Deathstroke

• 1. Introduction

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  Deathstroke wears a mask split between black and orange, and it covers a right eye that is missing. He is Slade Joseph Wilson, a mercenary and former U.S. Army soldier. Within the DC Universe he is regarded as the greatest and deadliest assassin alive. Writer Marv Wolfman and artist George Pérez created him, and he first appeared in The New Teen Titans #2 in December 1980. His chief enemy is not another killer for hire. It is Dick Grayson and the teenage heroes who gathered around him. Why would the best assassin in the DC Universe spend years hunting young heroes? What did an experimental serum give him, and what did it take from the people closest to him? And how does a man who dies so often keep coming back?

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• 2. Soldier To Assassin

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  Slade Wilson was 16 years old when he lied about his age and enlisted in the United States Army. After taking part in the Korean War, he was assigned to Camp Washington, where he rose to the rank of major. In the early 1960s, Captain Adeline Kane noticed his talent and offered to train him privately in guerrilla warfare. In less than a year he had mastered every fighting form she showed him, and he was promoted to lieutenant colonel. Six months later the two married, and Adeline became pregnant with their first child.

  Vietnam brought two changes that shaped the rest of his life. There he met William Wintergreen, a member of the SAS, and there he was given a drug that let him use up to 90% of his brain's capacity. It brought enhanced physical power, an accelerated healing factor and heightened senses. Soon afterward Slade became a mercenary, and his family knew nothing about it.

  Later writers refined the claim about his brain. His mind is said to process information nine times more efficiently than an ordinary human's, and he has an eidetic memory. He is described as a tactical genius whose strategic mind rivals that of Batman. His body is just as unusual. He ages slowly, resists toxins, and has recovered from impalement and from bullet wounds to the brain, even though he says he can only heal non-fatal injuries. Before the serum, his military training had already made him a master of martial arts, swordsmanship and marksmanship. His arsenal includes swords, firearms, knives and a ballistic staff that fires bolts of energy from each end.

  His professional reputation is built on numbers. He charges a seven-figure fee and asks for a six-figure deposit. He has completed nearly every contract he accepted, and his single failure was a contract from H.I.V.E. to kill the Teen Titans. He pays lawyers to make sure police can never prove that Slade Wilson and Deathstroke are one man. That secret double life soon cost his family dearly, beginning with a kidnapping that demanded he betray a client.

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• 3. The Price Of Honor

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  The criminal Jackal took Slade's younger son Joseph hostage and demanded the name of the client who had hired Slade as an assassin. Slade refused, saying that giving up the name would break his personal code of honor. Joseph's kidnappers slit his throat, and he was left mute. Slade rushed the boy to a hospital, but his wife Adeline was furious that he had put their son in danger. She tried to kill Slade with a gun and succeeded only in destroying his right eye.

  His eldest son Grant took a different road. H.I.V.E. gave Grant superhuman enhancements, and he became Ravager. He accepted a contract to kill or capture the Teen Titans. The enhancements proved fatal, and Grant died. Slade agreed to finish the contract his dead son had taken, and that decision made the Titans his enemies.

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• 4. War On The Titans

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  Promethium was the first target. Slade stole the element from S.T.A.R. Labs and planned to sell it as a weapon. To test his device, he kidnapped the Titans and placed them in the path of a Promethium bomb. They escaped and chased him, but he badly wounded Changeling as he got away.

  Next came New York, where Deathstroke held officials hostage to draw the Titans out. Only Terra, a new ally, and Changeling were free to answer. Terra knocked Changeling out and fought Deathstroke alone to prove she deserved a place on the team. The fight was staged. She and Slade had secretly planned it so she could infiltrate the Titans.

  The storyline called The Judas Contract shows how well the plan worked. The Titans trusted Terra with all of their secret identities, and Slade used that knowledge to defeat each member at his or her weakest moment. Dick Grayson avoided capture and met Adeline and Joseph Wilson. He took the new name Nightwing, and Joseph took the name Jericho. Jericho freed the Titans by possessing his father's body. Terra caused the H.I.V.E. building to collapse and died in it. Changeling then tried to kill Slade but stopped, realizing that Slade was not fully responsible for what Terra had done.

  Years later, in the Titans Hunt storyline, many Titans disappeared in a way that echoed the Judas Contract. Slade and Nightwing traced the abductions to the Wildebeest Society, whose leader turned out to be Jericho. He had been possessed by the corrupted souls of Azarath, who wanted to use the captured Titans as host bodies. Slade had to kill his own son to save them. Afterward he went back to mercenary work, though he sometimes helped the Titans when a shared threat outweighed their old hatred.

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• 5. A Father's Plan

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  Slade underwent a process that gave him the power of regeneration, which let him survive any wound as long as his brain stayed intact. When Adeline needed a blood transfusion to live, he gave her his blood, and she gained a similar healing factor. The change in her DNA drove her insane, and she formed a new version of H.I.V.E. In the battle that followed, her throat was slit, but her healing would neither fully mend her nor let her die. Starfire was forced to kill her, and Slade renounced all ties with the Titans.

  Jericho had managed to move his consciousness into his father in the instant before he died. From inside Slade, he forced Deathstroke to murder Wintergreen and then attacked the current Teen Titans before leaving his father's body. Slade pushed his daughter Rose Wilson into the mercenary trade as the new Ravager, hoping she would find and kill Jericho. He used a specially designed serum to raise her hostility. It left her at least partly insane, and she cut out her own left eye to show her father she was just like him.

  Slade later hired Nightwing to train Rose. Then, after a confrontation with Superman, he discovered that Nightwing had been teaching her the values of heroism. He could not kill Grayson in front of his daughter, because doing so would undo everything Slade himself had taught her.

  When the One Year Later publishing line began, Slade built a team called Titans East and attacked the Titans. Readers learned that his real mission was to give his children something he could never offer. That something was a real family, in the form of the Teen Titans. By attacking the team, he made sure Rose and Jericho would be trusted more by their teammates.

  The Blackest Night crossover brought the confession. Facing reanimated relatives, Slade told his children that he had menaced the Titans for years partly so they would hate him and escape the sorrow of a life with him. Jericho, cured of his madness, chose to stay with his father. He reasoned that only Slade would have the courage to kill him if his insanity ever returned.

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• 6. Mercenary For Hire

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  Infinite Crisis found Deathstroke hiding in a warehouse south of Metropolis. He was a founding member of Lex Luthor's Secret Society of Super Villains, and he waited there with other members to ambush the Freedom Fighters. The battle was short. Deathstroke killed Phantom Lady and shot Uncle Sam in the back, leading to Uncle Sam's apparent death.

  Nightwing offered Slade a deal. Nightwing would stay away from Rose if Slade kept metahuman villains out of Blüdhaven. The agreement lasted 34 hours. On the orders of Alexander Luthor Jr., Slade dropped Chemo on Blüdhaven, killing over 100,000 people.

  After the Blackest Night crossover, Slade assembled a team for the Titans: Villains for Hire storyline. Its members were Tattooed Man, Cheshire, Osiris and a new character named Cinder. The team ambushed Ryan Choi in his home, and Deathstroke drove his sword through the hero's chest. Later the team was hired to kill Lex Luthor in Midway City, which turned out to be a ruse designed by Slade and Luthor to expose a traitor on Luthor's security staff. The traitor was a shape-shifting assassin named Facade. Slade also recruited Arsenal, a former member of the Teen Titans and the Justice League.

  Slade's real goal was to find a way to cheat death itself. On a South Pacific island, his own team betrayed him, and the cult leader Drago gouged out his left eye. Drago revealed that he was Corporal Daniel Rogers, an old friend who had abandoned Slade during a civil war in Afghanistan. Slade's healing factor restored the eye, and the Titans rescued him. Slade then revealed what the team had been building. It was the Methuselah Device, meant to heal Jericho and to bring back the loved ones of any Titan who helped. Jericho was disgusted by the price his father had paid and tried to destroy the machine, and the device's power source, a metahuman named DJ Molecule, broke free. Cinder destroyed the machine in the chaos.

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• 7. Reboots And Resurrections

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  In 2011, the New 52 rebooted the DC universe, and Deathstroke became a top mercenary known around the world. A man named Cristoph hired him to work with younger mercenaries called the Alpha Dogs. Their target was an arms dealer named Jeffrey Bode, whose cargo turned out to be clones of the villain Clayface. Deathstroke killed the Alpha Dogs afterward, angry that his employers thought he could not finish the job alone. In Bode's suitcase he found the mask and knife of his son Grant, stained with fresh blood. Grant, it turned out, had arranged the whole chase. He defeated his father, then hesitated and left. Slade was happy that his son had become a better warrior than he was.

  The origin was rewritten too. In Deathstroke volume 2 #0, Slade is drafted into Team 7, is gravely injured on a mission, and receives an operation that makes him virtually superhuman. He later rescues Wintergreen from captors in Somalia. In Teen Titans: Deathstroke #1, he quits the army after a mission that destroyed a children's hospital he did not know about. During a mission in North Korea with Grant, a bullet blinds his right eye, and Grant is presumed dead.

  DC Rebirth launched in May 2016. In his ongoing series, Slade tried to save Grant by borrowing Speed Force energy from Kid Flash to travel through time. The attempt left him trapped in the Speed Force until the Titans rescued him. He then formed a team called Defiance with both his children, Wintergreen, Adeline Kane and Ace. Later he was imprisoned in Arkham Asylum and, seeking death, tried to goad Damian Wayne into killing him. Red Arrow killed him instead. At his funeral, Raptor gave Slade's body leprosy, which pushed his healing ability into overdrive and brought him back to life. He treated it as a second chance and hid as a doctor.

  In the Infinite Frontier era he took control of an organization called T.R.U.S.T. and renamed it Deathstroke Inc. Talia killed him after he was framed for the murder of Ra's al Ghul. His followers brought him back with a Lazarus Pit.

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• 8. Page To Screen

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  Success on the page came first. Because readers liked the character, Deathstroke the Terminator received his own series in 1991. It was retitled Deathstroke the Hunted for a stretch of issues and then became simply Deathstroke, and it was cancelled with issue #60. In all, it ran for 65 issues, counting four Annuals and a special #0. A new ongoing series was set for March 2026 under the DC Next Level initiative. His original billing predates James Cameron's film The Terminator by four years, so the name was later shortened to Deathstroke.

  His influence reached a rival publisher. Rob Liefeld created Marvel's Deadpool, whose real name is Wade Wilson, by first modeling the name, powers and costume on Deathstroke. Christopher Priest, who wrote Deathstroke's solo series during DC Rebirth, praised Wolfman's original version. He said Wolfman made the first modern supervillain by giving a bad guy internal conflicts, instead of the flat menace readers were used to.

  Alternate versions keep appearing. In Just Imagine..., a series conceptualized by Stan Lee, he is Deke Durgan of the Doom Patrol, whose touch is fatal. In the Flashpoint universe he is a pirate alongside his daughter Rose. In the Absolute Universe, General Slade Wilson is a cyborg who works for Jack Grimm.

  On television, the part has been played by many actors. Michael Hogan played a corrupt army general in Smallville. Manu Bennett played a former ASIS agent injected with the Mirakuru serum in Arrow. Esai Morales played a former Delta Force operator in Titans. Ron Perlman voiced the character in the animated Teen Titans and in the 2006 video game. Joe Manganiello played him in a post-credits scene of Justice League and in the director's cut of the film. In the Batman: Arkham games, Mark Rolston gave the character his voice. A film co-starring Deathstroke and Bane was reported in September 2024 to be in development for the rebooted DC Universe, from a screenplay by Matthew Orton.

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