale and illustrated by Luke McDonnell. It described his death wish as a self-destructive urge to die in a spectacular fashion, and it dug further into his past.

  The death wish also shaped how he dealt with his own family. His son Edward, about eight years old, was kidnapped by criminals hoping to manipulate Floyd. The boy was found dead in an apartment, and Deadshot punished the man responsible with several non-lethal gunshots before killing him. Later he learned that the kidnapping was part of a plot by his mother Genevieve, who wanted to push Floyd into finally killing his father.

  He returned to his home town to confront her, first intending to kill her. Herrs pointed out that Genevieve had her own wish to die and did not want to harm herself. So Deadshot refused to give her what she wanted. He put a precision shot into her spine instead, leaving her paraplegic. He observed that it was fitting, since her scheme had only paralyzed George, and now the two were a "matched set."

  Only after both parents had died did a different family find him.

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• 6. The Triangle

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  Among his parents' papers, Deadshot found a letter from Michelle Torres, who said Floyd was the father of her daughter Zoe. She lived in the Triangle, a neighborhood of Star City. When he visited, he recognized Michelle from years before and realized Zoe really was his daughter. The memory of abandoning his son, and then finding him dead, pushed him to stay. He took temporary residence there and learned the district's gangs and slum lords. He also learned that Michelle was proud of her Cuban and Italian heritage. Then he began systematically fighting corruption, hoping to make the neighborhood safer for the two of them.

  The locals responded by trying to protect him from vigilantes, including the local hero Green Arrow, and a romance grew between Michelle and Floyd. Then super-villains with grudges began arriving, and Lawton chose to put distance between himself and his new family. He arranged a school scholarship for Zoe, killed several of the villains hunting him, and faked his own death in an explosion. The 2005 limited series, written by Christos N. Gage and illustrated by Steven Cummings, gave Zoe to readers. Its ending shows a man deciding that a normal life is not for him. His campaign had still left the area mostly cleared of gangs, and Green Arrow patrolled it more regularly afterward.

  The Triangle then became a lever against him. In the 2005-2006 Infinite Crisis storyline, Lex Luthor recruited him into the Secret Six. Luthor offered the rule of North America as a reward, and the destruction of the Triangle as the penalty for refusing. Deadshot sent his payment to Michelle. He stayed on with the Six after Luthor was out of the picture and formed a grudging friendship with Catman, another former enemy of Batman.

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• 7. Precision

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  Behind every legend of the never-missing shot is a catalog of feats in the comics. Deadshot has no superhuman powers, yet his aim is described as near-superhuman. He can make bullets ricochet off structures and around corners, and he can kill several targets at once. He once shot an apple off Captain Boomerang's head with his eyes closed. When asked to subdue the flying Enchantress without killing her, he grazed her skull with a bullet.

  He is no mere sniper. He has held his own in hand-to-hand fights with Batman and Green Arrow on several occasions. He has also fought the rival assassin Deathstroke to a standstill. His weapons are a sniper rifle and the guns on his wrists, though he is skilled with every firearm and projectile. A smaller detail from his youth is that he learned to speak Russian.

  The Enchantress incident carries a quiet irony. The same shooter who can graze a skull on purpose spent years, in the comics, accused of pulling shots on purpose.

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• 8. Many Deadshots

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  When DC rebooted its universe in 2011 as The New 52, Lawton's history changed. He became a child born in poverty who joined the military before turning to contract killing. He had a daughter named Suchin, who had Japanese heritage, and his earlier children went unmentioned. He lost the trademark mustache. He was arrested after a failed assassination of a US senator and sentenced to life in prison. Then he joined the Suicide Squad, where he was made team leader. He also formed a casual relationship with Harley Quinn. Eventually he died killing a cult member named Regulas, and was later resurrected. The 2016 relaunch called DC Rebirth restored his earlier history, and Lawton brushed off the poverty story as a lie he had told. Another story, "The War of Jokes and Riddles," revealed that soon after his first defeat he had sided with the Joker against the Riddler.

  Other versions kept appearing. A character named Will Evans, influenced by the film version, challenged the original Deadshot to an even match between the two and was killed by him. A composite named Deadeye merged him with Marvel's Bullseye.

  On television, Bradley Stryker played him in Smallville with long hair and western-steampunk clothes. Michael Rowe played an Arrow version who was a military veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder and used bullets laced with curare. In animation, Michael Rosenbaum voiced him in the DC Animated Universe, Christian Slater in Justice League Action, and Jim Meskimen in the film Batman: Gotham Knight. Will Smith played him in the 2016 film Suicide Squad, as an African-American hitman blackmailed by Waller. In games, he appears in Batman: Arkham City as a boss, and in Injustice 2 as a playable character.

  In Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, a second Deadshot claims that the first is an impostor, and the game leaves open which of them is the original.

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