In the years before working on the animated Harley Quinn and Kite-Man: Hell Yeah! series, writer and producer Dean Lorey already had a history with DC. Besides working on The CW’s iZombie, Lorey also says he tried to get a Hitman series off the ground, which would have centered on cult-favorite DC antihero Tommy Monaghan. The series, which first introduced Noonan’s bar to DC fans, was written by Garth Ennis and drawn by John McCrea, and centered on a hitman who got super powers after being attacked by aliens in DC’s Bloodlines event.
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The character, who first appeared in The Demon Annual #2, would go on to headline his own series for 61 issues. There have been some spinoff series, including JLA/Hitman and All-Star Section 8, and Tommy has made a handful of appearances in other comics, but by and large, the character has been out of circulation since the end of his series.
“Because we established the bar Noonan’s, that sort of naturally led to some Hitman characters,” Lorey recently told The Direct. “I had been a fan of Hitman for a long time and, in fact, developed with Garth Ennis’ version of it for Syfy that never went forward. And so that’s where a lot of the Hitman characters sort of came from. Moe and Joe Double and Shawn Noonan and Six-Pack, and all of that.”
While it wasn’t necessarily an exclusively villain hangout in the comics, turning Noonan’s into that makes perfect sense. While it was a coffee shop on Supergirl (never seen, but the logo kept popping up!), the Harley Quinn version feels more like the one Ennis first envisioned, where it was the favorite hangout of hitmen and other lowlifes in the Cauldron, one of Gotham City’s toughest neighborhoods.
“Noonan’s (and its owner) actually took its name from the Sean Penn crime flick State of Grace, which has to be the most criminally underrated gangster movie of all time,” Ennis told ComicBook back in 2016.
Hitman served as a precursor to Ennis and Darick Robertson’s The Boys, expressing much of the same disdain for superhero archetypes (the character famously vomited all over Batman during a fight). While it was never quite as openly hostile toward superheroes — after all, it was taking place in a world where Superman existed — it certainly feels thematically on-point with The Boys, which DC published under its WildStorm imprint for a few issues before it moved to Dynamite.
There’s no word on whether the Hitman show was animated or live-action, but given the fact that Lorey had been working on shows like iZombie and Arrested Development before making the jump to Harley Quinn, it seems like it could go either way (and we would lean toward live-action).
