 | Character Profiles - Villains - Deathstroke
Real Name: Slade Wilson
Occupation: Mercenary
Marital Status: Widower
Base of Operations: Gotham City
Height: 6ft 4in
Weight: 225lbs
Eyes: Blue
Hair: White
First Appearance: New Teen Titans Vol. 1 #2 (December 1980)
Created By: Created by Marv Wolfman and George Pérez
Imbued with enhanced physical prowess by secret army experiments attempting to create metahuman soldiers for the U.S. military, Deathstroke the Terminator (called "Terminator" for most of his published existence) became a mercenary soon after the experiment. However, he kept this career secret from his family, even though his wife was an expert military combat instructor, until a criminal named the Jackal kidnapped his younger son, Joseph, as a hostage to force Slade to divulge the name of a client who had hired him as an assassin. Slade refused to do so, claiming that it was against his personal honor code, and attacked and killed the kidnappers at the rendezvous. Unfortunately, Joseph's throat was slashed by one of the criminals before Slade could prevent it, destroying his vocal cords and rendering him mute. After taking Joseph to the hospital, Slade's wife Adeline, enraged at his endangerment of her son, tried to kill Slade by shooting him, but only managed to destroy his right eye. Afterward, his confidence in his physical abilities was such that he made no secret of his impaired vision, marked by his mask which has a black featureless half covering his lost eye. Without his mask, Slade wears an eyepatch.
Slade has a long history as an enemy of the Teen Titans, beginning when his other son, Grant, became an early Titans foe called the Ravager who was physically enhanced to fulfill a contract to kill or capture the Teen Titans. However, those enhancements proved fatal and Slade agreed to complete the contract. As a result, he attacked the Titans continually and finally succeeded in capturing them by introducing Terra (who he shared an intimate relationship with, despite her being barely sixteen years old) into the team as a spy. At the end of this plot, Slade was defeated and captured with the help of Joseph, who joined the team as Jericho. Slade was put on trial for his crimes, but the trial was deliberately sabotaged by Garfield Logan, aka Beast Boy so that he could kill Slade himself, believing he was responsible for Terra's betrayal of the Titans. However, when the two confronted each other, Gar found himself unable to kill Slade. Feeling some empathy for Gar's grief, Slade explained his past with Terra, and Gar realized he was not to blame for the choices Terra had made. The two men parted on peaceful terms afterward.
Months later, Slade encountered the Titans again while they were investigating a mysterious plague linked to a group of biologically engineered beastmen, one of whom was a target of an assassination by Slade himself. When Troia and Raven were both stricken by the plague, he aided them in destroying the beastmen and finding a cure for the contagion. Shortly after this, he came to the Titan's assistance again during the Titans Hunt storyline when most of their members were abducted by the Wildebeest Society, and proved instrumental in tracking them down, only to discover their leader was none other than Jericho himself. It was revealed that Jericho had been possessed by the corrupted souls of Azarath, who were using him to capture the Titans and use them as physical hosts in order to survive. During the transfer process, Jericho's true self resurfaced briefly, begging his father to kill him. To spare his son any more pain and save the remaining Titans, Slade was forced to drive a sword through Jericho's heart, seemingly killing him. This act still haunts him to this day, though Jericho later turned out to have survived death by transferring his mind into his father's body seconds before his death.
Afterward, Slade continued his life as a mercenary, but also acted as an occasional hero, aiding the Titans or acting on his own to help others, most notably during the Total Chaos storyline when the Team Titans arrived in the 20th Century to assassinate Donna Troy before she could give birth to her son, who in their timeline had grown up into the tyrannical despot, Lord Chaos. His relationship with Gar Logan had also changed around this time to the point where they became friends as well. Slade also met Pat Trayce, a tough former-cop who would become the new costumed Vigilante. Pat Trayce and Slade quickly became lovers, and began a tumultuous on again/off again relationship.
After Slade thwarted an assassination attempt on the President of the United States, he was subsequently framed for the murder of a U.S. Senator. The man responsible had taken on the identity of the Ravager and was hunting down Slade's friends and loved ones. Eventually with the help of the Titans and Sarge Steel, Slade was able to prove his innocence, and the true culprit was revealed to be Steve Dayton, under the alias of the Crimelord, who had again succumbed to mental instability caused by his Mento helmet. Meanwhile, his relationship with his estranged wife Adeline took a tragic turn as Slade underwent a process to gain regeneration power, allowing him to survive any wound so long as his brain is intact (this power is limited, as Slade can not regenerate his lost eye since that injury happened before he gained his healing factor) . After gaining the power, Slade was forced to give his wife a blood transfusion, resulting in her gaining a similar healing factor which manifested itself as a form of immortality. This drove Adeline insane, shaming Deathstroke into going into a semi-retirement state.
Deathstroke teamed up with the Titans to face his wife Adeline, who in her insane state, had revived The H.I.V.E. and sought to rid the world of all superhumans, blaming them for Jericho's death. During the battle, interrupted by Vandal Savage and a band of villains that he had organized from recent Titan battles, Adeline's throat was slit and begged Slade to kill her, since her version of her healing factor wouldn't heal the wound but allow her to live in spite of it. Deathstroke refused, but Koriand'r, aka Starfire of the Teen Titans shocked her teammates and Deathstroke by using her starbolt blast to disintegrating her completely, per Adeline's wishes. This was a turning point, as Deathstroke renounced all ties with the Titans as a result of this act of mercy on Starfire's part.
Recently, it was revealed that Jericho managed to transfer his consciousness into Deathstroke in the instant before his death. Taking control of his father, Jericho forced Deathstroke to murder his longtime butler, mentor, and companion Wintergreen. He then launched a series of attacks against the current Teen Titans, most notably shattering Impulse's knee with a shotgun blast, before leaving his father's body. Deathstroke has since manipulated his one remaining child, Rose Wilson, into the mercenary business as the new Ravager, in order to find and kill Jericho.
During the Identity Crisis, Deathstroke was enlisted as a bodyguard for Doctor Light, who was being chased by the Justice League. In the ensuing battle, Deathstroke nearly beat the team of Elongated Man, the Flash (Wally West), Zatanna, Hawkman, Green Arrow, Black Canary, the Atom, and Green Lantern (Kyle Rayner). He systematically took out every member except for Rayner, whom he had the potential to disable through trying to usurp his ring's energies using his own formidable willpower. But before the outcome of this conflict with Rayner ended, Green Arrow stuck an arrow in Deathstroke's right eye socket, enraging him. Slade went ballistic and began to beat Green Arrow, but was stopped when the majority of the team tackled Deathstroke to the ground. Dr. Light used his powers, and the two escaped. Near the end of Identity Crisis, Deathstroke confronts Green Arrow on a rooftop. Arrow sees his reflection in the windows of a nearby building, but when he turns to confront Slade, Deathstroke is gone. Instead Green Arrow finds Slade's cowl and a note stuck to the wall by the very arrow he stabbed in Slade's eye socket. The note reads, "This is yours - We're not done."
Deathstroke was a founding member of Lex Luthor's Secret Society of Super Villains in the Infinite Crisis storyline. He was seen hiding in a warehouse south of Metropolis waiting to ambush the Freedom Fighters with several other members. The battle didn't last long, and by the end, Deathstroke had impaled Phantom Lady through the chest, calling his action "just business".
He was the employer of an undercover Dick Grayson, whom he hired to train his daughter Rose. However, after the two had a confrontation with Superman, Deathstroke discovered that Nightwing had been teaching Rose the values of heroism. He could not kill Grayson in front of his daughter because doing so would undo all of Slade's teachings. Nightwing offered a deal: he would stay away from Rose if Slade would keep the metahuman villains out of Blüdhaven.
The deal held for 34 hours, when Slade, under the orders of Alexander Luthor Junior, the real leader of the Society, went with several villains — who included old Titans Doom Patrol foes and Brotherhood of Evil members Monsieur Mallah and Brain — to drop Chemo, another fellow villain who appeared to be a nearly brainless monster made of pure energy and radioactive chemicals, on Blüdhaven, killing thousands. Slade gave the explanation to the Brotherhood that Nightwing should be made to believe that he can never go home again.
Grayson took the first of his revenge by bursting in on Deathstroke and Rose's training session, revealing to the latter that the Kryptonite that Deathstroke had implanted in place of her missing eye was radioactive and deadly to humans as well as to Kryptonians (though slower in its effects on humans). Angered, Slade went after Nightwing with a grenade, only to have Rose try to stop him. Amid the smoke of the resulting explosion, Rose fled, telling her father that she hated him. Dick disappeared as well, but not before leaving a note for Slade warning him that he'd be back to make him pay for Blüdhaven.
At the climactic Battle of Metropolis at the conclusion of Infinite Crisis, Slade was confronted by Batman, Robin and Nightwing. During the struggle he was questioned regarding his motives for aiding the Secret Society. His claims of monetary motivation were deemed unsatisfactory, and he was told to take responsibility before being rendered unconscious.
Slade apparently in hiding in Star City, he nearly murders a crony of several Star City businessmen who want to hire him for a murder. Before finishing his violent refusal, he asks the name of the target; when informed that it was to be the mayor of Star City, Oliver Queen (whom Deathstroke knows is secretly Green Arrow), he spares the lackey and decides to take the job. However, things don't quite go according to plan, with Green Arrow using the resources of both his identities, outfighting Deathstroke and then trapping him within a ring of armed National Guardsmen. The fight ends with Deathstroke's arrest and subsequent conviction and incarceration; however, this is revealed as a ploy to gain access to another jailed foe of Green Arrow's who has information on the hero's activities in the "lost year", which include Green Arrow studying under an assassin who once trained Deathstroke himself.
Green Arrow claims that an assassin known as Natas taught Deathstroke "almost everything he knows".
Deathstroke is also active behind the scenes in Teen Titans, currently in the process of organizing a counter-team of teen superhumans that will be known as Titans East. The current Titans team includes Ravager, who now wants nothing to do with her father. Deathstroke intends to "reclaim" Ravager and a recently resurrected Jericho from the Titans or, if that fails, to crush them along with the rest of the team. For these reasons, he's specially choosing each member of Titans East. Deathstroke believes Titans East, overall, will successfully counteract every member of the current Teen Titans line-up. As indicated over the course of recent issues, Deathstroke is manipulating every member of his new team in one way or another. He has blackmailed former Titan Risk, is drugging Cassandra Cain and supplying Inertia with a formula which grants superhuman speed.
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