So, this latest Flash
episode featured the first major super villain team-up of the show. This is something that’s been building
for Flash for a long time, mainly
because in the comics Flash’s bad guys work together all the time. Villain team-ups have always been a
special event within comics but the Flash’s foes, nicknamed the Rogues, have
always been unique amongst them.
Part of this comes from most of the Rogues having low level powers,
compared to how indomitable Flash’s super speed powers are. Really though, what binds the Rogues
together is that they’re unique amongst comic book villains. Most bad guys are psychotic killers
like Batman fights or megalomaniacs like Superman battles, the Rogues are all
just common criminals, crooks trying to get by. Given that Flash
is dedicated to slowly introducing more and more of the Rogues, I figured now
would be a good time to do a Guide to the Flash’s Rogues.
CAPTAIN COLD
If you’re reading this then by now you’re probably already
familiar with Captain Cold. Real
name Leonard Snart and the son of a crooked cop, Cold was a bandit in Central
City who had the misfortune of stating his career of crime the same day the
Flash made his triumphant debut.
While in prison, Snart tried to find an edge against Flash’s super
speed, eventually looking into a local lab that was perfecting technology to
induce absolute zero. Upon his
release, Snart broke into the lab and stole one of their devices and adopted
the name Captain Cold in his future battles with the Flash, even wearing a
visor mask that was tied into the police scanner.
Snart basically ended up the leader of the Rogues for
whatever reason. I think the main
reason is that he was the first Rogue to do an actual team-up when he started
working alongside Heatwave. He
also ended up bringing his sister Golden Glider into the Rogues mix till she
was murdered by another cold based villain named Chillblane, we all agree not
to talk about him these days. Like
a lot of the Rogues, Captain Cold got a lot more development in the later years
under Geoff Johns’ Flash run. This was the era when a lot of the
Rogues gained a more tragic back-story and got to be more complex
characters. In Captain Cold’s
case, it started his long slow march to eventually joining the Justice League
under Johns’ run in Forever Evil.
HEAT WAVE
Real name Mick Rory, Heatwave went the opposite direction
from Captain Cold emphasizing super heat rather than super cold. Because there’s really no obvious
reason to use fire to fight super speed, Heatwave eventually had to pick up a
better reason for carrying a pair of handheld flamethrowers beyond just “to
fight the Flash.” So, during that
same Geoff Johns run when the Rogues were all getting genuine identities
Heatwave picked up one of, if not the most, tragic backstory of the many
Rogues. The idea was introduced
that he was a pyromaniac, somewhat similar to the Batman villain Firefly. The big difference is that where
Firefly is more joyously pyromaniacal Heatwave is a compulsive and tragic figure,
compelled to set fires by his own psychosis.
This has effectively made Heat Wave less of an overt villain
or even the standard breed of criminal.
Overall, most of the Flash’s foes are people forced into crime by
unfortunate circumstance. In Heatwave’s
case, his compulsion to burn things eventually made him an arsonist for hire
and he developed his handheld flamethrowers to help him spread the flames
better. Heatwave is a weird
Flash villain in that he rarely gets the spotlight all by himself, he’s one of
the few rogues who seems to genuinely need the other villains to actually carry
a story. A lot of that has to do
with how limited his powers are, all the other rogues have some amazing ability
but his powers are essentially the same as any guy with a lighter and
hairspray.
CAPTAIN BOOMERANG
Meet everyone’s secret favor Flash bad guy. Seriously, Captain Boomerang is one of
those absolutely ridiculous villains that has developed a shockingly large
following owing to just how weird yet persistent he is. His whole deal is that he developed
boomerang weaponry under the thinking that Flash would dodge them only for the
boomerangs to swing around backwards and hit him. You’ve got to admire the sheer determination of super
villains like Captain Boomerang, it’s right along that line between beautiful
stupidity and overwhelming insanity given that it if he was this dedicated to
being a thief he probably would’ve been better off just moving somewhere there
weren’t superheroes. Seriously,
you have to wonder how much more effort it was to build incendiary and
explosive boomerangs compared to just buying a plane ticket to Peru or Angola
or the like.
Boomer, as he hates being called, has become the Rogues’
whipping boy in a lot of ways. A
perennial failure and incompetent, he often ends up the butt of jokes for his
ridiculous weapons, comical costume, and the fact he’s from Australia. A lot of these things have actually
earned him a place in fandom’s heart as his struggles to remain on the villain
B-list make him incredibly relatable.
Later on, his son took up the role and was a lot more competent owing to
the fact he actually had super powers: limited super speed. Eventually that got scuttled and
classic Boomerang returned to his previous position on the blurred line between
struggling villain and hilarious joke.
WEATHER WIZARD
Weather Wizard is easily the most powerful member of the
rogues but often the one writers have the least idea what to do with. His techno-wand allows him to
manipulate the weather as the name suggests, summoning twisters and hail,
shooting lightning and ice blasts, and in general being up there with Storm and
Thor in terms of weather control powers.
This makes him one of the most powerful DC villains period, especially
when people get creative with his powers like having him generate storms inside
people (it’s gross and terrifying.)
Despite that incredible power and the fact he’s the Rogues’ heavy hitter
Weather Wizard rarely headlines Flash stories. He tends to be an opening villain for Flash to take down
before the real threat presents itself later on or a sort of background
pestering influence to pop up whenever Flash is trying to deal with some other
issue.
Like a lot of the Rogues, Weather Wizard gained a tragic backstory
during Geoff Johns run though his origin is more directly tied to his
abilities. When common crook Mark
Mardon was on the run from the cops over his third strike he hid out at his
brother’s science lab. When his
brother tried to turn him in the two struggled and Mardon’s brother was
killed. That guilt has dogged him
ever since this origin was revealed and informed the idea that he affects a
narcissistic egotism as a way of masking his deep-seated grief. Family has always played a big role in
the Flash mythos and Weather Wizard is a great example of how damaging it can
be when your own actions are what destroys it.
MIRROR MASTER
If you thought the last guy had tragic family issues you
ain’t seen nothing yet. Originally
Mirror Master was a crook named Sam Scudder who discovered weird mirror
technology that he used to bedevil the Flash instead of patenting it and making
millions because this is a comic book.
Scudder’s whole deal was optical illusions and light based attacks,
playing off the idea of both confusing the Flash on what he was hitting as well
as blasting him with the one thing he couldn’t outrace. It was a good gimmick and a cool idea
though Scudder was never that interesting a character. It was also introduced that mirrors are
actually transdimensional teleport gateways, entering both a nexus of all
mirrors everywhere and an alternate mirror universe. The mirror universe is basically like the one from Star Trek, heroes are villains and
villains are heroes. It was
eventually forgotten when DC introduced Earth-3, which was basically the same
thing, but came up later when certain people in Flash’s life were replaced with
their mirror duplicates.
All of that is very cool but it’s not exactly compelling
character points. Once again,
Geoff Johns to the rescue though this time with a little help from DC Comics
MVP Grant Morrison. In 1989,
Morrison debuted a new version of Mirror Master in the pages of Animal Man, a surrealist meta-comic he
was writing. The new Mirror
Master, named Evan McCulloch, was a Scottish mercenary abandoned by his parents
at a young age. Eventually
McCulloch ended up accidentally assassinating his own father on a job, which
caused his mom to commit suicide.
Like Weather Wizard, the guilt over this incident has stuck with him but
where Weather Wizard hides his guilt under a protective layer of ego and
self-obsession, Mirror Master assuages his guilt with copious drug use.
TRICKSTER
Trickster has possibly the greatest super villain origin of
any Flash villain. He was a circus
performer named James Jesse and because he had the same name as a famous outlaw
he decided to turn to a life of crime.
It’s good to remember that at the time a lot of these characters were
invented comics didn’t really run off real world logic so much as they did a
sort of logic of ridiculousness.
Anyway, Jesse developed flight shoes along with a handful of prank-based
gadgets that all play way too close to the schemes and gadgets of Riddler,
Joker, and Prankster. This has
always left Trickster in kind of a sticky wicket as he’s had a hard time
standing out in the crowd. The
most interesting way writers got around this was to, at one point, have him
lead up a group of reformed Rogues for the FBI to try and take down the
remaining villains. In addition to
Trickster there was Heatwave, Magneta, and Pied Piper which all led to a great
event entitled Rogue War.
During that period, the main Rogues got a new Trickster
named Axel Walker, a young punk who had found a warehouse full of Jesse’s gear
and adopted the monicker for himself.
Walker didn’t last long in the role but was at least an interesting bad
guy for how disturbingly sociopathic he was as a rogue. In a lot of ways, he plays like a
proto-version of the Jokerz from Batman
Beyond; a character steeped in the iconography of a violent but cartoony
villain to hide how wrong in the head they actually are.
ABRA KADABRA
If ever there was a Flash villain defined by his own
crippling failure it’d be Abra Kadabra.
Kadabra is actually a failed stage magician from the 64th
century, where no one really appreciates a good card trick anymore for
unaccountable reasons. Given that
he’d already dedicated his life to learning stage magic and trying to start a
second career would be really inconvenient at this point, Kadabra steals a time
machine and comes back to the present where his future tech grants him powers
unto a real wizard. Now returned
to the past, Kadabra decides to use his new found incredible powers for, what
else, petty crime. Seriously, I
don’t think there’s ever been a character to work so hard at avoiding possible
success. He could’ve gone back
before there were heroes and taken over, he could use his powers for actual
stage magic, he could just use future knowledge to make tons of money, but no;
crime is his only goal for his incredible abilities.
Just to add to the comical ineptitude of this guy, Abra
Kadabra likes to pretend he actually does have mystic abilities. Most folks, including the Rogues and
the Flash, are aware his “powers” are just bogus technology but don’t let on
because they’re essentially humoring him.
That’s right, a villain so incompetent that even the hero feels the need
to humor him. Admittedly,
Kadabra’s powers are at least pretty cool as, like a lot of Flash villains, his
origin is just an excuse to create a character with a suite of aesthetic
abilities and the stage magician suite is pretty cool. However, none of that really makes up
for the fact he uses time travel and future tech to basically figure out what
card you’re thinking of.
PIED PIPER
Pied Piper is a very weird bad guy. When he first appeared he was a C-list
bad guy who popped up sporadically to threaten the Flash with the power of his
hypnotic horn. In a sane and
rational world he would’ve passed into obscurity with a lot of Flash’s low
level villains like Peek-A-Boo and Plunder but that didn’t happen. Instead, like a lot of things in the
Flash’s saga, Pied Piper made a dramatic return under the stewardship of Geoff
Johns and Mark Waid. There were
pretty much 10 years where these two men ran Flash comics, mainly in the wake
of 1986’s Crisis on Infinite Earths
and Barry Allen, the original Flash, passing the torch on to his sidekick Wally
West.
When Piper was revived, he was more of an anti-villain,
someone who did bad things but mainly owing to necessity rather than amorality
or psychosis like most of the Rogues.
That’s why he eventually ended up on Trickster’s reformed rogues FBI
team. Even when the reformed
rogues dissipated Trickster remained in a sort of limbo, shifting back and
forth between Flash’s foe and ally.
At this time he enhanced his arsenal to all forms of sonic weaponry and
it was revealed he was gay, making him one of DC’s first relatively prominent
gay reoccurring characters.
TOP
And so we reach the last quasi-Rogue with the Top. The Top is an oddity even among the
Rogues as, like Pied Piper or Abra Kadabra, you’d expect him to be consigned to
the dustbin of comic history.
Contrary to popular belief, not every villain makes it in a rogues
gallery and Flash has plenty of bad guys like Girder or Rainbow Raider or Tar
Pit that absolutely no one cares about.
The Top has somehow managed to slip through the cracks to become both a
reoccurring threat and a pretty great villain in his own right. Originally, his whole deal was that he
had managed to turn himself into a human version of the Tasmanian Devil from
Looney Tunes. He’d spin around at
incredible velocity and developed spinning based weapons to use against
Flash. It was a weird gimmick
mixed with a dopey costume that really shouldn’t have endured.
However, endure it did and thanks once again to Geoff Johns
(seriously, that guy gets around.)
Johns brought back the Top with a creepy makeover and a terrifying new
power. The idea was that now the
Top had some form of telepathic powers that allowed him to “flip” people’s
minds, twisting around their sense of morality and identity. It was a creepy concept and the fact
the Top found a way to possess someone else’s body after his death made it all
the creepier. It eventually turned
out he was the one responsible for the Rogue War after he “flipped” the minds
of various Rogues to turn good. Of
all Flash’s villains, this iteration of the Top is easily the creepiest and
most unhinged, playing more like a Batman villain than anything else. He may have died during the Rogue War
but it feels like only a matter of time before he spins his way into some other
poor bastard’s mind.
DR. ALCHEMY
These last three bad guys aren’t technically members of the
Rogues but rather big name Flash villains that it felt wrong not to
include. Dr. Alchemy, briefly
called Mr. Element in a horribly goofy and miscalculated costume, is pretty
much exactly what his name suggest: a doctor of alchemy. As such, he develops an incredibly
powerful stone device that allows him to transmute anything. This places him up there with Weather
Wizard as one of the most powerful characters ever despite barely registering
as a blip in the DC villain universe.
Seriously, this guy as gone toe-to-toe with the Justice League of
America but most folks couldn’t pick him out of a generic villain line-up. Part of his major abilities comes from
how vague the power of his stone is in that it basically allows him to
rearrange matter at will. He can
create fully formed and functional airplane wings on the side of a van or turn
planes into living horses.
In a way, Dr. Alchemy’s powers make render him too strong to
be reoccurring, a lot like fellow OP bad guys Molecule Man and Matter
Master. As it stands, his most
memorable and lasting moment has ended up an appearance in Greg Rucka’s Gotham Central where he went nuts on the
GCPD in one of the more gruesome explorations of his abilities.
GORILLA GRODD
Given that DC editor Julius Schwartz ran the company for
nearly a decade under the banner of “apes on comics sell comics,” it’s kind of
surprising there aren’t MORE ape super villains. As it stands, Gorilla Grodd is really the only name ape bad
guy aside from maybe Titano the super ape. I think what makes Grodd such a perennial favorite of comics
is just how weird a concept he is to fight the Flash. They basically sat down and thought “who will defeat this
super fast guy? I know: a psychic gorilla!” Like I mentioned, this is basically the kind of whacky
nonsense that defined the surrealist acid trip that was comics at the dawn of
the super-heroic age, it just so happens that Grodd never lost that lovable
insanity. In a way, the fact that
Grodd hasn’t really changed at all, he’s still a psychic talking gorilla from a
hidden city of fellow talking gorillas, serves to highlight how right Julius
Schwartz was about apes on comics.
I mean, Gorilla Grodd is basically Flash’s archenemy, he’s the most
popular villain Flash ever faced and has appeared in multiple comic adaptations
and has battle basically every super team of the DC universe. It just goes to show: apes on comics
sell comics.
Reverse Flash/
Zoom
The Reverse Flash is a unique Flash foe in that despite
being a literal embodiment of the complete opposite of Flash’s identity and
visual design…he was never really that important. Seriously, most of the classic Flash stories don’t revolve
around Eobard Thawne, the psycho-historian from the future who recreated
Flash’s transformation and gained super speed himself. He fought the Flash a lot and it was a
big deal that eventually Barry broke his neck but for the most part he just
wasn’t going at it with Flash in the same manner as Joker and Batman or Luthor
and Superman. In all honesty,
without Tom Cavanagh’s standout performance as the Reverse Flash on the CW
show, the character probably wouldn’t be as beloved now as he is.
However, Reverse Flash did have a legacy all his own in the
form of Hunter Zolomon. Zolomon
was a cop who lost the use of his legs and tried to convince Wally West to use
the cosmic treadmill to go back in time and save him. When Wally refused, Hunter stole the treadmill and tried to
use it himself. The attempt failed
but the resulting explosion gifted him with temporal super speed, allowing him
to slow down his local time and move at speeds beyond even that of the
Flash. Taking up Reverse Flash’s
occasional nickname of Professor Zoom and shortening it to just Zoom, Zolomon
was a major bad guy during the Johns run and a true force to be reckoned
with. He was a violent and brutal
sociopath who actually caused Flash’s wife to have a miscarriage at one point. Eventually, Wally managed to defeat him
but only with the help of the entire Flash family.
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