Remembering DC’s Strange First Attempt at Vigilante in the Arrowverse

Even though Chris Smith is the only one named in the title of the series, Peacemaker is really an ensemble show about the group of misfits who bond together under the name the 11th Street Kids. And the standout of the 11th Street Kids is Adrian Chase, an absolute psychopath who is somehow also a big sweetie, played by Freddie Stroma.

Stroma steals every scene that he’s in, making Vigilante a fan favorite. But he isn’t the first person to bring Vigilante to live action. Before James Gunn‘s DC Universe, a variation of Vigilante appeared in the fifth and sixth seasons of CW series Arrow, an appearance that illustrates just how far DC media has come in less than a decade.

Fans of Peacemaker would be very surprised if they go back to visit the Adrian Chase who pops up in season five of Arrow. Unlike the crazed weirdo who memorizes animal facts and berates his poor mom, the Adrian of Arrow is a handsome district attorney, played by Josh Segarra. Chase quickly bonds with Oliver Queen, who serves as the mayor of Star City when he’s not punishing evildoers as Green Arrow. The two need to rely on one another because there’s a new masked man in the city, a violent new force is on the streets, one who kills villains without remorse.

Here’s where it gets tricky… by season five, Arrow had more or less shook off its original trappings as would-be Batman show, in which its rich boy with daddy problems turned masked creature of the night only distinguished itself from its Gotham counterpart in that he used a bow and arrow and killed people. The CW Oliver still didn’t feel much like the loud-mouthed liberal Ollie of the comics, but at least Arrow felt more like a superhero show willing to indulge in weird DC Comics lore.

Thus, there were actually a few masked men running around Star City in season five. There was, of course, Vigilante, with his all-black suit and a take-no-prisoners approach to killing bad guys. One was Wild Dog, a sub-Z-lister who was somehow even less well-known than Peacemaker. Another was Prometheus, a relatively new baddie that Grant Morrison created during their Justice League run as an anti-Batman, reimagined here as a masked archer.

Throughout season five, viewers started to notice that Chase had a more heartless approach to crime fighting than Oliver—which made perfect sense to comic book readers. Created by Marv Wolfman and George Pérez as a riff on anti-heroes of the 1970s and early ’80s, Chase was a district attorney who had lost faith it he law. When the courts couldn’t solve problems, he would hunt down and execute evildoers. So committed to this ethos was Chase that, after realizing how he had harmed innocent people in his mission, he kills himself in 1988’s Vigilante #50, written by Paul Kupperberg and penciled by Steve Erwin.

Thus, comic book readers thought that they knew where the story was going: Chase was Vigilante, and eventually he and Ollie would have to duke it out in their costumed personas. However, Arrow pulled the rug out from under viewers with a twist: Chase was in fact Prometheus, an identity he took after his father was killed by Green Arrow earlier in the series. So who was Vigilante?

That answer didn’t come until season six of Arrow, where he was revealed to be Vincent Sobel (Johann Urb), the former partner of Dinah Drake a.k.a. Black Canary. Even more so than Chase, Sobel adhered to a strict morality and was given to big speeches about how to be tough on crime. Paired with the Prometheus arc from season five, the Vigilante arc from season six serves as a referendum on Oliver Queen as a hero, forcing him to reckoning with his past misdeeds. And, in that way, it isn’t so different from the story that James Gunn is telling in Peacemaker.

To be frank, the Arrowverse Vigilante is pretty silly, somehow both more ridiculous and less humorous than the version in the current DCU. And yet, he remains a pretty good reminder of what the Arrowverse was: inspired by the comics, but very much its own thing; often corny, but always, undeniably fun.