Publication history
The Darkness debuted in Witchblade #10 (Nov. 1996) by Marc Silvestri, Garth Ennis, and David Wohl. The comics series The Darkness ran from December 1996 to August 2001. Volume 2 ran from December 2002 to November 2005. Volume 3 ran from December 2007 to December 2013.
Fictional biography
The Darkness
The Darkness is depicted as a cosmic entity predating recorded history. It is the embodiment of chaos that exists prior to God's light – embodied in the comics as the Angelus. As the cosmos forms, the Darkness grows to resent God and His creation. Conjuring a legion of demons, the Darkness declares war upon the Angelus and her host. This lasts for eons until a truce is reached to prevent mutual destruction; to seal the truce, the two powers mate and conceive the Witchblade.
Sometime after this, the Darkness begins inhabiting human vessels – the sons of its chosen bloodline; the father passing the curse to his child at the moment of conception, dying as the force leaves his body. The power then awakens on the son's 21st birthday. A wielder of the Darkness has been present in every major time period and continental power in history. These hosts are usually predisposed to be violent, and have been dictactors, murderers, thieves, and abusers.
The Darkness so far has 13 cosmic powers, known as "Artifacts".
Jackie Estacado
Jackie Estacado is the vessel of the Darkness for the first run of the series. He is depicted as an antihero; often aligned with evil, but sometimes with remorse. He states his ethos in Vol. 2, #5: "My whole life I've been kicked around, you know? I don't know how to do anything but kick back".[1]
The son of notorious mob associate Danny Estacado and an unnamed prostitute, Jackie is taken in by Saint Gerald's Orphanage, where he is frequently abused by the orderlies. Despite his antisocial nature, Jackie protects his friend Jenny from their cruel treatment. At the age of six, Jackie is adopted by up-and-coming mob boss Frankie "Kill-The-Children-Too" Franchetti, who claims to be his uncle. Frankie does this after being persuaded by Sonatine of the Brotherhood of Darkness that bringing Jackie into his inner circle will make him powerful.
Raised as a hitman for the Franchetti mob family, Jackie has a penchant for murder and promiscuity. Despite his criminal lifestyle, Jackie follows a strict moral code of trust in those who earn it and fierce loyalty to family and allies. Early in the series, his main love interest is his childhood friend Jenny Romano. He later develops a romance with Sara Pezzini after the birth of their daughter, Hope Pezzini.
Life in the mob provides Jackie with a home and as a sense of safety and family, but also makes him more violent and prone to illegal activity. Losing his virginity at age fourteen to a female police officer during an interrogation, he disregards the law and develops a sex habit. Completing his first hit at age sixteen, Jackie soon becomes Frankie's chief enforcer, skyrocketing the Franchetti family into one of the top mob families in New York City. Jackie often visits Jenny's club to keep in touch.
Both the Angelus and Sonatine watch over Jackie throughout his life, waiting for him to manifest the Darkness – the Brotherhood wishing to exploit his power and the Angelus wishing to annihilate the wielder at his most vulnerable. Jackie is also watched by followers of the Church of the Angelus who have infiltrated various criminal operations. Among them is Regis Tyne, a mob accountant who associates with Jackie and attempts to assassinate him over a decade later.
When he turns 21, his dark powers awaken and he learns of his evil heritage. Jackie spend much of his time escaping from or fighting the Angelus and the Brotherhood of the Darkness. Jackie tries to quit the mob and Frankie kidnaps and kills Jenny. Jackie blows up a warehouse with Franchetti's crew in it, killing Frankie and burning himself alive.[2] Jackie spends two days wandering around Hell searching for Jenny until the former priest Tom Judge, bearer of an artifact called "the Rapture," comes and gives him hope, allowing him to exit Hell.[3] Jackie's body is then reconstructed by the Darkness.[4]
Jackie returns to find the Franchetti mob taken over by Frankie's cousin, Paulie. Paulie discovers Jackie's secret and blackmails Jackie into doing hits for him. Jackie turns on Paulie and takes control of the Franchetti family, fighting the Russian mafia in Atlantic City, where he is seduced by a woman created by his own unconscious. Siding with the Magdalena (the bearer of another artifact, the Spear of Destiny), he confronts the Angelus.[5]
After an attack by the Angelus's army on the Franchetti family, Jackie learns from an Angelus warrior that detective Sara Pezzini, former bearer of the Witchblade, is pregnant and that he is the father of the unborn baby. The Darkness, tired of the truce between the Light and the Darkness, had mind-controlled Jackie to have sex with Sara while she was in coma. The Angelus tries to get the baby to win the war. Jackie and Danielle Baptiste, the new bearer of the Witchblade, defend Sara from an attack by the Angelus's army and get her to a safe house in a cavern. The Angelus army attacks again, defeating Jackie and the Magdalena, but they buy Sara enough time to give birth. Sara dies in the process, but her daughter's power brings her to life again, giving her half of the power of the Witchblade, Dani keeping the other half. The Angelus defeats Sara and Dani, but is vanquished by the baby. Sara names her daughter Hope.[6]
Jackie meets chemical engineer Professor Kirchner, who helps him develop his darkness abilities. Jackie usurps the power in the fictional banana republic of Sierra Muñoz, South America, in hopes of establishing a new empire. Jackie establishes a drug cartel in Sierra Muñoz with a narcotic made from his own bodily fluids, builds an impenetrable fortress, forms an army, and takes a lover, not knowing Kirchner is controlling her. The residents of Sierra Muñoz resist Jackie's takeover with the help of the U.S. Department of Defense, which wants to capture Jackie for experimentation. He defeats them, but Kirchner and his pregnant lover turn against him, and she takes control of the Darkness, taking it from him. Dying, Jackie regains the Darkness by pure willpower. Confronting Kirchner, he learns that the baby is already born, and that it is an incarnation of the Darkness without human flaws like a conscience. It attacks him, but Jackie defeats it.[7]
Jackie heads back to the United States, surviving an encounter with a dream-stealing witch in Mexico. He is captured by a devil named the Sovereign. The devil tells Jackie that when he went to hell, Jackie made a deal with the Sovereign, who promised, in return for several assassinations, to reunite Jackie's body and soul. Jackie fulfills the Sovereign's demands, killing a possessed nun, an immortal drug dealer, and a 10-year-old African warlord.
He visits New York, where he punishes some thugs of the Franchetti mob who caused the death of a 5-year-old girl[8] and visits Sara and his daughter. The antagonists Glacier Stone and Ember Stone are introduced, Jackie learns that there is a total of 13 artifacts, and Jackie kills the current incarnation of the Angelus,[9] and has his first kiss with Sara.[10] The new bearer of the Glacier Stone, and of another artifact, the Sword of Blood, is Michael Finnigan, an Irish mobster Jackie hired to watch over Sara and Hope. Months after this, he saves Jackie, who was captured by a revenge driven Egyptian mob.[11]
During Jackie's missions for the Sovereign, he encounters a woman with a red ribbon who intrigues him. He also meets a past Darkness wielder named Aram, also known as the Foreigner, who explains that the Sovereign has been manipulating Jackie from the start and that his soul and the Darkness are still in him, repressed by his desire to be free of the Darkness's influence. Ignoring the Foreigner, Jackie follows the woman and faces a resurrected djinn created by a shaman to kill Darkness wielders. Finding the djinn to be virtually invincible, Jackie is guided to strangle the woman to death with her own ribbon, breaking the curse of the djinn and freeing the woman from eternal servitude. Jackie is confronted by Aram, who intimidates him into summoning the full power of the Darkness. Aram disappears and Jackie realizes the Sovereign's manipulations and intent on revenge with full control of his powers.[12]
Jackie attacks the Sovereign, chases him away from his base, and conquers it for himself. He finds a list of statues of the Sovereign; to destroy all of them he gathers a crew of thieves, smugglers, and fighters, beginning with Leonard Kim, a surviving member of the Sovereign's mercenaries. He has to escape from a team of government killers with the help of an army officer who decides that Jackie's abilities should not be replicated. He walks into a trap that a Russian mafioso built with the help of a traitor on his team, which lures him with images of his sister Capris; he escapes from a machine that feeds on his magic energy. Next, he has to deal with a second traitor in his team, mob accountant Regis Tyne, a sleeper agent of a fanatical human Angelus army, who decides not to kill Jackie because there could be worse bearers to the Darkness, but is still killed by a surprised Jackie. He revives Regis with the help of the Darkness, now controlling him, hears his story and let him continue as part of the crew. In the last confrontation with the Sovereign, Jackie and his team, ensnared in illusion spells, win because of Leonard Kim's sacrifice. Leonard declines Jackie's offer to heal him with the Darkness.[13]
Powers and abilities
The Darkness is an elemental force of chaos and creation. A Darkness wielder accesses another dimension through the shadows around them and exerts control over the demonic creatures that dwell there. These creatures, called Darklings, usually appear as serpentine or goblinoid fiends that can communicate with their master through telepathy. They possess supernatural strength and stamina as well as deadly claws and fangs.
Darklings emerge in different forms depending on the needs of their host. Some Darklings have wings and others can breathe fire. Darklings have also exhibited the ability to easily adhere to sheer surfaces as well as teleport through shadows with their bearer and produce corrosive chemicals through their saliva or excrement. While beholden to their vessel, Darklings do exhibit their own autonomy.
In battle, Darkness wielders envelop their bodies in an armor of shadowy metal. This gives them strength and durability as well as razored fingers and bladed tendrils emerging from their shoulders which can transform into wings. With practice, the wielder can use their armor to shapeshift. They can also instinctively fashion weapons and shields from their armor.
When a wielder is injured, the shadows surrounding them are absorbed into their body to regenerate cells at unnatural rates, even to regrow lost limbs. This renders the vessels impervious to disease and poisons as well as resistant to supernatural afflictions. This also allows them a degree of pseudo-immortality as the Darkness keeps them preserved over millennia.
Darkness bearers are typically hardened individuals whose lives have endowed them with considerable fighting prowess and survival skills. Wielders from older time periods were usually skilled swordsmen while modern hosts like Jackie are skilled marksmen. Jackie was trained in chemistry by Kirchner, enabling him to convert Darkness into water, corrosives, or narcotics.
