The Flash S4 adds Hartley Sawyer as Elongated Man

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One of the best things about CW’s stable of superhero shows is their willingness to add swaths of additional superheroes to their single hero programs.  The name of the show might be Arrow or The Flash but both series also feature a rotating cast of supporting superheroes that help the world feel larger and more engaging.  It’s an approach that took Smallville years to stumble on but now they’re doing right out of the gate, like with Martian Manhunter appearing as a supporting character for Supergirl season 1.  And they aren’t slowing down, either, with new heroes joining the shows all the time and now we’ve got another name to add to that list.  The most recently announced new hero joining the CWnivere is Ralph Dibney, the Elongated Man, who will appear in The Flash season 4 and be portrayed by Hartley Sawyer. 

If you’ve never heard of Elongated Man before I don’t blame you, in the arena of comic book stretchy guys he ranks about dead last, which is a real shame.  He’s actually a pretty fun and rewarding character to read it’s just that he’s never hit the sweet spot of popularity that contemporaries like Mr. Fantastic or Plastic Man have, probably because he’s not quite as easily summed up.  

Mr. Fantastic has the connection to the Fantastic Four as the smartest man in the world to fall back on and Plastic Man’s cartoon antics have helped become a staple of Cartoon Network shows.  By comparison, Elongated Man’s major achievements are that he’s a stretchable sleuth, is happily married, and has a public identity- not exactly a great pedigree to build a character off of. 

In fact, Elongated Man was actually referenced in an earlier Flash episode as being of the victims of the particle accelerator explosion.  In the season 1 episode ‘Black Out’ Professor Wells lists several people who died when the accelerator exploded and among them is Ralph Dibney, Elongated Man’s civilian identity.  A lot of us, myself included, sort of thought that meant he wouldn’t be making an appearance in the CWniverse but I guess it turns out death in this world is just an inconvenient detour. 

It does make sense that Elongated Man would make his debut on The Flash as that’s where he first appeared in the comics as well.  Originally he was less of a straight hero and more of a mysterious and somewhat amoral dude the Flash knew.  He wasn’t a criminal or anything just someone more interested in using his powers for financial gain as well as crime fighting.  In fact, when he first appeared he and the Flash were rivals with Elongated Man challenging him to races and such simply to prove he could stretch rings around the Flash.  Eventually, this vision of the character gave way to a more heroic one but its echoes never truly faded. 

It was revealed that E-Man’s real name was Ralph Dibney and that he developed a special formula that allowed him to stretch his body after being obsessed with contortionists as a kid.  Seriously, his origin is just noticing that a certain soda made people more flexible and making that soda into a concentrated form.  The drink was called Gingold, incidentally, a fact I bring up only because I fully expect it to factor into his appearance on The Flash in one way or another. 

After bedeviling the Flash for sometime Ralph was eventually promoted to the Justice League after he got married to a woman named Sue and sorted his life out.  Sue and Ralph Dibney were, in their time, some of the most beloved Justice Leaguers there’ve been.  

They were basically the beating heart of the league in the ‘70s, what’s known as the Satellite Era (because the team lived on a satellite then.)  This was their peak period as a husband and wife superhero team who mainly specialized in solving locked room mysterious with high concept genre elements.  Eventually, they faded from prominence but remained a popular supporting pair around the fringes of the DCU.

One major thing that’s always made Elongated Man unique is that he didn’t use a secret identity.  He wore a mask for the first couple of encounters but upon joining the Justice League he opted to ditch the mask and just let the world know Ralph Dibney is the Elongated Man.  For years he was the only Justice League member to have that level of exposure to his identity.  

In the late ‘90s when Wally West joined a revised version of the team as the new Flash he also chose to adopt an open identity, which is a connection I could easily see the show exploiting.  Of course, when the world knows who you are that makes you a pretty clear target for bad guys and unfortunately, that ended up taking a major toll on Ralph in the end. 

In a mid-2000s comic called Identity Crisis Ralph’s wife Sue Dibney was murdered, which kicked off a massive search for her murderer and also revealed the fact that she had previously been raped by the villain Dr. Light.  It’s an incredibly sour and unrewarding read that’s steeped in pointless character death, bad mystery writing, and being cruel for its own sake.  The event more or less broke Elongated Man and is probably the biggest reason he’s disappeared from modern parlance and I really doubt we’ll see any part of it get translated to the shows.  It also set Ralph down a dark path trying to resurrect his wife and eventually getting killed in the process.  Luckily, because this is a superhero comic, death wasn’t the end for Ralph and he and Sue came back together as friendly mystery solving ghosts with the ability to possess people’s bodies. 

Now I have exactly no idea how much of this will actually translate into The Flash’s vision of the Elongated Man.  CW shows have previously made a habit of re-purposing C-list heroes into disposable villains like Red Tornado or Jemm, son of Saturn, and Ralph’s villainous past could easily land him in that camp.  I certainly hope that’s not the case but at the same time team Flash already has like 4 superheroes on it so it seems unlikely E-Man will be made a permanent hero of the group.  

I wouldn’t be surprised if he was used to goad Wally into revealing his identity to the world as Kid Flash, that feels like it’s been building since the midpoint of season 3.  Personally, I’m hoping Elongated Man shows up as a reoccurring rival for the team, like a competing superhero for Central City, maybe paving the role for a larger role on Legends of Tomorrow but only time will tell. 

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