Peacemaker (character)

• 1. Introduction

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  Peacemaker is a comic book antihero whose name promises the opposite of what he delivers. When Christopher Smith debuted in Fightin' 5 #40 in November 1966, he was a pacifist willing to do anything to bring peace to the world. Writer Joe Gill and artist Pat Boyette created him for Charlton Comics. That contradiction, peace pursued by any means, would outlast the publisher and survive several rewrites of the man himself.

  Three questions run through his story. How does a diplomat's crusade turn into a vigilante's haunting? Why was he written out of a planned Watchmen role? And how does a character who faded from view after the 1980s return to wide popularity decades later?

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• 2. Charlton Beginnings

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  Fightin' 5 was an espionage-team title, and Peacemaker first ran as a backup series inside its pages. Credit for his creation is not entirely settled, since IGN has also named Bill Montes alongside Gill and Boyette. The original Smith was an envoy and diplomat for the Geneva Arms Conference. He was so committed to peace that he took the title of Peacemaker and used force as a superhero to advance it. He carried an array of weapons against international threats, and he founded an organization called the Pax Institute. A solo comic followed, but it lasted only five issues before it was cancelled.

  By the 1980s, Charlton Comics was finished. Financial troubles, a sales slump across the comics industry and outdated internal systems drove it out of business. DC Comics acquired the rights to its characters, Peacemaker among them. DC first placed these characters on an alternate world. Then, in 1985, the crossover event Crisis on Infinite Earths brought them into the mainstream DC continuity.

  A limited series in 1988, run by Paul Kupperberg and Todd Smith, showed what DC intended to do with him. It redefined his personality and his history.

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• 3. Ghosts in the Helmet

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  Wolfgang Schmidt was an elite Nazi officer, and his son's reinvented life was built around that fact. In the post-Crisis version, the hero is reintroduced as Christopher Schmidt. He is traumatized when he learns who his father really is, and the father then takes his own life to avoid arrest. Christopher relocates to the United States and takes the name Christopher Smith. His father's ghost continues to haunt him and gives him commands, many of which he obeys.

  Smith later served as a soldier and was imprisoned after massacring a village of innocent people. Partway through his sentence, he joined a government organization called Project Peacemaker. As a vigilante, he came to believe that his helmet held the ghosts of people he had killed, or who had died near him. Those ghosts, he thought, spoke to him through the helmet and offered wisdom and strategy. He then joined Checkmate, a special-forces unit that hunted terrorists, until his own behavior became too extreme. He died in a battle with the villain Eclipso.

  The helmet remained his most defining trait. It could emit ultrasonic frequencies to overwhelm people's senses and scramble electronics. It could also sense hostile enemies nearby, fire lasers, let him swim underwater and mimic other people's voices. Around it he wore technologically advanced armor and used a jetpack, a jetplane, many explosives and many firearms. His rise came in the 1980s, when antiheroes such as Wolverine and the Punisher were popular.

  Decades later, the television series would give Smith not one helmet but several, each with its own unique ability.

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• 4. The Watchmen That Wasn't

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  Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons originally planned Watchmen around characters taken from Charlton Comics' creations. Peacemaker was meant to appear, and the project was dubbed Who Killed the Peacemaker? DC first allowed the use of these characters. Then came the plan to fold them into the mainstream universe through Crisis on Infinite Earths. DC withdrew permission and said it did not want the characters left "dead or dysfunctional."

  Moore and Gibbons responded by creating original characters to fill the outlined roles. The Comedian took the place that Peacemaker was supposed to fill.

  Years later, multiple critics would describe John Cena's version of Peacemaker as inspired by that very replacement, the Comedian.

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• 5. Deaths and Replacements

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  The crossover event Janus Directive ended Smith's run as Peacemaker, at least for a time. Another character, Mitchell Black, took up the mantle after Smith was killed. Smith came back to life in the comic Day of Judgement. He then became a mentor to Jaime Reyes, a new incarnation of Blue Beetle, who was also a Charlton Comics character.

  Smith later received his own backup feature in the Inferior Five comics. He then moved into the Suicide Squad comics. He also began working missions for Amanda Waller, an official he had known earlier. Historically, Peacemaker had not belonged to the Suicide Squad in the comics. After his role in the 2021 film The Suicide Squad, however, the comics placed him on the team.

  Other Peacemakers have appeared along the way. A group called the Peacemakers shows up in the crossover series Armageddon 2001. An alternate female version named Peacewrecker was introduced in Dark Crisis on Infinite Earths. In Absolute Superman, a private army of Peacemakers serves as enforcers for Lazarus Corp. Christopher Smith appears there as a mentally unstable captain, whom Brainiac forcibly turns into a cyborg.

  The film that reshaped the comics began as a casting puzzle for filmmaker James Gunn.

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• 6. Casting John Cena

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  Dave Bautista was the first actor James Gunn wanted for Peacemaker. The two had worked together on the Guardians of the Galaxy films, where Bautista played Drax the Destroyer. Bautista was unavailable, because he had taken the lead in Zack Snyder's Army of the Dead (2021).

  John Cena entered talks in April 2019. Gunn had wanted to work with Cena since seeing him in the romantic comedy Trainwreck (2015). Cena had previously auditioned without success for both Marvel and DC Comics films. His casting was officially revealed in August 2020. Gunn told him not to read any Peacemaker comics, because a preconceived notion of the character might distract from the story. During promotion, Cena wore the Peacemaker costume to interviews and events. He wanted to familiarize audiences with a lesser-known character, a tactic he had used as a professional wrestler.

  In The Suicide Squad (2021), Amanda Waller sends Peacemaker to aid the squad on a mission. The target is Jötunheim, a laboratory in Corto Maltese that performs inhumane experiments through the alien Starro. The film gave Peacemaker less development than the other squad members, and Gunn had meant his apparent death to be permanent. After finishing the film, though, Gunn began a spinoff series about Peacemaker's origins "just for fun" during his COVID-19 lockdown isolation.

  He brought the idea to producer Peter Safran, who was later approached by DC Films about a Suicide Squad spinoff. HBO Max picked up the series in September 2020. Gunn wrote all eight episodes of the first season and directed five of them. Cena agreed to return and became an executive producer alongside Gunn and Safran. The character was kept alive, and a post-credits scene filmed in January 2021 set up the show. After the first season's success, a second season was ordered in 2022.

  In that first season, Peacemaker joins a government task force to stop an alien species called the Butterflies. The second season, released in 2025, sends him to a parallel universe where he is an admired public hero. He also makes cameo appearances in Creature Commandos (2024) and Superman (2025).

  Smith's adolescent self is played by Quinn Bennet in the first season and Myles Benson in the second.

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• 7. A Rude Jerk Learning

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  In The Suicide Squad, Peacemaker is patriotic and jingoistic, ready to do anything for what he sees as freedom and peace. He is emotionally closed off and written as a "rude, violent jerk." The television series goes further. It shows him haunted by his murder of the character Rick Flag Jr. and trying to make peace with himself.

  Several supporting characters encourage him to grow. Others judge him by his outward behavior and believe he cannot change. The series also centers on his abusive father, Auggie, a racist who operates as the villain White Dragon.

  Cena studied the character's comic history before shaping his own take. Given Smith's childhood struggles and hardships, he concluded that Smith would be "willing to do anything to a certain extent." Cena also chose to play Smith as bisexual. Gunn said Cena turned him "into this hyper-sexualized dude that is open to anything sexually."

  Critics would debate that choice at length.

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• 8. Critical Verdict

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  Richard Newby, writing for The Hollywood Reporter, said that nobody actively disliked Peacemaker and nobody actively cared about him either. By the time DC owned the character, Newby argued, "he was already relegated to the D-list." The 2022 television series, in his view, made people care. Susana Polo of Polygon said it let Smith become interesting for reasons beyond his scrapped Watchmen appearance. Her colleague Lux Alptraum described the character in The Suicide Squad as "flat," and said the series expanded him.

  Cena's performance drew praise in both the film and the series. James McMahon of NME cited the show's "irreverent" take on superheroes. Newby credited Cena with giving the character depth, and wrote that it offered "a new way to understand what comic characters can offer when allowed genuine change by artists seeking the same." Darren Mooney of The Escapist read Smith's use of equipment built by his racist father as heroes confronting the "thorny history" of comics. Danielle Ryan of /Film praised the portrait of a man defying others' expectations to become better, helped by the empathy of the supporting cast.

  Smith's bisexuality split critics. Ryan said the series let him be "queer without challenging his masculinity," and Jenna Anderson of ComicBook.com welcomed the added LGBTQ representation. Alptraum disagreed. She felt it was easy to miss and reflected only Smith's sexual drive, writing that "we're stuck with a limited vision that reinforces the idea that male bisexuality is nothing more than overflow of indiscriminate horniness." Matt Taylor of Digital Spy likewise called it underrepresented.

  The character has since spread into other media. In the series Suicide Squad Isekai, Takehito Koyasu voices him in Japanese and Seán Patrick Judge in English. The Cena version is playable in Injustice 2 on mobile, Mortal Kombat 1, DC Worlds Collide and Fortnite Battle Royale. In Scribblenauts Unmasked: A DC Comics Adventure, both Christopher Smith and Mitchell Black appear, so the original and his replacement share one game.

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