WILLIAM HELL
White Dragon, on the other hand, has a long history with the Suicide Squad. Maybe longer than Peacemaker’s. While Smith didn’t become an official member of the Squad until DC’s current, Infinite Frontier era, as a member of the late ‘80s DC clandestine universe, Peacemaker and Task Force X had plenty of run-ins. Problem is, White Dragon was one of the first villains introduced in John Ostrander, Kim Yale, and Luke McDonnell’s definitive run, first appearing in Suicide Squad #4 in 1987.
William Heller posed as street-level vigilante…uh…William Hell (he’s not particularly creative). Despite his costume making him look like a white supremacist Shining Knight, Hell would bust up crimes in Central City and hold the criminals until the grateful police would arrive and finish off the arrest. Only he wasn’t holding all of the criminals – just the Black and Latino ones. The white criminals he caught, he would send to the headquarters of the local Aryan Empire group. It should be noted that the cops were mostly cool with this arrangement – when the criminals the police were arresting tried to point out that there were other people in on the robbery with them, they were summarily ignored.
Heller was an awful person, and he was exposed and brought down by the Squad. Later, he would return with a new identity and a new costume. The White Dragon first came back trying to kill the descendants of the Justice Society before himself being forced into the Suicide Squad. And like any good Suicide Squad member, he got blown up trying to rebel against Waller.
In any case, as far as we know, he didn’t have any kids…and certainly none of them were Peacemaker. But White Dragon’s inclusion here is another way that Peacemaker showrunner James Gunn has found to honor that classic run DC’s Suicide Squad comics.
AUGGIE SMITH
The DCEU’s Peacemaker seems to be drawing a little from both sources for his backstory. Auggie Smith has a lot of William Heller in him – but between the shockingly comics-accurate costume and the very American white supremacy, Auggie has a lot of William Hell in him.
But there’s a hint of tragedy in the way Schmidt’s death in front of his son traumatized the boy that the show seems to have grafted onto Peacemaker’s dead brother, adding a layer of pathos that doesn’t really exist in the comics character.
Don’t get me wrong: comics Peacemaker is still a monumental disaster of a person, and it’s very messed up that a five year old kid would have to experience that at all, even if his father deserved it. But shifting that burden even more firmly onto Christopher and making the person who died not objectively deserve it makes the already heartily cylindrical John Cena even more three dimensional.