Aquaman/Green Arrow – Deep Target revealed DC has a sinister organization that’s much more cerebral and deadlier than Mark Shaw’s Leviathan.
WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Aquaman/Green Arrow: Deep Target #6 now on sale from DC Comics.
It’s safe to say, Leviathan’s evolution in the DCU made it one of the most remarkable, sinister groups the Justice League ever faced. It grew from the 2011 cabal Talia al Ghul used to battle Batman Incorporated, to that of a greater world power when it got appropriated by Mark Shaw, aka the former Manhunter. Shaw took the group to new heights — not just using metahumans to wage war on the Dark Knight’s inner-circle.
This new Leviathan stunned the world by taking out other shadow groups, even kidnapping Superman, to intimidate the League in a way they never expected. However, come the shenanigans in Aquaman/Green Arrow – Deep Target, it’s clear the new society on the block, Scorpio, is much more dangerous.
Now, this isn’t to knock Leviathan, because it did an incredible job. It ran an espionage game, brainwashing members of the D.E.O, A.R.G.U.S, Checkmate, and Spyral to join their ranks. They also stole tech from them too, nearly killing the likes of Sam Lane and Amanda Waller along the way. Shaw, though, wanted to fix the world, ergo why he wasn’t into killing heroes as much.
The League didn’t achieve world peace, so he thought would with this intricate plan, even playing Lex Luthor and the Legion of Doom along the way. Admittedly, Leviathan was a master puppeteer but in time, the mission crumbled with the likes of Waller and the League taking it down because it was out in the open and accessible.
Scorpio on the other hand remained fully in the darkness, operating the way the Court of Owls and Vulture did in the past, providing a major advantage. And it was needed because their plan was super-ambitious: rewriting time. In other words, Scorpio was running its own Flashpoint, creating a time machine for General Anderton to make a utopia the League didn’t know they were part of. It’s why Green Arrow and Aquaman swapped lives, giving Anderton a quiet victory. Admittedly, the plan had flaws and the heroes rebelled, taking them through various realities including a human-dinosaur world. But had the kinks not existed, no one would have known what happened.
They’re the kind of villain comics need; undetectable when running grounded schemes, or ambitious ones. Scorpio quietly assembled a super-armory to boot, as well as rocket ships and a moon base, melding what James Bond villains did, as well as Marvel movie villains such as Hydra and the Red Room.
Ultimately, this was down to Anderton’s genius, evolving the group from what Kordax did when it debuted as enemies of Aquaman in 2019 Scorpio was in danger of becoming the same generic, basic gimmick, but Anderton knew that rather than bombs and armies out in the open, he could hatch a self-contained scheme no one would be aware of. Not Superman with his super-hearing, Batman with his all-seeing eye or even Flash, with his Speed Force. In that sense, Scorpio set the bar high, reminding fans what Leviathan wanted to be in terms of changing the world for the better.
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