The Guardian
From Barbelith
Background
There's an interview with Guardian artist Cameron Stewart over here at Newsarama (http://forum.newsarama.com/showthread.php?t=28040) that gives more info about the new Guardian, Jake Jordan, and his battles against the Subway Pirates. But there were two prior heroes who bore the name The Guardian. (As well as a real-life British newspaper, with a center-left political slant. This is notable since the hero has usually fought alongside The Newsboy Legion.)
GUARDIAN I and III [Jim Harper]
First Appearance: Star-Spangled Comics #7 (April 1942)
The original Guardian was a Kirby-created hero of the Golden Age, sometimes seen in stories alongside big hitters like Superman. In his home title, however, he was a supporting player -- a cop who became the legal guardian of the misfit kids of The Newsboy Legion. He fought crime in the blue-and-yellow suit he appropriated after three thugs cornered him in a costume shop.
In the 1970s, Kirby brought the character back by having the Cadmus Project (the original Newsboy Legion all grown up) clone Harper to act as their security officer, under the name The Golden Guardian. An honest, moral man, Harper often regretted that he could not get out into the 'real world' as often as he would have liked. Not having super-powers as such, he was nevertheless a strong man and an experienced fighter and tactician. Recently, the cloned Guardian was killed, although another child clone survived. This clone is rapidly growing up, but has not yet reached adulthood - he finds himself in the care of Superboy, one of those he was previously assigned to watch over.
GUARDIAN II [Mal Duncan]
This part gets a bit confusing. The easiest thing to do is to read this "Titans Tower" bio (http://www.titanstower.com/source/whoswho/mal.html) of Mal Duncan. Do some scrolling -- the good part is about three-quarters of the page down, after the image with the familiar gold helmet, in the "Pre-Crisis" section.
Notably, this version of the Guardian -- a sometime Teen Titan who inherited a powered exoskeleton from Guardian I -- went on to use a magic/high-tech horn as a weapon, as does Boy Blue in Seven Soldiers 0. The Guardian's horn was cursed by a demon, which altered it so that every time it was used, it weakened the boundary between this world and Limbo -- possibly echoing the interdimensional attack of the Sheeda.
Also note that Jim Harper was written as the uncle of Green Arrow's sidekick Speedy (real name: Roy Harper). It was Speedy, a Teen Titan, who gave Harper's uniform to Duncan... and, pre-Crisis, Speedy was one of the Seven Soldiers.
New Story
Genre: crime drama, pirate adventure (with a generous helping of urban legends tossed in).
Location: Manhattan, New York City -- and the Secret Subways underneath.
The issues:
Other appearances:
- Jake Jordan also makes a cameo appearance in Mister Miracle #3
Morrison on The Guardian, in a Comicon interview (http://www.comicon.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=36;t=004150), 5 Sept 05: "The Guardian is Jake Jordan, a troubled ex-cop who's recruited as the in-house superhero of a crusading tabloid newspaper called the Manhattan Guardian. He gets involved in bizarre, tabloid style stories as a crimefighting reporter…. "With Guardian again, I knew from Kirby's original design that the Guardian was intended to be a superhero cop…. His shield is in the shape of a cop's badge. He began as the notion of the beat cop turned superhero, so I took my cue from the original and instead of a 1940s cop I dressed my Guardian in a kind of Riot Police version of the familiar gold and blue outfit."
Read more about The Guardian and The Newsboy Legion in Toonopedia (http://www.toonopedia.com/gnewsboy.htm).
Back to Seven Soldiers Annotations
