'Supergirl': Comparing Agent Liberty's First Appearance to the Comics

Tonight's episode of Supergirl, titled 'American Alien,' introduced the season's big bad, a human [...]

Tonight's episode of Supergirl, titled "American Alien," introduced the season's big bad, a human supremacist known as Agent Liberty.

Here's the thing: in the comics, Agent Liberty isn't a bad guy, and while there are the broad strokes of some similarities here, his depiction on Supergirl marks one of the most significant departures from the comic book source material that we have ever seen in the Arrowverse.

While we see him being the mastermind behind plans to torture and murder innocents for the offense of being aliens on Supergirl, the Agent Liberty of the comics was essentially a way to explore the idea of putting a traditional, square-jawed, conservative "patriotic" hero into the morally gray world of the 1990s.

Supergirl's version of Agent Liberty is described as "the ruthless and terrifying leader of the Children of Liberty, a human-first hate group. The character is described as "a brilliant orator in the guise of a family man", who can easily convince people that he's right."

This lines up, to an extent, with the comic iteration of Agent Liberty, who first debuted in 1991. Also known as Benjamin Lockwood, Agent Liberty is an ex-CIA agent who becomes disenchanted with the goverment, forming his own paramilitary group. Liberty eventually sees the error of his ways, separating from the group and assisting Superman and Justice League in the years that follow.

Introduced in 1991's Superman #60 from writer/artist Dan Jurgens, Agent Liberty was a mysterious super-soldier with a very black and white moral code. Wieding high tech weapons like a jetpack and an energy shield, the character's first appearance actually has something unexpected in common with tonight's episode of Supergirl: it dealt with the fall of Bruno Manheim and Intergang after their money laundering schemes were revealed to the world.

Later, he would become an unpredictable wild card, and in hindsight it almost feels like creator Dan Jurgens was using Agent Liberty to probe territory that would later be more fully explored with Ed Brubaker's Captain America run -- namely what the brutal but idealistic soldiers of the pre-Cold War era would make of today's more nuanced sociopolitical landscape.

The Sons of Liberty were a reactionary group in the comics, designed to take down the U.S. government, which the members of the SoL saw as compromised beyond repair. Agent Liberty was the tip of their spear -- and ultimately they were hoist on their own petard (not to mix metaphors) as Liberty saw the error of their methods and, in spite of their good intentions, turned on the Sons of Liberty and became a true hero by helping to bring the organization down.

Of course, the idea of taking down the government may not be (at least overtly) part of Agent Liberty's mission statement yet, but the self-professed patriot did attempt to assassinate the President after finding out that she was secretly an alien, so that is not an entirely different set of priorities either.

Whether TV's version of Agent Liberty is redeemable as a hero seems unlikely -- and, after last season's big storyline with Reign, it would seem like an odd choice to make it all about redeeming the villain again -- but anything is possible this early in the game.

Supergirl airs at 8 p.m. ET/PT on Sunday nights on The CW, before episodes of Charmed.

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