What Happened to Black Adam?

DC Comics has a lot of great characters. Everyone knows Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman, but there are ranks of amazing B and C-list characters under them. Sometimes, like Harley Quinn, they’ll become insanely popular and leave their mark on pop culture. Other times, things don’t work as well. A perfect example of this is the character that many people blame for the death of the DCEU — Black Adam. Black Adam is exactly the kind of character that should have risen to the top of the superhero ranks; Adam is a complex and violent anti-hero, with the kind of scene-chewing histrionics that are always entertaining. However, the failure of Dwayne Johnson’s Black Adam ended all of the work that DC did with the character.

Black Adam is an interesting case study for a character failure. The character’s history in the comics is quite convoluted, but it’s also an example of writers finding a character with untapped potential and tapping into it. Black Adam is an intriguing character with a long history and deserves better than he’s currently getting, which is basically nothing. What went wrong with Black Adam and what can be learned from it?

Black Adam Was Crafted Into DC’s Most Complex Character

Black Adam’s history doesn’t really give an inkling of how complex he’d become. At first, Black Adam was just one of many villainous opposites to the original Captain Marvel. Black Adam was given the power of the Wizard Shazam but it broke him, and he became evil. This was basically who Black Adam was for decades: the evil Captain Marvel, flying around fighting the Marvel Family on Earth-S once DC decided to use these characters again after winning them in a lawsuit. The turn for Black Adam came in two ways — the mid ’90s The Power of Shazam series, which brought the Shazam mythos into the present day but kept a lot of the idealism of the old stories, and JSA. Black Adam was introduced as a member of the Injustice Society in the early issues of that book, but that wouldn’t last. He’d soon join the JSA as a probationary member.

Black Adam’s origin as a former hero was still a part of the character, but his evil was described as coming from Theo Adam, the human descendant of Black Adam who found the scarab that contained his soul. In JSA, it was revealed that the Black Adam side of the persona had completely taken over and wanted to be a hero again. This was a huge bit of exposure for Black Adam. JSA was DC’s hottest team book and arguably the best team book in comics. Black Adam was being exposed to a huge new audience of readers, his anti-hero tendencies coming from an older set of morals. Adam’s arc through the mid ’00s made him into an anti-hero who took the law into his own hands, freeing his homeland from dictators, and becoming a monarch, believing he was the hero but rebelling against the superhero community. He started his own Black Marvel Family, finding happiness with Isis and her brother Osiris, a happiness that would be taken from him by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and becoming a monstrous genocidal villain fueled by rage in the process.

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Black Adam got a lot of fans during this time. There was a fractured nobility to Black Adam; he did good things and he did terrible things. It was great to ride the heights and plumb the depths with Black Adam. Eventually, Black Adam settled into a comfortable little rut. He led the nation of Khandaq as a sort of villain nation, all while talking a big game but not really doing anything. Much of his history was changed by the New 52 and the various continuity changes that followed it over the years. For example, at some point in the past, he was thrown thousands of light years away and had to fly back to Earth, which explains why he was gone for so long, replacing his time spent in the scarab. However, the Black Adam movie saw the character get another push. Black Adam #1 kicked off a very good twelve-issue story. Black Adam joined the Justice League, and was slated to play a big role in Dark Crisis on Infinite Earths. Black Adam fans were happy again.

Of course, we all know how that turned out. DC didn’t actually seem to have any plans for Black Adam without the success of the movie making him a household name. Since the end of Dark Crisis on Infinite Earths, Black Adam has sent back to his Khandaq rut. Now, DC is going through something of a renaissance. The publisher is redefining its universe for an all-new generation, taking classic concepts and gussying them up, and building new ones. Black Adam hasn’t been touched yet, despite Shazam having his own series for nearly two years now.

Abandoning the Push of Black Adam Wasted a Prime Character

Black Adam became a success when creators looked at the facets of the character and found new things. They carried the character through a grand tragic arc, and made a whole generation of genuine Black Adam fans for the first time. Black Adam wasn’t cool because he was powerful and violent, he was cool because of his of his history, his attitudes towards heroism, and where it all took him. Black Adam is basically a divine version of Doctor Doom, a bad person with some good beliefs. Adam’s complexity as a character was the key to why fans loved him and DC was always able to find great stories with the character.

The failure of Black Adam was a huge blow for the character, but it shouldn’t have meant that DC abandoned Black Adam totally. Between 2021 and 2023, Black Adam was made into a much more important character than ever, and it made perfect sense for him. He played an important part of the superhero community, his more brutal sense of heroism causing the kind of stress that is very entertaining. This is the kind of character that DC needs; both to show the limits of heroic idealism but also to show the costs of brutality. Instead of dropping the character at the end of Dark Crisis on Infinite Earths, they could have kept going with the character. Black Adam still could have become a DC icon if the publisher continued to put the work in.

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