Broadway

      

 Above right: The late "Future Tense" Broadway, in Goliath's arms. (Both pictures courtesy of Dracandros.)

Gender: Male

First Appearance: "Awakening" Part I

Other Appearances: Every episode of Gargoyles and the Goliath Chronicles except "Outfoxed," "Avalon" Parts II & III, "Shadows of the Past," "Heritage," "Monsters," "Golem," "Sanctuary," "M.I.A.," "Grief," "The Hound of Ulster," "Walkabout," "Mark of the Panther," "Eye of the Storm," "The New Olympians," "Sentinel," "Bushido," "Cloud Fathers," "Ill Met By Moonlight," "Vendettas," "Generations."

The gargoyle who would be known as Broadway hatched into the Wyvern gargoyle clan in 958 AD, middle sibling of the three gargoyles who would quickly come to be called the Trio. He has a calm and empathic manner of approaching most situations and people, as opposed to Brooklyn's biting sarcasm or Lexington's initially very trusting and later highly distrustful manner. His large size and bulk contrasts with Brook's lean athletic build and Lex's small size. Broadway is aqua in color with greenish wings.

An overriding factor of Broadway's character is his immense love for food. Flora, fauna or neither, it's all the same. He has even used food as a weapon, clubbing Vikings with legs of mutton and the like. Food has always been good to him, and even cushioned his falls when sneaking into theaters. However, it has sometimes gotten him into trouble; when Xanatos showed his true colors to the clan, his first action was making the Steel Clan robot blow up the box of Chinese food in Broadway's hand.

Within a short time after Xanatos had been sent to prison on charges of receiving stolen property, Broadway had become obsessed with television, the movies and the images he saw in them. Like his brothers, he was a great fan of the Pack before they shown to be evil, but his adulation was never to the point of Lexington's. However, after the Pack went off the air, Broadway found a new fixation. Westerns, noir, and similar genres became his bread and butter, and he watched them as often as he could. One factor common to all these also attracted the young gargoyle's attention - the gun.

The piece was always depicted in a glamorous manner, appearing to be cool, desirable, and even necessary. And Broadway came to believe that this indeed was so. He emulated the actions of his heroes of the big and small screens, and mimed at the gestures of gunplay. After viewing another of his westerns one night, the young gargoyle stopped by Elisa's apartment for a snack (his snacks, of course, being more than most would eat in a full meal), but quickly found his attraction diverted by something else - Detective Maza's gun in its holster, on the rack with her coat. Picking it up, he mimed the motions and techniques seen in the movies again, and accidentally fired the gun. Going into the kitchen to apologize to Elisa, he found her unconscious and bleeding to death on the floor from a chest wound inflicted by his own actions.

In desperation, Broadway dropped the gun and took Elisa to the hospital, laying her on a stretcher outside the door where she was discovered by the resident doctors. She was taken in critical condition to the operating room and at one point in the night her heart stopped for a time before she was resuscitated. Meanwhile, Broadway fled to a secluded spot and wept until the sun rose and he entered stone sleep. He awoke the next evening with a vengeful rage against firearms of all sorts, and in attacking a gun-wielding mugger in Central Park found out about the planned sale of a huge shipment of stolen prototype particle-beam weaponry that Elisa had been hunting down, by the crime boss Tony Dracon and his aide "Glasses." On the way to the docks to stop them, Broadway met up with Goliath, who thought the two humans were responsible for Elisa's shooting. Following a brawl in which Tony's thugs were mopped up, Broadway stopped Goliath from killing Dracon, revealing that he was the one who had shot Elisa. After destroying the guns, the two gargoyles went to visit Elisa at the hospital and found her in weak but stable condition. Even once released from the hospital she would be on crutches for weeks afterward.

Broadway and the clan were kept busy over the next months. MacBeth attacked them and captured Lexington and Brooklyn, while throwing Broadway around like a rag doll. The young gargoyle was responsible for destroying more Steel Clan robots than any of his clanmates when Xanatos attacked them again. He helped Lexington rebuild the crashed Pack helicopter they took from Jackal and Hyena. The clan fought off Coldstone and the return of the Pack, and Broadway dragged Brooklyn away from the fight when the leader of the Trio was hit by a tranquilizer dart while trying to stop the Gen-U-Tech mercenaries from taking Maggie.

A husband-and-wife archaeologist team's discovery of the Scrolls of Merlin proved to have far greater ramifications than they intended, especially in the young gargoyle's life. When Elisa and other NYPD members arrived at the storm-tossed ship carrying their find to New York, MacBeth's minions attacked the ship to take the scrolls, which were believed to contain magic of great power. The Manhattan clan attacked the thieves as they departed, trying to stop them in their purpose. Hudson was knocked into the sea with one of the scroll tubes, where he washed up by the house of a human he would soon befriend, Jeffrey Robbins. Broadway followed the jets carrying the other scroll back to MacBeth's mansion, where he was discovered and imprisoned. After acquiring the other scroll, MacBeth returned and began a ritual of opening, keeping Broadway chained up as a test subject for any spells which might be within. After opening the scrolls, MacBeth began reading them in front of Broadway, only to find them to be a diary. Goliath attacked at this point and took the scrolls, nearly destroying them in MacBeth's ritual fire. Broadway prevented him from doing so, however, saying that the story of Merlin's life contained therein was more powerful than any magic. MacBeth released Broadway at this point, and the young gargoyle and Hudson later began teaching themselves and each other to read.

Demona's rampage with Puck showed Broadway to have a heavy-set, muscled human form, with short blonde hair. Shortly after, the gargoyle got the chance to play detective once more. Matt Bluestone began hunting down Dominic Dracon, believing him to have ties to the secret society called the Illuminati. Shortly afterward, he disappeared. While investigating Matt's apartment, Elisa was jumped by an intruder. Broadway appeared and beat him up, but triggered a bomb in the process, blowing up Matt's apartment. Elisa was quite unhappy and told Broadway to basically go away and do something else, but he argued that if the bad guys were using such tactics she would need help, and she relented. Broadway accompanied her to Cleopatra's Needle, where she met Matt's old FBI partner Martin Hacker, who gave her some leads to follow. After he left, she was attacked again, and she and Broadway fought them off.

Elisa then went to meet with an old man curating an old gangster hideout, to ask him if he had seen Matt and if so where he had gone. Unfortunately, the old man was none other than Dominic Dracon, and tipped his grandson Tony Dracon off about the detective's approach; as she and Broadway started descending the stairs in the warehouse where Dracon was boring into the wall and had Bluestone prisoner, the stairs were imploded and the two intruders fell into a pit. Broadway turned to stone as the thugs started sifting through the rubble, so Elisa quickly pulled herself out of the pit and watched Dracon's efforts come up with only a sardonic note. She then told Dracon she knew where the family jewels were hidden, but they could only be retrieved under cover of darkness - giving Broadway time to wake up. When he did, he found the discarded note, which with his very rudimentary at this point reading ability, he was able to decipher as "Right idea, wrong Falcon." Realizing as Elisa did that the Falcon being referred to was the statue on the building opposite Dominic's offices, he flew there in time to help Elisa snag the bad guys. His detective yearnings had paid off after all.

Afterwards, the clan dealt with Demona and MacBeth, Coldstone, and Thailog. Before the appearance of the upgraded Pack Broadway too vied for the position of second-in-command, but when Brooklyn gained it by his calm command of the situation he and Lex accepted it without resentment. Around this time, Dracon was starting to lean on small business-owners in a wide-spread protection racket, building up his personal wealth again. Choosing not to warn the gargoyles in fear that they might screw things up if they became involved, Elisa went undercover as a racketeer herself, with Captain Chavez, Detective Bluestone and Officer Morgan in on the plan. When Dracon's men appeared to find out who was muscling in on their territory, and Goliath and Broadway leapt to her defense thinking she was under attack, she coldly brushed them off and went with Dracon's people to his penthouse to meet with him. Broadway deduced that she was undercover, and convinced Goliath to follow him to Dracon's and play at being corruptible themselves. By this deception Dracon's operations were soon blown wide open, and the skunk-haired human was in prison once more.

After Goliath abandoned the clan for a time without warning them to go to Avalon, Broadway, Lexington and Hudson followed Brooklyn, who, as Second, assumed command of the clan. During this time, the clan skirmished with Fang and his minions in their bid to take over the Labyrinth, and MacBeth and his minions in their bid to take the sword Excalibur. Broadway helped defeat Fleance and Banquo, giving the clan time to go and help Arthur and Griff. When Hyena attacked the museum in an attempt to destroy the Mayan Sun Amulet, Broadway and Lexington intercepted and defeated her, leaving her for the police. Broadway thought of destroying the Amulet because of Hyena's reference to magic and gargoyle death, but thought better of it, and his choice to let the artifact remain in existence saved the Avalon questers and Guatemalan gargoyle clan.

One of the worst challenges faced by Goliath on the Avalon journey, after the war with the Archmage and Weird Sisters on Avalon itself and the tests of the fibre of his soul at the Archmage's old lair and in the frozen wastes of Norway, was the nightmarish future version of Manhattan which Puck cast him into in an attempt to get the Phoenix Gate. This world was secretly ruled by Lexington, and one of the results of his evil was the injuries sustained by Broadway. This future Broadway was sightless, having had his eyes destroyed and his face scarred by Sevarius and the Ultra-Pack, and he "saw" by means of a neurally-connected sonar collar which Lex made for him in some last vestige of remorse. His skin had faded to a deathly pallor. However, despite all of this, the strong simple core of Broadway's good nature remained, and he saved Goliath from death at the hands of the embittered and resentful clan leader Brooklyn. Where Goliath's abandonment had left Brooklyn with a withering disdain for and disgust with the purple gargoyle, and had caused Lexington to embrace the dark, Broadway never lost faith that Goliath would return. He died shortly thereafter in an assault on Lexington/Xanatos' pyramid, and over his body Goliath shed some of the only tears the stoic gargoyle ever let escape his eyes.

After Goliath returned, the Trio tried to gain the favor of his daughter Angela. While they all met with limited success initially, Broadway enjoyed more than his brothers because of his simple, friendly, empathic nature. He enjoyed a leap in progress in this department when he and Angela became hosts for the spirits of Coldstone and his lover, when they believed their actions could finally rid them of their evil brother. Though the loving actions they engaged in were initiated by their possessors, the two were aware of everything that happened, and became closer to each other... especially when the two spirits went to their bodies leaving the two young gargoyles in an embrace. The final nails were driven into this coffin shortly after the Quarrymen's appearance, when they embraced after reading from Shakespeare in the library. Thereafter the two were officially an item.

In the Goliath Chronicles, Broadway's obsession with Hollywood overwhelmed him, and he was possessed by the desire to become a star. Fox agreed to help him, and cagily arranged for two stunt pilots to feign at being newlywed inexperienced pilots in danger of imminent crashing in front of a news crew as the plane carrying Fox and Broadway drew into the LAX airport. Broadway saved the two on national television, and immediately gained some of the fame he desired. This fame was a double-edged blade he hadn't counted on, however, as admirers pounced him and tore at his clothes.

During the taping of an interview with a late night talk show host named Shauna Coyle, Jackal and Hyena, on Quarrymen payroll, attacked the secret warehouse where it was being conducted and kidnapped Broadway after being tipped off by Fox's traitorous pilot. They strapped a jetbomb and launcher to Broadway's unconscious form and planned to frame him for the destruction of a Los Angeles landmark and the murder of the people around it. However, against her husband's advice Fox had brought along a suit of powered armor in case things got unusual, and she saved Broadway from the jetbomb. The two of them mopped up the dastardly duo and traitor, got Broadway back to the interview, and then returned him to New York when he realized this wasn't what he wanted for his life after all. The unwarned disappearance strained Broadway and Angela's relationship for a short time, but this was quickly repaired.

Broadway later helped Hudson when they were attacked by Quarrymen while investigating the wreckage of a pro-gargoyle meeting, and was brushed off by the elder gargoyle, who was sulking because of his eye. When kidnapped by the Illuminati, Broadway was tormented in a flooded chamber, having to fight to get air to breathe. Later, during the final assault on the passenger and carrier train by Jon Canmore and the Quarrymen, Broadway helped save Margot Yale and the other police in the rear car, starting the process of opinion change which culminated when Brooklyn's plan saved the whole train and all its passengers from certain messy death. The gargoyles were finally hailed as heroes and given the recognition they deserved.

In Greg Weisman's Master Plan, Broadway and Angela would have three children - Artus, Gwenyvere and Lancelot.

Broadway has the abilities typical of gargoyles - great leathery wings upon which he could fly, a strong prehensile tail, night vision as good as human day vision, slow aging rate, great speed and strength, highly tuned senses, and the mixed blessing of healing stone sleep. His strength is second only to Goliath's, and his hearing is even sharper than a normal gargoyle's thanks to his large ears. Broadway is of vast bulk and prodigious appetite, and seems able to consume an almost unlimited quantity of food without becoming ill or varying his weight past the heavy point to which it gravitated.

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