#please understand that I'm calling your mini the Waluigi of the Cannon Canon as a compliment

[maxwell-grant]

Asking because apparently he has a crossover with the Shadow and the Spider : do you have any thought on Peter Cannon, Thunderbolt ?

(Spoilers for, all of the Peter Cannon stories basically)

While there’s been a lot of discussion around the Gillen/Wijngaard 2019 mini and it is, easily, the best comic made with the character and one I’d heartily recommend to everyone, I’m instead gonna be talking more here about Peter Cannon the character, who turned out to be a much more fascinating rabbit hole of information to dive into than I’d expected. Much like his stolen costume implies, Cannon is a character of dualities and contradictions.

Peter Cannon is actually owned by the estates of Pete Morisi, his original creator. In other words, it's a creator-owned superhero from an era which tended to have the rights consumed by the corporate bodies. When you compare and contrast to Watchmen's eventual fate, that's a fun one for me to think about - Kieron Gillen

He is not just another Charlton survivor drastically altered and fragmented by the Watchmen cataclysm: he is this epistolary composite of several different characters and ideas in conversation with each other, characters whose legal rights and defining traits are all over the place and still kind of building up on each other even now. He is, simultaneously, more fragmented than his Charlton brothers, and yet the only one who’s been able to remain consistent over the decades. Peter’s roots go back further than theirs, even though he is currently exiled from the universe they’ve been relocated to, a state of affairs that in some ways makes it so that he is, at once, more trapped under Watchmen’s shadow, as well as more free from it.

He's like a weird game of telephone that started in the crudest beginnings of the Golden Age superheroics, and with at least one touchstone every couple of decades all the way until today (he got a new series announced this year even), with different characters all inspired by each other and ripping off each other to various degrees existing separately across 80+ years, each belonging to different rights holders and universes, oscilating wildly in popularity, influence, and just how much they have in common with each othe, but still telling a long-running story as if they were one and the same, which they are and aren’t.

We have the original sources (and ensuing riffs or public-domain usages of said sources), the creation of knock-off created due to licensing issues who’d become an established character in his own right, different attempts at remixing the source ingredients ultimately creating knock-off of a knock-off, the badboy knock-off of the original knock-off who’d catch on with the times and go on to be massively popular, and then things would break down as said knock-offs start to congeal together in fragmented mirror freakshows of each other that have to exist together and who knows what’ll happen from there.

Or, I guess to try and put it more simply,

-cough-

Cannon’s even had more than a couple of separate “universes” and superhero casts built around him, by virtue of the fact that his comics cannot have access to the actual Charlton supporting cast, so they have to fill in for stand-ins, and because he’s under that pulp/public domain zone, his comic runs don’t really have any continuity with each other, except they kind of do, because they are all building up on each other even if just thematically. The Cannon Canon is rather limited, and every writer who tackles the character has had to go back and dig into the prior runs to find.

Peter Cannon being several entities in one isn’t even just a facet of their turbulent publishing history, it’s an aspect that’s actually made it’s way into their stories proper. The 90s DC run established that Peter is the reincarnation of the monastery’s greatest hero Varja (a misspelling of vajra, a divine weapon/tool which symbolizes the properties of a thunderbolt). The 2012 run took a plot point from the classic run that was Peter’s manifesting a life-like dragon illusion to scare a villain into retreating (and how that ended up foretelling Ozymandias’ whole “world peace through giant squid attack” plan), and made the storyline about how Peter Cannon-Thunderbolt and The Dragon, the world-conquering threat he called upon to defeat and enact a benign version of Veidt’s plan, were one and the same. And the 2019 run had Peter’s development born from encounters with two separate versions of himself: Thunderbolt, the Ozymandias stand-in who’s been repeating alien genocides across worlds for 30 years in the hopes of it eventually working, and Pete Cannon, a professor who lives a fulfilling human life in a world without superheroes.

Peter Cannon is Bill Everett’s Amazing-Man using Daredevil’s costume and setting (said Daredevil would go on to appear again and again Death-Defying Devil and any number of different names the character’s appeared under because his original name is taken and his characterization can be anything). Peter Cannon is Thunderbolt. He is The Dragon. He is Iron Fist, who is another rich white blonde masked adventurer/vigilante/martial artist rework of Everett’s Amazing-Man. He is Adrian Veidt, who is Ozymandias. He is Thunderbolt from another world, who is Peter Cannon as well as Ozymandias and Dr Manhattan. He is Pete Cannon. He will probably be something else in the near future as well, as a response to the world around him.

His original 60s stories capitalized on the increasing interest in martial arts and martial arts philosophies, the perpetual Western fascination with buddhism and Tibet and love of orientalist tropes that had taken on, shall we say more benign forms, compared to the early 1910s or 1930s, with Peter Cannon being both the ultimate White Savior, as well as someone who wants nothing whatsoever to do with said “whiteness” and the world outside of the monastery, and that being such an inescapable aspect of his entire backstory and make-up, that it forces writers into a dilemma as to how they deal with it, and thus, find ways to make it workable. His 90s run was heavily focused on post-Cold War politics, Peter’s PTSD as well as reworking him into a better, more compassionate hero as a response to Ozymandias as well as working with the idea that Peter would eventually go on to join the DCU, which didn’t happen. The 2012 series takes a broader focus on disarmament and recontextualizing the character, and the 2019 series is pointedly about a lot of things and many of them have to do with Watchmen and the broader superhero genre, but also where Peter stands in said genre and world, what is it that this character speaks to or about.

What fascinates me is how utterly reluctant Peter Cannon is to get involved. He mostly wants to chill with his best mate, Tabu. Stories are often about the push and pull between Peter Cannon (who wants to just study the ancient scrolls and be left alone) and Tabu (who wants him to go and be the Superhero Thunderbolt.) This happens again and again through the run, almost to the point of comedy. It's rare that you see a superhero who needs as much pushing to do something.

He’s like a more responsible early Peter Parker. Actually, he’s like if Peter Parker had better ethics and morals. And with Tabu it’s like Uncle Ben never died.

The push and pull between Peter Cannon the man and Thunderbolt the hero is the interesting weird part of it. We're led to someone who's Sherlock-Holmes smart, with a similar distance, but has nothing but contempt for the world's mainstream civilizations. Why be a superhero when this is the world he's protecting? At the same time he doesn't - as Ozymandias did in Watchmen - fall into the trick of believing just because he knows more he gets to tear it all down.

It’s to some degree close to the trope of the white savior, but rather than someone like, say, Iron Fist, the interesting thing is Peter Cannon literally has not earned it. He’s not the best or anything else. He didn’t choose his path. He knows he’s not worthy. He’s an apex human, but he’s an apex human because of this other civilization that is better than we are.

If you ask 99 out of 100 superhero comic fans to tell you something about Peter Cannon, they’ll say inspiration for Ozymandias. You can’t avoid that. As a device to talk about influence and how comics change, with Peter Cannon you cannot avoid the ghost of Ozymandias.

But it has to be bigger than that - Kieron Gillen on Thunderbolt

I find it interesting also how Peter’s personality contrasts with what he is, what makes him more interesting than the typical white savior. He didn’t find a magical monastery amidst general globetrotting, he wasn’t rescued and taught magic martial arts and decided to use them to go and fight crime, he quite literally had no choice in the matter. He was born in the monastery (or taken there as a 6-month old baby), his parents died due to a plague he just barely survived, and he was raised by monks for 20 years and decreed to be The Chosen One (whether by the sheer improbability of his arrival and survival there, or as a gesture of honor toward his parents), and then instructed to return home and help others in his native land, a land he had no memory or fondness or any attachment for.

He grew up in a fantasy land of great knowledge and compassion and magic that was constantly targeted by a rotten and corrupt outside world trying to destroy and plunder it it, and then he was ordered as an adult to go live in that rotten and corrupt world and fix it because it’s where he comes from, having superheroism thrust upon him by no choice of his own. The rest of the world looks at him with awe and wonder and fear because he’s a Great Man capable of impossible things, things that to him are basic and banal and things he hasn’t really mastered as much as he could or should. At the same time he complains about the world outside home, he’s also driven to prove himself, to live up to his calling as The Chosen One, and it sucks. Being The Chosen One sucks for him, sucks in general, and it’s what he is. I think there’s a lot of potential to a superhero take on The Chosen One that fully explores just how awful that trope is and how disastrous it could be to said hero (Griffith from Berserk is one example of that)

It’s an interesting position he’s coming from as to why he’s a reluctant hero, why he’s so removed from his call. Even before Ozymandias, there's an aspect of Peter Cannon's core concept that makes him feel indeed like he's being more forced into heroism than anything and that, under different circumstances, it wouldn’t take much to push him into villain territory to begin with. Which is why his runs are so preoccupied with Cannon’s humanity, Cannon’s connections to the people around him, and Tabu specifically, that make him human. It’s where this impossible superhuman genius Great Man with the world on his shoulders, trying to navigate an impossible position with catastrophic room for error, with such proven potential for darkness, gets to breathe easy and find help, remember that saving the world is never a one-person job and that he is not alone.

I love how this is consistently where all three of his last major runs have ended on, in the 90s with his growing humanity and friendship with Tabu, in the 2012 mini where Tabu and the Charlton stand-ins come to save him at the end, and in the 2019 mini where he is forced to acknowledge his own failings, his own self-described lack of personhood and the consequences of a genius far removed from humanity making decisions for it, so that he might overcome them and grow into a better man and friend, and that’s how we end with this,

some 60 or 80+ years of storytelling for this character, and the other characters he’s been, somehow forming a remarkably coherent character arc through it all and a promising future, or at least, the potential for one. Not that this was necessary for reading said run or getting to this moment, but going through the entirety of the Peter Cannon Canon before rereading the 2019 mini definitely gave me much needed context for the character, and also reaffirmed that this kiss, this development of Peter and Tabu’s dynamic? This was a long time coming. Come what may, I’m terribly interested in what else will come out of this strange and fascinating amalgam of comics history (so long as it doesn’t have a certain raccoon man’s name attached to it) and what the future holds for Peter Cannon and whatever else he may be next.