The saga of the hero known as the Red Knight is a long one and involves many people, not the least of which are the two man who have used the armor; Jonathan C. Winchester and his partner, friend and loyal legman Archie Goodwin.
The armor itself is mysterious and recent evidence suggests that it has been around for several hundred years and may indeed date back to the time of Camelot. What is known of the armor for certain, however, is that it is enchanted with powerful magic, psionics or both and is an instrument of great power destined for use in the service of good.
The first man to use the armor and take the name Red Knight was the millionaire industrialist Jonathan C. Winchester. Jonathan's family was old money and he had been a lonely only child. His life prior to taking up the mantel of the Red Knight at the age of 72 was a dull tale of boarding schools, Harvard business, a few awards for his charity work, and then years of seclusion in his mansion, punctuated by trips to Europe. Winchester was a confirmed Anglophile and sometimes spoke wistfully of the year he spent studying European history at Harvard before his father brought his foot down.
During one of these trips to Europe, however, his true destiny was made manifest when he obtained the Red Knight armor. This trip occurred almost 30 years before the Red Knight appeared on the scene, and Winchester simply said he bought the armor from an antique dealer in England.
After the old man's death, Archie Goodwin investigated this story and found a still living friend of Winchester. The friend said he clearly remembered the armor making its appearance in the mansion's display case shortly after the visit Winchester described. Winchester also told his friend the same story concerning its acquisition and the friend remembered that he didn't think much of it; Winchester always brought back antiques after visiting Europe.
Interestingly enough, Winchester kept impeccable financial records, and filed them in immaculate order. Archie searched them all and found an entry concerning every antique purchase the old man ever made in his entire life.
Except the armor.
At any rate, 30 years after obtaining the armor, Winchester gained the ability to animate it with his mind, while his body rested in a trance. Despite being empty, the armored form of the Red Knight was quite strong and wielded a flaming broadsword. Indeed, if the Red Knight ever opened its helmet, a ragging inferno could also be seen burning inside the armor.
Through experimentation, Winchester found that the sword was also capable of projecting a jet of flame. First used offensively, Winchester soon learned to use this jet for propulsion as well, allowing the Red Knight to fly.
How Winchester generated this remarkable spectral form was never discovered. Nor was it ever determined if it was the armor, Winchester, or both acting in concert which generated this phenomena. No one else who has since worked with the armor has been able to recreate these effects, including several powerful meta-human psychics who assisted in research into the armor's properties after Winchester's death.
Archie Goodwin strongly suspects (based on things he observed and conversations he had with Jonathan) that the old man kept a private journal devoted to the extensive personal research he conducted on his "gift" and the armor. But although Archie now has full access to all of the old man's possessions and the mansion itself, he still hasn't been able to find it.
Archie appreciates the fact that even now, the old man is still able to keep a few secrets from him. It was always that way, from the very beginning.
Archie Goodwin started out a detective at the LAPD--and one of the few honest cops in the city. Following a trail of murders, Archie soon uncovered a vast drug smuggling operation led by metahuman criminal/drug kingpin Candyman, who had thoroughly corrupted a shipping business owned by Jonathan Winchester.
At the same time, Winchester himself began to suspect that one of his companies might have become compromised by organized crime, and took it upon himself to investigate. This reckless decision would have cost him his life at the hands of Candyman's goons, had it not been for the timely arrival of Archie, who had squeezed an informant and learned of the trap they'd set up at one of the old man's docks.
Putting their heads together, Winchester and Archie soon broke the criminal conspiracy wide open, discovering that it not only involved corruption in Winchester's organization, but also a large group of rogue cops who provided security for Candyman's operations. Between Archie's street smarts and the old man's cagey political skills, there was a massive house cleaning, both in the LAPD and Winchester's company. The drug ring was crushed and Candyman was last seen fleeing the country, only a half-step ahead of the FBI.
By this point, thoroughly disgusted by the police department (which was hardly grateful to be purged), Archie left the force. The old man immediately asked him to come work for him and make sure that the kind of corruption that took hold of the shipping company never occurred again. Archie, realizing that they made a good team (not to mention that this was a great opportunity for him to start eating better), took him up on it.
The following years passed pretty calmly. Archie took well to his new job as trouble shooter and kept everything the old man owned on the straight and narrow. This tranquility was turned on its head, though, in late 1939.
While Archie was investigating what he initially assumed to be a small, isolated case of industrial espionage, he quickly uncovered the activities of a Nazi spy cell! He was captured, but not before he got a message to Winchester. Thus Archie's torture at the hands of metahuman S.S. enforcer Mack The Knife was pre-empted by the first ever appearance of the Red Knight. Mack The Knife was tough, but ultimately no match for the stalwart American.
And thus, the "Golden Age" Red Knight was born.
With the raw power of Winchester's Red Knight teamed with the detective skills of Archie Goodwin, it didn't take long for the duo to become a powerful and prominent force in safe-guarding the people of Los Angeles from threats both conventional and exotic. Despite this prominence, Archie's role in the Red Knight's success remained largely unknown, which was just the way he liked it. Ironically, when the Red Knight joined the Justice Society of America in 1942, the other members of the Society never met Jonathan Winchester face-to-face, but instead dealt almost exclusively with Archie Goodwin.
The Red Knight occasionally adventured throughout the country, sometimes working with the JSA, sometimes not, but mostly remained based in Los Angeles. While working in the L.A. area, Jonathan and Archie soon met another local metahuman hero, the beautiful, mute telepath Psilence (Annette Rosenberg). Initially brought together by a single case, the three soon began working together more and more in a loose professional relationship that quickly became a close personal friendship. Later still, this friendship blossomed even more between Archie and Annette; in a triumph of irony, the high-verbal and the mute had fallen in love.
From 1946-1949, "Team Red Knight" as Archie called it, waged a hugely successful war against crime in L.A. Their accomplishments included toppling the Zefelli crime family, repelling attempts by Candyman to re-establish his power base in America, and defeating such meta-human menaces as Blastwave, Lightstorm, Tank, Ver-Man, and Moses Mayhem. During that time, the flame-wielding Red Knight and the slight, brunette Psilence were also often romantically linked in the tabloids--which amused Jonathan, Annette and Archie to no end.
Sadly, the team was shattered by tragedy during the first recorded confrontation with the Patchwork Man in 1949 (see the entry on The Patchwork Man for details). This encounter was only the beginning of an escalating battle of wills between Winchester & Goodwin and the enigmatic Patchwork Man, who was by far the Red Knight's most dangerous and tenacious enemy.
This struggle supposedly ended in a climactic battle over San Francisco in 1952, where both the Patchwork Man and the Red Knight were thought to have died.
In the final moments of this battle, Jonathan Winchester successful prevented the Patchwork Man from spreading a deadly biological weapon over the city, but only at the cost of a massive and fatal heart attack, despite Archie's best efforts to revive him.
After the Patchwork Man's aerial platform crashed in flames into San Francisco bay, Archie Goodwin took a boat and dived at the crash scene to make sure that the Patchwork Man was really dead. While Goodwin was surprised to find the Red Knight's intact suit of armor, the Patchwork Man's body (and his disturbing, ever-shifting Comedy/Tragedy mask) was never found.
Goodwin convinced himself (because he had to--the alternative was just too ghastly) that the Patchwork Man must have been incinerated when the Red Knight forced himself to go nova, exploding in a huge sphere of white-hot fire that exterminated the cloud of viral death that the Patchwork Man was in the process of releasing over the city. This became easier to believe as the years passed at the Patchwork Man didn't resurface.
As for the Red Knight, although Archie retrieved the armor, the man who had so ably filled it was now gone. Thus the Red Knight simply disappeared, which was probably just as well; the Red Knight was beginning to attract unfavorable attention from HUAC simply because of his surface similarities to the communist Crimson Dynamo. Still, due to his widely presumed death defending an American city, HUAC left the Red Knight's reputation pretty much alone and he was well-remembered--especially in San Francisco which would eventually construct a monument in his honor.
For Goodwin's part, he did quite well. The old man left him everything, which was very substantial. The old man's company holdings were vast, and even Archie had little clue how rich his former employer. Archie quickly found himself at the center of a vast financial web involving utilities, manufacturing and even a few partnerships with defense contractors and other major industrialists.
And yet this new life felt empty. Goodwin was never meant to be chained to a desk, even a beautiful oak one. Besides, overseeing financial matters and boardroom politics held little allure for him. Yet he persevered, seeing it as his final duty to his former employer. But as time passed, he became restless and could easily imagine what drove the old man's mind to journey out into a suit of red armor and a life of adventure fighting the forces of evil.
And speaking of that armor, how could it be that it was still intact? Goodwin wondered. It should have melted in the intense furnace of Winchester's heroic sacrifice.
Yet it didn't.
In some way it felt eminently proper that some trace of the Red Knight still lingered on, though. It was the least Winchester's legacy deserved after all the good he did.
No. All the good they did. Together.
Despite the danger, despite the pain, despite even what happened to his dear Annette, being involved with the Red Knight really was the best part of Archie's life and he still couldn't quite believe that it was now over. Thus, the mystery of the armor's existence captured his imagination. It was a small mystery, but it was his. And one that was in his power to solve. After all, solving mysteries used to be one of his jobs.
He missed those old jobs.
At any rate, several of the companies that Winchester was involved in dealt with high technology and advanced scientific R&D. Archie immediately knew which company could give him the answers he needed and provide him with a state-of-the-art analysis of the armor and how it survived.
The company in question was a large conglomerate with links to the defense department and run by a brilliant, scientist/industrialist named Tony Stark.
It was quickly discovered that the old suit of armor was infused by the psychic energy of the old man, probably scorched into its metal during the psychic flash of his death. The most obvious result of this was that the armor was now highly resistant to flame and generally far sturdier than it used to be--some sort of lingering echo of the psychic force field that once animated it. Tony Stark also suspected that there may be other far stranger and less quantifiable "quirks" to the armor, but couldn't quite pin them down, even with assistance of renowned theoretical scientist Dr. Herionimous Joy.
At any rate, the armor soon formed the nexus for Stark's own powered armor prototype, which had been in active development on behalf of the U.S. government ever since the first invasion of Normandy was repulsed by the German's powered armor corps, the Berserkers. Development had reached an even more frantic pitch with the appearance of Russia's Crimson Dynamo (After WWII, the U.S. pretty much split the German rocketry experts evenly with the Soviets, but while the Americans got the entire flying disk team [and nascent electromagnetic technologies] to themselves, the Russians escaped with the powered armor scientists. This of course meant a terrifying powered-armor gap).
Luckily, after years of failure in licking the problem of a neural control interface, the new design incorporating the Red Knight's armor seemed very promising. Strangely, however, attempts to duplicate this success without the (psionically charged) armor were for a time far less impressive (i.e. complete failures). Stark suspected that one of the benign "quirks" of the armor was that its psychic charge amplified and heightened the resolution of the signals sent to the neural interface. He also firmly believed that once the mechanics of this process were more fully understood, he would be able to reproduce them.
All of which was just fine with Archie. After all, one of his provisions for letting Stark Industries use the armor in the project was that he be the one who got to test it.
Thus, a new Red Knight soon appeared in the skies in late 1953, looking very much like the old one, except perhaps a bit bulked up. He still flew (now with the aid of the German's flying disk electromagnetic field technology) and had a flaming broadsword (an energy sword, which Tony kept promising to get the kinks worked out of), but now he could also project "fire" from his hands (actually a Stark-designed energy weapon called a "repulsor"), emit clouds of bright red smoke (concealment and tear gas), and even talk.
Good to his prediction, within only a few months of operational testing on the new "Silver Age" Red Knight, Tony Stark had figured out how to make the neural interface work elsewhere and the result was the War Machine prototype, which was rushed into development and began testing in April 1954, with former metahuman hero James Stonewall as operator.
Despite performing admirably during the nationwide crisis caused by the Patchwork Man in March of that year, the War Machine armor began to develop substantial glitches in the control system soon afterward. The problems became so numerous that the armor was forced to be recalled and undergo a second testing cycle at Stark Industries. Preliminary results indicated that the neural interface was more fragile than expected and required routine, extensive and expensive maintenance to function reliably. Tony Stark is said to have admitted privately that rushing the armor was a mistake; one that he wouldn't repeat. Thus, even with the rumored assistance of Lexcorp, Stark predicted that a new, sturdier version of the War Machine armor won't be ready until 1956.
The modified Red Knight armor, on the other hand, performed flawlessly (with the possible exception of the Force Sword attachment) and Archie proudly retook the Red Knight's former place in the ranks of earth's mightiest heroes, as well as becoming a charter member of the JLA.
In 1955, Red Knight and the JLA were forced to travel to Apokolipse and confront Darkseid's evil minions, including a reconstituted Crimson Ghost (Edward Parker), now calling himself Dr. Bedlam. Along the way, Archie learned that the Red Knight armor was originally constructed as a gift to mankind on New Genesis centuries ago. This revelation made Archie's observation that the armor comprised, as he put it, "the three major food groups of superheroes," namely magic, psionics and super-science, even more appropriate.
Archie Goodwin had only begun to explore the armor's true potential when he died saving the lives of his one true love Annette Rosenberg and his friend Warden Braffert during the Legion Crisis. According to his wishes, he was cremated and his ashes scattered over San Francisco Bay near where his friend and mentor Jonathan Winchester gave his own life years earlier.
Later, during the battle that climaxed The First Patchwork Man War, the Amazing Ghost Fighter briefly donned the Red Knight armor and used it to good effect to help stop Archie and Jonathan's greatest enemy. During this same battle, the Adamantium Age Red Knight, Willow Rosenberg, was also briefly involved, although the identity and origin of this "second Red Knight" currently remains a mystery to the Justice League.
The Red Knight armor is now back in its glass display case in the Winchester mansion. The damage it sustained during its last battle has been repaired. It stands ready, waiting patently for when Willow Rosenberg will take up her father's mantle several decades from now.
(See also Willow Rosenberg)