Slade Wilson Has Only One Eye And It Changes Colour!

While filling out the guest-appearances page some more, I stumbled into another cover used in solicitation material that was later modified.

I don't know specifically what threw it off course, but about halfway through the The Team 7 series from 2012, what was delivered varied greatly from what was advertised. Come to think of it, the Deathstroke book at the time (volume two) and the other series in which he was appearing, The Ravagers, were also apparently disrupted greatly. All the books were lightly connected at the time so probably several changes were dictated in one book and those caused ripples in the others.

In any event, here's the cover that was used for issue six, with solicitation text below.

In a tale from the recent past, Team 7 is on a mission to rescue Caitlin Fairchild when a team member dies. Meanwhile, in the present day, Deathstroke hunts down his former Team 7 partners.

If my memory is sound, that is actually fairly close to that issue's content.  And the text hasn't changed much from what was originally promoted in February 2013. So little, in fact, that I won't even bother to copy it.

But the cover went through some significant alterations. This was the one displayed prior to its release.

Most of the changes make sense. The "final" version is more focused and arguably more eye-catching.

I personally prefer the colouring on the early version with one exception; Slade Wilson has blue eyes (well...one...) so either someone did his/her research or an attempt to make the newer cover more attractive coincidentally made it more accurate as well.

August 10th updates

Continuing to list Deathstroke's publishing history, here's what was added to certain site pages earlier today:

Volume One: Issue #31, part five of the World Tour.

This was a good time to be a Deathstroke fan. If Amazon.ca can be trusted, a second compilation of the first volume will be released at the end of the year collecting issues 10-13 and the first annual (which featured one of my favourite cover all-time, at right). If plans are to continue doing so, no doubt the World Tour will be included as it was a fun, self-contained story within the series. It's very accessible to current readers.

Volume Three: Issue #8, part of the Godkiller story line, released July 22nd.

Guest-Appearances: Forever Evil: A.R.G.U.S. issues one and two.

Deathstroke's contribution to these two books is rather brief, but at least his background with Steve Trevor is recognized. Trevor appeared in the last two issues of Team Seven as a member of that group. He crossed paths with Deathstroke as a result, but I don't recall a specific cause for the animosity that Slade shows towards Trevor in  A.R.G.U.S. Mind you, in light of how the entire Team Seven project all went to pot, Slade might just want to put a bullet in anything that reminds him of it.

The page for Volume Two is pretty well done aside from minor corrections and details, and Volume Three gets updated more or less as books are released.  As the page for Volume One continues to fill up, as well as the guest-appearances page and the one dedicated to Rose Wilson, then new ones will be created to cover Deathstroke's appearances in the digital books dedicated to the Arkham series of video games and to the Arrow TV show. Looking forward to that, actually, because much of that material will be new to me.

Future's End May Erase Even More Recent Past

A few posts ago, it was mentioned that the second volume of Deathstroke solo title erased, or adjusted, a significant amount of his pre-Flashpoint history and that of his daughter, Rose Wilson.

DC Comics relaunched their entire line in September 2011 so some of that revision was to be expected. Except that they may now be ignoring some of those revisions already.

While I very much enjoy DC's characters for the most part, I get tired of the multiple alternate versions that they have. The Future's End series, as a result, was of no interest to me. A story that takes place in a near future "that may not happen" (it won't, and we all know it) isn't much of a draw.

But they had a sale on Comixology recently during which individual issues could be bought digitally for about $1 each. I took advantage of that opportunity to sample the product, knowing that Deathstroke was included.

Note: While I only have about the first 10 or so issues, I know what happens later in the series between Barda and Slade. If this future never comes to pass, I think I need to be grateful as a Deathstroke fan.

In any event...In the few issues I've read, I've only seen Slade Wilson without the mask and not involved in any action whatsoever. He's working for an organization that is attempting to recruit one Cole Cash (ugh...), otherwise known as Grifter, due to the latter's ability to see through all manners of deception. The organization is hunting down super-powered characters and wish to use Grifter's abilities to facilitate locating targets.

Fair enough, and a good evolution of Grifter's abilities. The puzzling thing is that when Slade and Grifter meet, they don't seem to know one another.

And they really should. They worked together in Team 7. That team did not last long, granted, but long enough that the two characters should recognize one another about ten years later.

Perhaps it's just a matter of the writing style of the dialogue clouding the issue a bit. At left, 'Stroke seems to say the name "Grifter" as though he has never used it before. And maybe he hasn't. I don't recall if Cash used it while with Team 7 but I don't believe any of the characters in that book used their present codenames at the time.

Still, Slade calls their recruit "Mr. Cash" which is inconsistent with how he talked to him in Team 7 anyway. They were certainly on a first name basis.

There may a part of a story somewhere that I have yet to read which explains this lack of recognition between the two characters. Or something that happened in the five-year gap leading up to Future's End that had the same effect. Or both characters are faking for the benefit of that little girl character that I didn't really get (or enjoy).

Because while Team 7 was hardly a classic, it's story meshed with the final few issues of Deathstroke's second volume, its zero issue, and the end of Ravagers series. That would be an awful lot of continuity to scuttle after rebooting your entire line in order to clarify your continuity.

It should be pointed out that some of the solicitations and covers for Team 7 don't actually reveal what goes on inside the book, so perhaps there was editorial involvement that caused the story to change.

Let's close things out with a sharp variant cover to the third issue of Team 7, by Ivan Reis, Rod Reis and Joe Prado.