Peacemaker represents one of comics’ most prolific creators’ attempts at a Captain America-style super soldier. He was reimagined as America’s cynical broken heart in Watchmen‘s Comedian, before taking his final form in John Cena’s perfectly aligned manifestation on James Gunn’s DCU TV series.
“Peacemaker… What a joke.” The late Colonel Rick Flag Jr’s (Joel Kinnaman) last words in James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad called the title character exactly what he’s always been. Or as Peacemaker’s original doppelgänger, The Comedian, once said, “It’s a joke… It’s all a joke.”
So what is the connection between Peacemaker, The Comedian, and John Cena himself? Let’s take a look at why the trio has more in common than you may think.
The Latter Day American Heroes
Peacemaker was the brainchild of writer Joe Gill, a US. Navy veteran who cut his teeth in the same pre-war bullpens as Jack Kirby and Joe Simon, the creators of Captain America. While Kirby and Simon’s Steve is known for his unassailable faith in the American dream, Gill’s characters had a more complex relationship with their service. Gill was also responsible for the creation of Captain Atom, an Air Force veteran subjected to an incredible experiment that turned him into a force of nature.
While the Peacemaker comics of Gill’s era were largely soldier and spy stories not unlike those Marvel was telling in Nick Fury, Captain Atom was on the run from his military creators, similar to the Hulk. Publisher Charlton Comics, under Gill’s guidance, walked the fine line between both the approaches of DC and Marvel, a blend of Marvel’s grounded realism with DC’s ambitious scale.
The Man Who Would Be The Comedian
Walking the line rarely works out for anyone besides Johnny Cash, and so it went for Charlton Comics. When DC purchased the library of the Charlton characters, their intent was to fold them into the wider DC Universe. Where the problem emerged was when one of comics’ wizards came to the publishers at DC with a transformative idea. Alan Moore wanted to use the recently acquired Charlton characters in a story tentatively titled “Who Killed the Peacemaker?” It was a tale that would deconstruct the idea of superheroes, casting Peacemaker as America’s lifelong hitman, an assassin at home and abroad, who would meet his demise alone at home, drunk on nostalgia as one of his fellow superheroes breaks in and hurls him from the window.
If that sounds familiar, it is because that story became the global phenomenon known as Watchmen.
DC balked at allowing Moore to tarnish all of their pretty new toys with psychoses, sexual deviance, and outright evil mastermind plots. Instead, he created pastiches of the Charlton characters, and the rest is history. Peacemaker Chris Smith became Comedian Eddie Blake, and the vision of a man who raped, murdered, and pillaged his way across decades of superheroic history became an enduring one.
A generation of comic book movie geeks would come to know The Comedian through Zack Snyder’s live-action Watchmen adaptation, but Peacemaker himself would largely be consigned to the dustbin of comic history. He appeared occasionally as a supporting character or disposable opponent to establish a threat, but it would be the Comedian who would receive the lion’s share of the public’s attention.
John Cena and The Failure of Good Guys
It wasn’t until director James Gunn, who’d delivered huge successes at Marvel Studios by utilizing forgotten legacy characters in Guardians of the Galaxy, that Peacemaker would see his day in the sun. A role originally intended for Guardians co-star Dave Bautista instead went to his fellow WWE alum John Cena. And Cena, it would turn out, would be the perfect man for the part, in the best and worst ways.
Peacemaker’s pastiche of patriotic superheroes, once earnest, reflected his creator’s complicated views of post-war American power. John Cena’s unique place in millennial pop culture and his road to credibility mirror the broken path his generation has walked since 9/11. Peacemaker shows us the unfunniest of all punch lines: It doesn’t matter if you’re a good soldier. It doesn’t matter if you follow orders. It doesn’t matter. It’s all a joke.
Cena made his name in the middle of the “Attitude Era” of the WWE. He presented himself as the ultimate “face,” a good-guy who would never go back on his word, never quit (even when he should), and never give up. In short, he was what skinny Steve Rogers might’ve been if he’d had a different draw in the genetic lottery.
Unfortunately, Cena emerged at right around the time that the WWE was taken over by one of the most electrifying figures in sports entertainment history, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. While the Rock would go on to worldwide superstardom for his wrestling persona, changing “sides” whenever it suited the narrative or his own ambitions, and leveraging his power in the WWE to nearly taking over DC studios itself, Cena would find himself on the outside looking in.
By the time WWE President Vince McMahon considered a “heel turn” for Cena, the organization and Cena had invested so much in his good guy persona that a pivot made no sense. Cena had become a philanthropic powerhouse, doing good work in the real world through the Make-A-Wish Foundation at a record rate and elevating the lives of the fan community in ways that earned him well-deserved recognition worldwide.
Still, with all that, he would find himself reduced to a meme in the earliest days of meme culture. A bit that became a routine became an image that more people knew than knew of Cena himself. He became invisible. He appeared sporadically in film. He became an irregular performer with WWE.
…And then his old friend Bautista turned down a role for scheduling reasons, Cena’s name came up.
The Death of the Dream, and Numbing the Pain
The dream life Cena lived in the WWE stands in stark contrast to the reality inhabited by Chris Smith, where the American dream shatters along its deepest faults.
No one cares about Peacemaker, despite his faithful service and obedience to authority. He kills national heroes at his superior’s command. Chris even claims, in his most famous quote, “I cherish peace with all of my heart. I don’t care how many men, women, and children I need to kill to get it.”
He’s pretty awesome at everything (not unlike many millennial hyper-generalists), but the specialists from prior and subsequent generations are somehow always better than he is at their thing. Bloodsport is a better killer. Vigilante is a better psychopath. “F**k Peacemaker,” says Rick Flag Sr. (Frank Grillo), in a gruff, crusty boomer-ific growl which invokes every failure-to-their-father-son’s worst nightmares. Everyone knows that he’s terrible, even Gunn, who said in describing Cena’s Peacemaker in The Suicide Squad, “he’s a piece of s**t at the beginning and he’s a piece of s**t at the end.”
Cena’s own metatextual transformation over the course of his career from good guy “face” to traumatized “heel” mirrors Chris Smith’s journey as a character. The visceral version of ego death that exists when he kills an alternate universe version of himself from a world where all of his worst trauma doesn’t exist causes him to truly and deeply question whether it is his own circumstances or his own weaknesses that have driven him to the ends where he finds himself.
Ultimately, despite the character being shoved to the side for Watchmen, Gunn and Cena seem to have deconstructed the character as far as Moore… And they agree: it’s all a joke.
Peacemaker Season 2 Premiere Dates And Episode Guide:
Peacemaker season 2 premiered on HBO Max on Thursday, August 21. The season will be eight episodes long, with one episode premiering per week.
Here’s the full list of episodes in Peacemaker Season 2, with premiere dates:
- Thursday, August 21, 2025: Peacemaker, Season 2, Episode 1
- Thursday, August 28, 2025: Peacemaker, Season 2, Episode 2
- Thursday, September 4, 2025: Peacemaker, Season 2, Episode 3
- Thursday, September 11, 2025: Peacemaker, Season 2, Episode 4
- Thursday, September 18, 2025: Peacemaker, Season 2, Episode 5
- Thursday, September 25, 2025: Peacemaker, Season 2, Episode 6
- Thursday, October 2, 2025: Peacemaker, Season 2, Episode 7
- Thursday, October 9, 2025: Peacemaker, Season 2, Episode 8 *Season Finale*
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