Peacemaker Just Brought an Unlikely Team of Superman Villains to the DCU

This post contains spoilers for Peacemaker season 2 episode 3.

By this point, we shouldn’t be surprised when James Gunn pulls an obscure DC Comics character for one of his projects, but he may have outdone himself in the latest episode of Peacemaker. While visiting the alternate reality where he’s a beloved hero, Chris Smith (John Cena) and alternate Emilia Harcourt (Jennifer Holland) witness an attack on a Federal Building by a paramilitary group calling themselves the Sons of Liberty.

Unless you were a fan of that one time in the mid-’90s when Bloodwynd, Maxima, and Agent Liberty were on the Justice League, the Sons of Liberty might be just as anonymous as Sons of Themyscira, whom Gunn dredged up and reimagined as Men’s Rights Activists in Creature Commandos. But if you do remember Agent Liberty, then you know the Sons of Liberty as part of an interesting storyline from Superman comics at the time.

The Sons of Liberty debuted in 1991’s Superman #53, written and drawn by Jerry Ordway, as a shadow organization that seeks to overthrow the American government and replace it with one that better adheres to the Sons’ understanding of the Founders’ ideals. In addition to its military wing, the Sons of Liberty also consist of powerful business leaders and they have a costumed hero in the form of the aforementioned Agent Liberty. In their stories from the early ’90s, the Sons of Liberty kidnap Superman’s old Smallville flame Lana Lang to manipulate her fiancé Pete Ross, Superman’s best pal in Smallville and, by the time of that story, senator from Kansas. The Sons met their end when Agent Liberty turned against them, killing principal members and leaking their secrets to Clark Kent.

Obviously, if the Sons of Liberty can be easily decimated by an out-of-costume Chris Smith, as we saw in the most recent episode of Peacemaker, then they’re no trouble for Superman. But the Sons were introduced at a time when DC was trying to tell more grounded, relevant stories about the Man of Steel. Many of the key ideas from those original Sons of Liberty stories feel ripped the headlines: the Sons of Liberty are a variation of the right-wing paramilitary groups that popped up at the time, while the reveal that a Liberty founder was collaborating with the fictional nation of Qurac mirrored the actions of Oliver North during the Iran-Contra scandal. These stories, along with an unrelated storyline happening at the same time with a street-level hero called Gangbuster, forced Superman to rethink the American Way for which he stood.

Entertaining as the stories were, they did make for a strange fit for Superman. That might be why, when the Sons of Liberty were reimagined as a more violent right-wing terrorist group after DC’s soft reboot Rebirth, they were pitted against C-list hero the Ray.

The Sons of Liberty make even more sense as antagonists for Peacemaker. In his original incarnation at Charlton Comics, Peacemaker eventually worked with an organization called the Pax Institute. Although presented as benevolent—in the same way that Chris’s commitment to peace through violence was presented without self-conscious irony—it’s not hard to see the Pax Institute as a terrifying shadow governmental organization like the Sons of Liberty, which is exactly how Grant Morrison presented it in the 2014 riff on Watchmen, The Multiversity: Pax Americana. In mainline DC Comics, Chris is the son of a Nazi war criminal and later finds redemption through the Peacemaker Project and later the intelligence organization Checkmate (think A.R.G.U.S. but with more pageantry).

For the DCU version of Peacemaker, the Sons represent a road not taken for Chris. The influence of his white supremacist father Augie could have easily led him down a road where he could have joined a version of the Sons of Liberty, becoming their Agent Liberty. Instead, he’s been trying to change his ways and become a better man. Then again, the way he brutally dispatches the Sons in the latest episode of Peacemaker suggests that he isn’t as far from those ways as he may have thought.

Most of all, the Sons of Liberty represent hope for Chris Smith. If even a nothing character like Agent Liberty can join the Justice League, then maybe there’s hope that Peacemaker can be accepted, if not on the Justice League then maybe the Justice Gang.

New episodes of Peacemaker season 2 air every Thursday at 9 p.m. on HBO Max.

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