Comics Rainbow - Time Masters

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 3^rd 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 31^st 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 20^th century rather than the 25^th.  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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