It’s fitting that at the end of one year and the beginning
of a new one time travel is a subject of some emphasis. Back
to the Future dominated the national consciousness once more during 2015, Doctor Who found itself reinvigorated
with an amazing new season, and Legends
of Tomorrow promises to whisk us away on an adventure through time with a
mini-Justice League of its own making.
Given all that I thought I’d take a look at the time travelers of the DC
Universe, mainly because they’re a lot more straight forward and understandable
than the mangled mesh of nonsense over at Marvel, seriously you do not want to
have me explaining the relationship between Kang, Immortus, Ramma Tut, Dr.
Doom, and Iron Lad to you. For now
let’s dive in to the Time Masters of DC Comics in all their shades, shames, and
successes.
Interesting that we start our book with the most hated
character who has the most interesting gimmick. Waverider is more or less the byproduct of a forgotten DC
event comic called Armageddon: 2001. Published in 1991 the series was about
a dark future where one of the DC heroes went rogue, killed everyone, and took
over the world. Waverider was a
time traveler who used paradox resistant material to go back in time and try to
find out who the rogue hero, now named Monarch, was using his ability to see someone’s
most likely future. That’s a super
cool power that was actually used as an excuse to make a whole ton of
future-set annual comics exploring weird alternate hero adventures like one
comic where Superman is President in the future.
Armageddon: 2001
fell to pieces when the ending twist was leaked ahead of time, which was
unheard of back then, leaving Waverider to squitter on as a sporadic entry in
the DC universe. I think the big
reason so many dislike Waverider is that his power is to make other characters
more interesting while he himself has the personality of mud. Add in the unfortunate connection to
such a botched event it’s no surprise this guy ended up killed by a quirky
robot sidekick turned evil (yes, really.)
I am a huge Hourman fan, which was probably apparent to long
time readers who notice he always has a place on my DC lists. I couldn’t tell you why I love the
character as much as I do other than he’s just so damn compelling in every
iteration of the character. The
one I’m focusing on here was the 3rd Hourman, an android from the
distant future who had time travel and manipulation powers.
He popped up as part of a DC event
exploring the world of the DC universe 1 million years in the future where he
was a lot more machine like before coming back in time to the present to join
the Justice Society of America and adopting a more human persona. He got his own series out of the gig
and it’s honestly a superb read, one of the best comics about synthetic
identity and self-definition I’ve ever read and full to the brim with amazing
time travel antics.
Though he was a great part of Justice Society I liked him
even more in his solo series thanks to how much room to breath it afforded him,
it was more like a superhero dramaedy than anything else, sort of in the vein
of Matt Fraction’s Hawkeye. It was also really cool that his method
of time travel was a giant literal ship that sailed through a rainbow river of
time. Seriously, he’s one of the
most fun and engaging and human heroes of the DCU.
The tale of Black Beetle is tragic, disappointing, and in no
way rewarding. He was a character
who popped up in the weird neutral zone of late 2000s DC comics. This was when DC was putting out a lot
of great big name comics that all kind of came clattering to a halt over a
couple of years in the immediate aftermath of Superman: Earth 1 that eventually led to the New 52 relaunch. He first appeared as part of the Time
Stealers, a villainous time travel group who bedeviled Rip Hunter and Booster
Gold and was powered by the mysterious black scarab, a piece of powerful and
unexplained alien technology.
Later, Black Beetle appeared near the end of the Jaimie Reyes Blue
Beetle comic run as a reoccurring antagonist given they used the same
technology. His identity was a
mystery but hinted to be a serious game changer. So, who was he and what were his mysterious end goals and
source of his incredible powers?
Nothing!
Yeah, that’s right, nothing. Apparently there was a plan for him to be more significant
and a big reveal but the writers just let him be an unexplained mystery for so
long that when the time came to answer who he was the relaunch was already in
the cards and nobody cared anymore.
He’s basically everything terrible at relaunches, reboots, and
reshuffles that has come to blight the comics industry but in character form:
such a terrible waste.
Rip Hunter is one of those weird, old school DC characters
that somehow managed to luck his way into a defining place in the current
continuity. Much like Captain
Comet or the Atomic Knights he got his start in the ‘50s when weird sci-fi and
strange adventures were the comic book stock and trade. So, the story of an adventuring time
traveler made total sense to fit into that particular morass of crazy
adventures fueled by even crazier science. He probably would’ve lived and died unnoticed by continuity
if not for a chance resurrection in the late ‘90s as part of the concept of
“Hypertime,” an idea too insane to get into here. Basically he came back and as a result he managed to kick
around the DC universe just long enough to end up a key figure in the 52 maxi-series and its follow-up Booster Gold comic. Now, he’s become so synonymous with DC
time travel he’s appearing on Legends of
Tomorrow.
What makes him so lasting and great? Well essentially he’s just the perfect
idea of a time traveler, mainly because the more modern version of the
character plays a lot like an Americanized Doctor
Who. Like the Doctor he’s got
a secret lair full of weird physics and a plethora of weapons from all eras and
like the Doctor his back-story and true identity are a mystery. His real name is lost to history as, if
anyone figured out his identity, they could go back and kill him as a child. It also helps that Rip has never had to
carry his own story, he’s more of a plot device than anything else, someone you
bring in to explain and enable time travel rather than drive a story. Given how complex time travel
narratives tend to be, having a character like Hunter around to explain
everything is an easy way to keep things moving without falling into a Primer or Looper type complexity trap.
The Time Trapper is one of the coolest time based super
villains ever. He was one of the
major enemies of the Legion of Superheroes; a group of teen superheroes in the
31st century that hung were like a proto-version of the X-Men. He’s essentially an evil scientist with
time manipulation powers and a sociopathic sense that the entire universe is
his laboratory for weird experiments into time and psychological manipulation. He had a major history of concocting
pocket dimensions with unique timelines crafted to torment the Legion members
as little private temporal hells.
I do, however, get why a lot of folks don’t care for
him. He’s a time travel bad guy,
which means his schemes are all pretty convoluted, and the fact that his
motivation is a very ephemeral “because I was curious” just adds to that. What’s more his identity and origin
both remain a mystery, which I really like but often leaves him a little
undefined. I personally find the
unanswered questions about him add to the mystique, especially given that at
this point it’s fairly clear he’s a character whose identity was never meant to
be revealed. Some villains just work
that way, existing less as a puzzle to be solved and more as a sort of opaque
fact to be accepted. Also his
visual design is great and I’m a real sucker for the “evil scientist with the
world as his petri dish” thing.
Per Degaton is an evil time traveling Nazi who fought the
Justice Society, a team of ‘40s superheroes who fought in World War 2 and a
whole new generation of heroes who’ve adopted classic mantels to join the fight
against evil. That statement alone
should make Per Degaton a stand out villain in the ranks of all time greats
like Starro, Amazo, or Darkseid.
However, you’ve never heard of Per Degaton and he barely shows up at all
throughout the DC continuity.
There’ve bee a few interesting stories with him but for the most part
Per Degaton has never once commanded the same respect as other villains, he’s a
bad guy who plays second fiddle to the Ultrahumanite. I think a big part of this comes down to timing. The Justice Society hasn’t really had
that many consistent on-going comics and when the best one happened, Geoff
Johns 2000s comic, Johns was more concerned with another time traveling villain
named Extant.
There was one interesting Geoff Johns’ story about Degaton
emphasizing him using his time travel powers to visit all the greatest defeats
and deaths of the JSA, which makes a good amount of sense given how petty he is
as a villain. However, Per Degaton
is still a time traveling Nazi scientist so putting him in the vein of “petty
bad guy with a time machine” kind of ruins the sheer awesomeness of that
set-up. Per Degaton should be
waging war on the world with armies of weird nazi science or invading
Wonderland or some other madness, not munching pop corn and watching Star Girl
cry over break-ups like a shitty Twitter troll (yes, that happened by the way.) If DC ever finds the money to get Hellboy creator Mike Mignola to make a
Justice Society comic he’d be the perfect author to give Per Degaton a
much-needed revival.
Of all the bizarre histories in this time travel list
Booster Gold is easily the strangest.
He started life as a Dan Jurgens passion project around the time Jurgens
was gaining a lot of clout at DC for his skill with Superman. He was an interesting hero and his
early comics are shockingly modern and deeply compelling with a lot of unique
elements that influenced a lot of future books like Batman Inc. Booster’s
story is that he was a football player from the future who suffered a scandal,
lost his position, became a security guard and eventually stole a bunch of
technology to go back in time to become a rich and famous superhero. Even though Booster’s end goal was
money he was still a very moral guy and the comics did a good job balancing his
endorsements and business stuff with the actual superheroing.
From there Booster has a weird history. He joined the Justice League
International under the Keith Giffen and J.M Dematties days and was a major
member for years and years before slipping into obscurity during most of the
late ‘90s and early 2000s. Eventually,
he made his way back into the mainstream focus around 2005 as part of DC’s
major reboot event Infinite Crisis
and its follow-up 52. Since his start turn in 52 Booster has morphed into a serious DC
Comics big name with a role on Smallville
and a reoccurring part in Batman: Brave
and the Bold. He’s essentially
an obscure C-lister who clawed his way into everyone’s collective heart, thanks
mainly to DC editor-in-chief Dan Didio being a major fan and it’s easy to see
why. Booster is, in many ways, a
Marvel hero, in that his chance to be a super star comes at the expense of his
previous success and having to abandon everyone he ever cared about to live in
20th century rather than the 25th. He’s a character fueled by human
failings and human emotions more than the abstractions of a power fantasy.
And one last jaunt into idiocy and nonsense to bring us to
the end of the rainbow, the linear men are a group of time travel
authoritarians that sprung up in that same hypertime rigmarole that revived Rip
Hunter. They were new characters
created specifically for the event as a kind of dictatorial time lords who
aired more on the side of intervention and sculpting history to their
ideals. The idea is at least
interesting albeit completely non-threatening given they can literally never
succeed because if they did everything would change and there’s no way that
could be accomplished. What’s
more, it didn’t help that they were deadly boring, just a bunch of sour puss
bad guys with no more depth or complexity than a stuffy headmaster in a
boarding school comedy.
What’s
really weird is how often these guys kept popping up despite how lame and
un-engaging they are. DC had a
whole major storyline in the waning days before the reboot dedicated to
bringing them back almost 20 years later after no one asked. That story at least tried to make them
mildly proactive and give them wrinkle of being a Chronal authority outside Rip
Hunter but…well, let’s just say there’s a good reason their story was left in
the old continuity.
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