God, I miss Floyd Lawton.
Sure, Justice League of America #7.1 is actually a one-shot story about some guy with the same name, but the new origin by Matt Kindt (whose work I normally enjoy) assures us once and for all that the guy we used to like under John Ostrander and Gail Simone’s pen is gone for good, and in his place is a completely generic and painfully boring lump they’re calling Deadshot. The basics are sort of the same – mercenary with really good aim.
Floyd Lawton was a child of privilege whose parents were cold, manipulative and mentally ill, and when his mother convinced his favored brother Eddie to kill their father, his attempt to stop that from happening disastrously caused him to accidentally murder his own brother, which gave him a suicidal death wish complex. Floyd Lawton Jr. is now a poor kid from the Narrows whose entire well-meaning family was just incidentally killed when jerks with machine guns killed their neighbors, which made him totally want revenge. There’s a slightly interesting element of ‘dumb luck’ in this rewrite, but it nonetheless feels utterly run of the mill.
Deadshot used to be a sleek, unencumbered gunman with cool weapons on his wrists and an eerily spare mask whose only feature was a single gunsight eyehole. While his questionable color scheme of red, yellow and gray could have used some refurbishing, his lack of style was part of his character. But the New 52 revamp of his look gave him an ugly, messy robot-looking helmet and giant metal-ridged shoulderpads for no good reason, making him look clunky and entirely encumbered.
Floyd Lawton used to be a black-haired, mustachioed, hard-bitten chain-smoker with a dark depth of ugly experience in his eyes, having lost a son to a predator and made a point of never giving a damn about anything else ever again – a vow it takes a lot to get him to break – but who also wasn’t afraid to crack a nasty joke. He is now a dirty blond, featureless young man with empty eyes who hates wasting things and seems entirely humorless.
Some may say it’s not fair to compare the New 52 versions of anything to what they were before after years of storytelling, but of all the characters who needed a revamp, Floyd Motherfucking Lawton was not one of them. He was my favorite DC character, and now he’s just a bland void of dullness. It’s impossible not to keep harping on what we’ve lost.
My Suicide Squad reading has been spotty at best, so I don’t know if Kindt is retelling an origin already explained there, or if he was given the chance to define it here, but either way, there’s no real power to it at all beyond the ‘oops’ nature of it. Even having Deadshot fall out of a plane to give enough momentum to his bullet to crack a jerk’s suit of armor and make sure he’s dead and then killing a kid just in case he’d become another version of him doesn’t succeed in making you give a crap about him. He’s just a completely nothing character right now and it’s goddamned depressing.
Sam Basri & Keith Champagne handle the modern art, while Carmen Carnero & Bit do the flashback sequences, and they do a fine job – the latter pair even give us a little twinge when they make Floyd Lawton Sr. look slightly like the guy we used to know. But any Deadshot story these days just leaves me cold.
So, I’ve decided that whenever I discuss a story with Deadshot in it, I’ll just include some random set of panels from what he used to be.
