Wayne Brady joins Black Lightning in recurring role as Gravedigger
Black Lightning season 3 is starting to heat up, and the addition of a new character should make it even more explosive. The CW announced Thursday that Wayne Brady is joining the show in a recurring role this season as the DC Comics character Gravedigger.
In this incarnation, Gravedigger’s real name is Tyson Sykes, and he’s a World War II veteran of the U.S. military who became a super-soldier after undergoing a secret experiment. This experiment gifted Tyson with enhanced strength and agility, tactical genius, and hand-to-hand combat expertise. Presumably it also gave him an increased lifes pan if he’s survived from World War II to the present in reasonable condition, but Black Lightning is no stranger to long lives. Maybe Tyson uses a similar kind of longevity serum as Tobias Whale (Marvin Jones III), who has fought Black Lightning (Cress Williams) with the same outward appearance he had killing the superhero’s father decades earlier.
But there’s an even bigger spin on Black Lightning’s version of Gravedigger: After fighting in World War II, Spikes defected to the country of Markovia rather than return to segregated America. His apparent goal has been to found a sovereign nation for metahumans within Markovia — a fascinating parallel to Marvel’s recent House of X and Powers of X comics, where the X-Men founded their own sovereign nation for mutants on the island of Krakoa. Gravedigger’s plan will put him on a collision course with the ASA — which has practically established martial law in the metahuman-filled city of Freeland as of the season 3 premiere — and Black Lightning himself.
Brady’s first episode of Black Lightning will likely air in early 2020.
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