Jacques 'Jack' DuquesneSwordsman

When Sin-Cong’s dedicated freedom fighter suffers betrayal, the disillusioned master swordsman Jacques “Jack” DuQuesne joins a carnival in the United States. While there, he incurs a gambling debt which launches his criminal career. 

A Double-Edged Sword

Jacques DuQuesne grows up in the southeast Asian nation Sin-Cong, a French protectorate. His father, bigoted government official Armand DuQuesne, routinely scorns and mistreats the natives, including their family’s butler Nguyen, which troubles Jacques. At age 18, Jacques learns of his family’s alleged kinship to the World War I hero Crimson Cavalier, and Armand gives him one of the Cavalier’s swords. Soon afterward, when Jacques tries to offer Nguyen some sort of compensation for Armand’s abuse, the butler brings Jacques to a covert meeting where charismatic speaker Wong-Chu advocates revolution against French rule. Inspired by Wong-Chu’s rhetoric, the Cavalier’s decades-old example, and wartime tales of Steve Rogers, AKA Captain America, Jacques becomes the costumed Swordsman. When the revolution starts days later, he becomes one of its most dedicated warriors. 

Over a year later, unaware his father had been slain by Nguyen months before, Swordsman celebrates when France withdraws its century-old occupation and recognizes Sin-Cong as an independent nation. Wong-Chu had long promised that Jacques and his father would be granted free passage out of Sin-Cong once the revolution was over, but now that he no longer needed the Swordsman’s services, the French-hating Wong-Chu gloatingly shows off Armand’s corpse and orders his underlings to slay the Swordsman. Outfighting a half-dozen armed men, Swordsman holds Wong-Chu at sword’s point but refrains from killing him.

Allowed to depart Sin-Cong, the disillusioned Swordsman becomes a costumed adventurer, eventually adding a second sword to his arsenal, while Wong-Chu becomes an infamous terrorist and drug lord.

Armed to the Sheath

A master of swordsmanship, knife throwing, and the combat use of bladed weapons in general, the Swordsman was an exceptional hand-to-hand combatant, acrobat and strategist, with far more combat experience than most other Avengers.

Using the motions of his swinging blade and flashes of reflected light off its metal, he can mesmerize or at least distract unwary opponents. An experienced thief, he accumulates knowledge of both ancient and modern architecture via many break-ins. He is also a skilled pilot of the Avengers’ supersonic Quinjets.

During his pre-Avengers career, he wields two traditional swords, one over a half-century old but durable enough to slice through most metals; he later wields a sword equipped with Makluan-based technology operated by buttons on its handle and hilt. This blade can project a concussive force beam, a disintegrating ray, a flame jet, heat rays, electrical bolts, ultrasonic shockwaves, a ray which disrupted electrical impulses, or nerve gas which induced temporary unconsciousness. The Swordsman occasionally uses other bladed weapons as necessary. He is also a recovering alcoholic.

Cross Swords

Inspired by Sin-Cong revolutionary Wong-Chu, Jacques offers his skills with a sword to his quest to free the Asian nation of French rule. Wong-Chu promises safe passage out of Sin-Cong after the war, but his hatred for the French leads him to renege on the deal and slay Jacques’ bigot father. They fight and when Jacques has the upper hand, he lets Wong-Chu live.

While foes with the Avengers, he faces off with the likes of Captain America and his ex-protégé Hawkeye. The Swordsman feels that nothing could ever change that he and Hawkeye were born to be foes.

When he allies with the Avengers, he faces the Mad Titan Thanos and Nathaniel Richards, AKA Kang the Conqueror; the latter of whom takes his life.

Allies to the Hilt

Despite his father’s mistreatment of the natives in Sin-Cong where Swordsman grows up, he still desires to save him when Sin-Cong is freed of French rule, though he fails to see the enemy in his midst, Wong-Chu, who kills his father.

While performing for a traveling carnival, Swordsman takes orphan brothers Barney and Clint Barton under his wing and teaches them the ropes, training them in acrobatics and knifemanship. Feeling insecure about his talents, Swordsman intimidates Clint followed by an offer to join him in a life of crime, but Clint flees, uninterested, leading Swordsman to attack him only to fail thanks to Clint’s brother and fellow performer Buck Chisholm, AKA Trickshot.

Swordsman has a thorny relationship with the Avengers. He first joins the team under false pretenses, acting as a double agent for the criminal underworld leader, “Tem Borjigin,” AKA Mandarin. He also allies with Avengers’ foe and career criminal Erik Josten, AKA Power Man, and together work for Johann Shmidt, AKA Red Skull, against Captain America.

He joins Elihas Starr, AKA Egghead’s Emissaries of Evil as well as the Lethal Legion, and continues to clash with the Avengers on multiple occasions. It’s not until gods Ares and Amora the Enchantress threaten the world that the Swordsman has a change of heart and desires to aid the Avengers instead. His brief foray into heroism ruins his criminal reputation, and depressed, he returns to his unlawful ways. 

While working for crime lord Monsieur Khruul, Swordsman meets Khruul’s niece Mantis, who sees potential in him. She inspires him and he chooses a more heroic path, joining the Avengers once again. He carries a candle for Mantis, but she often rebuffs him.

He Who Lives by the Sword

After several years, Swordsman traveled to the U.S. and, perhaps weary of action, joined the Carson Carnival of Traveling Wonders as a performer. When orphan brothers Barney and Clint joined the carnival, Swordsman took Clint on as an assistant, teaching him acrobatics and knifemanship, but Clint took more easily to archery training from rival performer Trickshot. Dissatisfied with where his own talent had gotten him, Swordsman attempted to intimidate Clint out of trying to surpass him. 

Eventually incurring a large gambling debt, Swordsman robbed the carnival’s payroll. When Clint discovered him with the money, Swordsman offered to take him as a partner in crime; Clint fled, but Swordsman attacked him and might have killed him if Trickshot and Barney hadn’t come to Clint’s rescue. Leaving the U.S. and his last surviving ideals behind, Swordsman embarked on a criminal career throughout Europe; notorious for his skills, he was frequently arrested, deported by a dozen nations.

In recent years, Swordsman returned to the U.S. and, believing Avengers membership would provide more freedom in his activities, whether criminal or otherwise, tried to join the team but was turned down. Days later, he lured Avengers leader and his former idol Captain America into a trap, intending to use Cap’s safety as a bargaining tool. When the other Avengers, including Clint Barton, AKA Hawkeye, surrounded him, Swordsman was teleported away by Mandarin. Wanting a pawn within the Avengers’ ranks, Mandarin equipped Swordsman’s blade with greater weaponry, then deceived the Avengers into thinking Tony Stark, AKA Iron Man, had recommended Swordsman for membership. Accepted into the team, Swordsman, who soon suspected Hawkeye was his former protégé, served alongside the Avengers for weeks, growing to admire them and becoming attracted to Wanda Maximoff, AKA Scarlet Witch. Eventually Mandarin ordered Swordsman to set off a bomb at Avengers Mansion, but he refused, disconnecting the bomb and escaping when the Avengers caught him with the explosive and misinterpreted his actions.

Swordsman again worked as a circus performer before then-brainwashed communist agent Natasha Romanoff, AKA Black Widow, recruited him and recent Avengers foe Erik Josten. They helped her battle the Avengers, but she ultimately overcame communist leader Hu Chen’s brainwashing and helped Hawkeye defeat Power Man and Swordsman. No longer concealing the fact that he was Swordsman’s ex-protégé, Hawkeye defeated his old mentor in solo combat during the fight, declaring himself fully free of the Swordsman at last. Despite their initial failure, Swordsman and Josten forged a partnership. Johann Shmidt, AKA Red Skull, recruited them to fight Cap in Canada, although Cap soon defeated both. 

When criminal scientist Egghead relocated to Canada, he hired Swordsman, Josten, and others as his Emissaries of Evil to help subject the U.S. to nuclear blackmail, but the Emissaries were defeated by fledgling Canadian government super-team the Flight, led by Logan/James Howlett, AKA Wolverine. The Mandarin then recruited Swordsman, Josten, the Living Laser and others to acquire diamonds to empower Mandarin’s Hate-Ray, with Swordsman and Josten stealing their share in Bolivia, but the Avengers defeated all involved. Parting company with Josten, Swordsman and Living Laser joined Batroc’s Brigade, which was hired to retrieve a Seismo-Bomb brought into the U.S. by enemy agents. Captain America also sought the bomb, however, and he defeated Georges Batroc, AKA Batroc, Swordsman, and Laser.

A solo Swordsman was rehired by Egghead, who had, ironically, murdered Hawkeye’s brother and Swordsman’s old carnival crony, undercover FBI agent Barney Barton, only hours before. Egghead ordered Swordsman to abduct Avengers member Goliath, an identity long used by Egghead’s old foe Hank Pym, but neither criminal knew Hawkeye had recently taken over the Goliath identity, while Pym had become Yellowjacket. Defeating the Avengers and subduing Goliath (who blurted out his true identity during the battle), Swordsman brought him to Egghead, but while the two criminals quarreled over their captive’s identity, Goliath revived and captured both men, even saving a humbled Swordsman’s life after Egghead knocked him out a window. Weeks later, insane Avengers enemy Eric Williams, AKA Grim Reaper, hired Swordsman, Josten, Living Laser, and M’Baku, AKA Man-Ape, to fight the Avengers as the Lethal Legion, but this team too met defeat. Imprisoned, Swordsman soon escaped and, weary of fighting the Avengers, pursued low-profile criminal interests unlikely to attract their attention, although his string of failures had cost him much underworld respect.

Swordsman grew increasingly dissatisfied with crime, so when he chanced to intercept a call for Avengers assistance from England, he responded despite having been deported from England years before and warned never to return. For the first time since he met them, Swordsman approached the Avengers representing no one’s interests but his own, offering to help them save the world from a plot by rogue gods Ares and Amora the Enchantress. The Avengers warily agreed, and Swordsman proved himself in battle against demons, satyrs, and other agents of Ares, but he departed after their victory, perhaps reluctant to risk being arrested in front of his former teammates. His brief heroism may have ruined whatever criminal reputation he retained, and he next surfaced in Vietnam, not far from Sin-Cong, performing ignominious grunt work for crime lord Monsieur Khruul. Solitary and self-loathing over how far he had fallen as both hero and villain, Swordsman tried to lose himself in alcohol, but Khruul’s niece Mantis, seeing his true potential, befriended him. Left for dead after a failed raid of a rival gang’s warehouse, he was nursed back to health by Mantis, whose love renewed his sense of purpose.

After Clint Barton, again Hawkeye, left the Avengers, Swordsman, accompanied by Mantis, rejoined the team, earning a government pardon; although some Avengers (notably Captain America) remained suspicious, the Swordsman, supported and mentored by Thor Odinson, AKA Thor, repeatedly proved himself in battle against the Lion God, the Troglodytes, and other menaces. His love life suffered, however, when Mantis grew attracted to the Scarlet Witch’s android paramour Victor Shade, AKA Vision.

Meanwhile, Hawkeye joined the newly formed Defenders, and the two teams were manipulated by Loki Laufeyson, AKA Loki, and Dormammu into opposing each other in collecting fragments of the Evil Eye. Swordsman sought one fragment in Bolivia, site of his earlier defeat, but Brunnhilde, AKA Valkyrie, bested him, leaving him to be captured by authorities.

Although seriously wounded, Swordsman sought no medical treatment, and when Avengers and Defenders joined forces against their common foes, he refrained from mentioning his wound, still trying to prove himself.

He subsequently fell ill when the wound became infected, but during an Avengers encounter with Cornelius Van Lunt’s Zodiac, Mantis’ father Gustav Brandt, AKA Libra, revealed Khruul had murdered Mantis’ mother years before, and Swordsman recklessly traveled to Vietnam to avenge the wrongs Khruul had done Mantis. The ailing hero, however, was soon overpowered and tortured for information about the Avengers; the Avengers rescued him, but although he soon regained his health, Swordsman’s humiliation at Khruul’s hands robbed him of his hard-won self-respect.

When the Kree Mar-Vell, AKA Captain Marvel, and the Avengers opposed Thanos’ planned conquest of Earth, they fought Thanos’ invasion fleet, battling Skrulls and other aliens in Thanos’ employ; the group fought super-criminals Ulysses Klaw, AKA Klaw, and Silas King, AKA Solarr, soon afterward. 

Following the Avengers’ attendance of Pietro Maximoff, AKA Quicksilver, and Crystalia Amaquelin, AKA Crystal’s wedding, Swordsman sought reconciliation with Mantis, who, still infatuated with Vision, rebuffed him. When Kang attacked soon afterward in search of the Celestial Madonna, he abducted most of the team but left behind Swordsman, whom he deemed insignificant. Emotionally broken, Swordsman rallied when Avengers associate Agatha Harkness guided him to Kang’s headquarters, and he teamed with a returning Hawkeye and Kang’s alternate-timeline counterpart Rama-Tut to help free the Avengers from robotic “Macrobot” bodies in which Kang had enslaved them. When a raging Kang fired an energy weapon at Mantis, Swordsman leaped to deflect the blast with his sword, which channeled the fatal energy blast into his body. He died moments later in the arms of a grieving, repentant Mantis, who realized too late that she still loved him. 

Following Kang’s defeat, Mantis buried Swordsman at the Temple of Pama in Vietnam, where his body was later possessed by the Cotati Supreme Exemplar, who accompanied Mantis into space to help her fulfill her destiny as the Celestial Madonna. In subsequent years, Swordsman was seemingly resurrected three times in the Legion of the Unliving—by the En Dwi Gast, AKA Grandmaster, Immortus, and Grim Reaper—but returned to death each time.