Superheroes who got blackmailed or extorted?

[Lorendiac]

For a piece I'm almost ready to post, I want to find an example of a case where a superhero (Marvel, DC, Image, or whatever) appeared to have "gone bad" -- and then later on it turned out that he was only being "forced" to do bad stuff (robbing a bank, for instance) because some real villains were threatening to kill his family or other nasty stuff and he was going along with their demands while he stalled for time and tried to find a way out of it. Or maybe they were blackmailing him because they had dug up some serious dirt that could ruin his reputation; maybe even put him in prison if they showed it to a judge and jury.

The tricky part is: I'd really like it to be a situation where this part about "extortion" or "blackmail" was only revealed in a retcon in a follow-up story, long after the original story that simply showed the superhero acting like he had "gone bad." I'm not so interested in a story where it only takes a few pages for us to find out why Superman is doing the weird stuff that he was shown doing on the cover. (The Silver Age Superman used to have that kind of "sales stunt" on his covers all the time, or so I hear -- acting like he'd lost his marbles, at first glance -- but everything would be explained very quickly if you actually bought the silly thing.)

[Matthew E]

The example that first comes to my mind is not a comic book example: it's Modular Man in the Wild Cards novels. Mod Man was an android created to be a superhero; his creator had vague plans to make many more of him. But his creator was also kind of a sociopath who made Mod Man, in disguise, rob banks and stuff to support him. He hated doing stuff like that, but found himself unable to go against his hardwired programming to be obedient to his creator.

[Karl H]

Wonderman basically got blackmailed into working for Shield in Frontline.

[dancj]

Well it wasn't blackmail, but if you want long term retconny goodness then....

Starman spoilers:
spoilers:

At the end of the Grand Guignol storyline (IIRC) it was revealed that The Shade was being posessed by something (I can't remember what) which did evil things. It turned out that this had been happening intermittently for years and so all of the really bad crimes he committed in the golden age weren't really him. So it's posession rather than blackmail, but for longterm retcons go it's a good example

end of spoilers

[Omar Karindu]

"The Golden Age" arc of Daredevil seems to imply that many of the DD villain Gladiator's crimes in the 1960s were the result of various forms of blackmail and extortion on the part of the mobster Alexander Bont, which would be a fairly colossal retcon -- originally, the Gladiator was protrayed as a flat-out lunatic. He's not exactly a hero, though, so this probably doesn't count.

Captain America v.1 #247 attempted to explain at least some of Nick Fury's more pseudo-villainous appearances in Iron Man as the result of his following orders from on high that he didn't always agree with.

In all honesty, the real problem is that heroes don't go bad that often, and rarely for long periods of time; and when both of those conditions are met, the retcon tends to be a more radical one aimed at erasing all traces of culpability and voluntarism all the hero's part.

[Mike Marino]

Well it wasn't blackmail, but if you want long term retconny goodness then....

Starman spoilers:
spoilers:

At the end of the Grand Guignol storyline (IIRC) it was revealed that The Shade was being posessed by something (I can't remember what) which did evil things. It turned out that this had been happening intermittently for years and so all of the really bad crimes he committed in the golden age weren't really him. So it's posession rather than blackmail, but for longterm retcons go it's a good example

end of spoilers

I thought the Culp posession only explained a small bit of the Shade's past. I may not be remembering this clearly, it's been a year since I last read through Starman, but I thought that Robinson made it clear that the Shade had a pretty checkered past that didn't involve the possesion.

[Shellhead]

I can't quite wrap my brain around what happened to Iron Man in the mid-90's, from my limited encounters with the dreadful Heroes Reborn and The Crossing. But it apparently involved retconning Iron Man into a villain, then replacing him with a goodguy teenager version from another reality, then retconning all of that mess back to the original version of Tony being the goodguy we always knew. And I predict that we will eventually see a comparable retcon festival involving Iron Man and Civil War.

[Grazzt]

I thought the Culp posession only explained a small bit of the Shade's past. I may not be remembering this clearly, it's been a year since I last read through Starman, but I thought that Robinson made it clear that the Shade had a pretty checkered past that didn't involve the possesion.

I'm pretty sure the Culp thing happened during World War II, so it doesn't make up for Shade being a Golden Age villain.

[Omar Karindu]

Though the Shade only managed a single appearance during the actual Golden Age, and was -- with the exception of one very goofy Silver Age Flash story in which he tried to destroy the world -- not only a thief but a moderately honorable one.

[dancj]

I thought the Culp posession only explained a small bit of the Shade's past. I may not be remembering this clearly, it's been a year since I last read through Starman, but I thought that Robinson made it clear that the Shade had a pretty checkered past that didn't involve the possesion.

Yeah -I think he was supposed to have still been a bit of a villain, but that it was Culp who did all of the really bad stuff