Solomon Grundy (character)

• 1. Introduction

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  Solomon Grundy is a DC Comics supervillain, and now and then an antihero, who took his name from a 19th-century nursery rhyme. He first lurched onto the page in All-American Comics #61, dated October 1944. Writer Alfred Bester created him as an enemy for Alan Scott, the original Green Lantern. Over the decades he grew into a rival for Superman, Batman and the wider Justice League. Strangely, he has also been tied to Swamp Thing, one of DC's horror-fantasy heroes. Behind the lumbering strongman sits a stranger set of puzzles. Who was the man beneath the mud, and did he deserve what happened to him? Why does a creature that heroes keep destroying always find a way back? And what should we make of the rare moments when something gentle stirs inside the monster? The answers change depending on the writer, the decade and sometimes the universe, and that is where this story begins.

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• 2. A Merchant in the Swamp

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  In the late 19th century, a wealthy merchant named Cyrus Gold was murdered, and his body was dumped in Slaughter Swamp, near Gotham City. Fifty years later, the corpse rose again. It was rebuilt partly from swamp matter and carried no memory of the man it had been.

  Later writers would not leave that origin alone. In Grant Morrison's Seven Soldiers of Victory, one of the Seven Unknown Men of Slaughter Swamp describes Gold's death at the hands of an enraged mob. He calls Gold miserly, yet admits Gold might just as easily have been an innocent victim of a misunderstanding. Slaughter Swamp, he adds, is a point in space where time means nothing.

  In the final issue, the same Unknown Man punishes another of his group, the Eighth Man, Zor. He dresses Zor in Cyrus Gold's clothing and leaves him for the mob to find. Zor was a vain figure who had tried several times to overthrow the universe, and he had once defeated The Spectre. The story implies that Zor would become the first Solomon Grundy.

  The New 52 version of Earth-Two offers a far bleaker beginning. Here Grundy is the champion of the Grey, a cosmic force connecting fungal life. He once worked in a slaughterhouse. After the foreman, Henry Pittance, assaulted his wife Pinney, she took her own life. Grundy then killed everyone in the facility and finally himself.

  None of these beginnings erased the others. The first hero to collide with the swamp's creation was Alan Scott, and his power ring was about to meet a problem it could not easily solve.

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• 3. Wood Against the Ring

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  A criminal scientist calling himself the Baron of York killed his own brother to seize the man's gang. He told his new followers he knew where Solomon Grundy's body lay. Once it was found, he injected Grundy with concentrated chlorophyll, and the side effect turned Grundy into a plant. The Baron then bluffed that Grundy would worship and serve him. Grundy killed him and took over the gang.

  Green Lantern found the new creature harder than ever to stop, since the chlorophyll made Grundy even more resistant to his ring. The chase ended in the petrified forest in Arizona, where the exhausted hero trapped Grundy in a bubble of green plasma. A freak weather event soon set him free.

  Grundy crossed the country toward the headquarters of the Justice Society of America. The members arrived to find the place smashed to pieces and Green Lantern missing. A large, muddy footprint on the floor convinced them that Grundy had taken their colleague. Johnny turned on the radio, which listed cities where Grundy had been seen. Each hero picked a city, and only Wonder Woman stayed behind.

  In fact, Green Lantern had left earlier, after Doiby Dickles warned him that Grundy was loose. Grundy then arrived, found no one, and wrecked the room. Lantern and Doiby used a device attuned to Grundy's mental wavelengths to predict where he would strike next. When the two met, Grundy ripped a tree out by its roots and swung it at the hero. They tumbled into a stream and over a small waterfall. Grundy held Lantern's head underwater until Hawkman struck him with a mace. Doctor Mid-Nite revived the Lantern, and a combined attack brought the monster down. Green Lantern left Grundy on a distant, lifeless planet.

  The exile did not last. Grundy's body drifted toward a young astronomer named Dick Cashmere, who was learning to ride light waves. Grundy took on Cashmere's identity for a time and left the real man bound and gagged. In this phase he gained intelligence, but he lost it again when Green Lantern defeated and buried him in 1947. Someone with a grudge against the Justice Society would soon dig him up.

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• 4. Borrowed Magic

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  Per Degaton, a time-traveling criminal, freed Grundy and recruited him alongside several other supervillains. Degaton traveled back to 1941 to capture the Justice Society on the day of the attack, hoping to change history and take over the world. In Echo Park, Grundy met Green Lantern, Flash and Wonder Woman, whom he already knew from 1947. He bested all three. The All-Star Squadron came to their rescue, and Grundy was the last villain sent back. He ended up on the Moon, where he stayed for over two decades, because the timeline was erased once Degaton was defeated.

  Eventually Grundy was knocked loose from his prison and returned to Earth to fight Green Lantern, Hourman and Doctor Fate. For a while he held temporary mastery over all wooden objects. Lantern and Doctor Fate combined their powers to lock him in a stronger bubble, orbiting the Earth.

  Later, a machine accidentally pulled two Earths together in warp-space and swapped people between them. Grundy was pulled to Earth-One in place of the superstrong Blockbuster. By then he had absorbed some of Doctor Fate's magic, which made him stronger and let him telekinetically lift Flash into the air. He hated Green Lantern so much that he took everyone he saw for the hero. When the machine shut off, he and Blockbuster swapped back and Grundy defeated numerous heroes on his home Earth. Meanwhile the JSA and the Justice League of America were off fighting an Anti-Matter being that threatened both worlds. When they returned, they found that Lantern had left Grundy and Blockbuster together to occupy each other, and the two had knocked the hate out of each other.

  On another occasion, Grundy convinced himself that the second Green Lantern's Earth must hold a second Solomon Grundy. He crossed over, overpowered that Earth's Superman, and was tricked and stranded on the moon. The Fiddler later fetched him from there to help the Injustice Society attack the JSA. Together they beat Hawkman and Wildcat, until Power Girl and Superman threw Grundy into a cooling volcano.

  All of that violence set the stage for a very different side of him.

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• 5. Affection and Betrayal

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  At Slaughter Swamp, Grundy once fought the Justice Society and the Justice League almost to a standstill. Then he developed an affection for a lost alien child who had been accidentally sent to Earth-Two and was dying from separation from his pet. Grundy had absorbed magic from Doctor Fate and Green Lantern, and he easily beat Superman, Flash, two versions of Hawkman and Green Lantern. Both Green Lanterns together finally sealed him in the swamp. The child was reunited with his pet and sent home.

  The Huntress was the first woman Grundy came to care for. After Alan Scott's daughter, Jade, rescued him from a glacier, he became loyal to her and, for a while, allied himself with Infinity, Inc. That bond was exploited by Marcie Cooper, who as Harlequin belonged to the Dummy's Injustice Unlimited. She used illusions to pose as Jade and sent Grundy after the members of Infinity Inc. one by one. She convinced him to press the bare hand of the unconscious Mister Bones against Skyman. Bones's skin constantly exudes a cyanide-based compound, and Skyman died quickly. When Grundy learned he had been tricked, he beat Marcie to within an inch of her life. The source calls this the beginning of the end for Infinity Inc. and for his quasi-heroic career.

  After Infinity, Inc. broke up, his loyalty to Jade faded. A later clash with Alan Scott and Jade in Green Lantern Corps Quarterly ended with Grundy turned into a statue of petrified wood.

  Other friendships were gentler. In Starman, Jack Knight befriended Grundy in the sewers of Opal City, where the creature had become innocent and childlike. He also befriended the earlier Starman, Mikaal Tomas, and died saving Jack Knight from a collapsing building. In Batman: The Long Halloween, Grundy struck up an odd friendship with a newly disfigured Harvey Dent. Batman, in a humorous twist, gave Grundy a Thanksgiving dinner. When Rag Doll met Grundy in a doorway during the Secret Society's attack on the Secret Six, Rag Doll's scarred face made Grundy relate to him, and he turned against the Society.

  In the DC Rebirth era, the Huntress recruited Grundy into the Justice Society, the same team that once fought to bring him down.

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• 6. The Earth-One Copy

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  When the Earth-Two Grundy visited Earth-One, he left some residual cells behind in the sewers. The Parasite used an enhanced crystal to speed up their growth, and a new Earth-One Solomon Grundy was born. This one was far more bestial than the original.

  Superman quickly learned that he could not beat him in a straight fight. Instead he flew the monster to an alien world inhospitable to all but the hardiest life. The zombie followed by propelling himself through the air, copying his enemy's flight. This version plagued Superman for years.

  The story reached a crisis when multiple Grundys were spawned. Superman and the Swamp Thing both encountered the clones. Superman then obtained a compound from S.T.A.R. Labs that made the Grundys inert, in effect killing the seemingly unkillable creature. The Swamp Thing tried to cry out for Superman to stop, because he believed Grundy met the definition of life. His difficulty in speaking made that impossible.

  This Grundy returned one last time, without explanation, leading a gang in the Earth-One Gotham City. Batman tricked him into a blast furnace, and he was apparently consumed by the flames. When Superman was revamped in Crisis on Infinite Earths, this entire version of Grundy was retroactively erased from history. What followed would be the Post-Crisis Grundy, whose rebirths would become a recurring pattern.

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• 7. The Cycle of Death

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  The title of Green Arrow (vol. 3) #18 is "Grundy No Like Arrows in the Face!". In it, Grundy has been hiding in the Arrowcave, Green Arrow's long-abandoned former headquarters. Oliver Queen and Roy Harper, also known as Arsenal, stumble onto his hideout. Green Arrow notes that this Grundy seems much more violent, and he kills him by choking him with the string from his broken bow. The feat is remarkable because Grundy has no heartbeat, no functional veins and no need to breathe. In issue #53, "Solomon's Revenge", Dr. Chrissie Cavendish of S.T.A.R. Labs claims to be the great-great-granddaughter of the man the monster spawned from. She tries to cure him, but the cure warps her into something worse than Grundy. Green Arrow subdues her and leaves Grundy alone.

  The Parliament of Trees, a high council of Plant Elementals, tried to make Grundy the newest Plant Elemental. The process needed fire, since a Plant Elemental cannot be fully created unless it died in flames. Grundy's death involved no fire at all, so he became only a half-functional Plant Elemental. That helps explain why he keeps rising from the swamp in new incarnations, each shaped by how he was last destroyed. Some are truly evil and some far less so. Some are mindless, and some are moderately intelligent, recalling the literate monster of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

  The pattern repeats across the crossover events. Superboy-Prime's heat vision vaporized him at the Battle of Metropolis. In Brad Meltzer's Justice League of America, Grundy was reborn with intelligence and wanted to end his cycle of dying and returning. He enlisted Professor Ivo to build him an Amazo body to live in forever, but Red Tornado ripped him apart with F5 tornado winds. In Salvation Run he was killed by Parademons, and his abandoned body's hand trembled as the villains left.

  His powers explain the persistence. He has superhuman strength and stamina, a healing factor, and resistance to fire, cold, and physical, magical and energy attacks. In his earliest appearances he could even turn the ground around him into a bog.

  The story of the cycle reached its sharpest form in the 2009 one-shot Faces of Evil: Solomon Grundy by Geoff Johns and Scott Kolins. Cyrus Gold returns to life in Slaughter Swamp and goes to Gotham City, where police shoot him after he attacks a charity worker. In the morgue he transforms into Grundy, an unintelligent monster repeating the opening line of the rhyme. After a fight with Killer Croc in the sewers, he reverts to Gold. At his own grave, the Phantom Stranger warns him: "There is an unholy night coming, as black as the dead's blood. And it's best if Solomon Grundy was not around for it."

  Gold has one week to learn who murdered him, repent for his sins and gain absolution. Alan Scott serves as his reluctant guide beside the Phantom Stranger, while Etrigan tries to drag him to Hell. Gold keeps getting killed and returning as a complete Grundy driven to kill. In the end it is revealed that Gold killed himself, which means he inflicted the curse of Solomon Grundy on himself. Afterward Grundy returns as a Black Lantern, and Gold lands in hell. Grundy attacks Bizarro, using a past friendship to stir the creature's emotions. Bizarro defeats him by flying him into the sun, destroying him and the black ring.

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• 8. Grundy Everywhere

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  On the television show Gotham, Drew Powell played Butch Gilzean, a mob enforcer who works for Fish Mooney and who was born Cyrus Gold. Through the first three seasons, he serves Oswald Cobblepot, Tabitha Galavan and Barbara Kean, until Kean kills him for trying to betray her. In the fourth season, hospital administrators dump his body in Slaughter Swamp, where chemical waste from the Indian Hill facility turns him into a pale, regenerating, superhumanly strong creature. Suffering amnesia, he chooses the name Solomon Grundy after hearing people play a record of the nursery rhyme. Edward Nygma recruits him as an enforcer, until Galavan jogs his memory.

  Stargirl portrayed Grundy through CGI. In the first season he serves the Injustice Society of America and is kept in a reinforced cell. Rick Tyler, whose father Hourman Grundy killed years earlier, spares him at the first season finale on the condition that he never returns. In the second season Grundy breaks into restaurants for food, so Rick leaves meals for him in the forest. Grundy comes to see Rick as a friend, assists the Justice Society against Eclipso, and is killed in battle. Rick buries him, though Shade assures him Grundy will come back. By the series finale he has been resurrected and joined the JSA.

  In animation, Mark Hamill voiced a Grundy in Justice League who was a mobster from the 1920s, resurrected as a monster and searching for a lost soul he did not know he had. He befriends Hawkgirl and sacrifices himself to help her and Doctor Fate stop the Thanagarian deity Ichthultu. Fred Tatasciore has voiced the character many times since, in series, films and games. In The Batman episode "Grundy's Night", the creature was created by working-class citizens of 19th-century Gotham to wreak havoc on rich landowners who polluted a lake with industrial waste. Legend says he will rise again on a Halloween night with a total lunar eclipse. In Robot Chicken's DC special, he is named Solomon Gruesday because he was actually born on a Tuesday.

  In the Batman: Arkham games, Slaughter Swamp is revealed to be a Lazarus Pit. Ra's al Ghul repeatedly murders Grundy to study the pit's power, and Gotham City is eventually built over his prison.

  The character even reached music. The Crash Test Dummies mention him in "Superman's Song", because lead singer Brad Roberts could not think of a supervillain whose name rhymed with "money". A late-1980s side project of the Screaming Trees took Grundy's name, with Van Conner as lead singer, and rapper Sean Price recorded a track called "Solomon Grundy" on his album Mic Tyson.

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