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I don’t think we really appreciate how genuinely good the CWniverse has actually turned out to be. For a collection of series dramas with wildly variant budgets cooked up by the network that gave us One Tree Hill and 90210, the CWniverse is a staggeringly excellent achievement that I think will be looked back on the same way we remember Adam West’s Batman or Linda Carter’s Wonder Woman.
It’s a great collection of adaptation that really understands that it’s the characterization and drama that have made superheroes so compelling for 80 years and counting, so it’s only fitting that they would do a wedding episode.
Yes, this year’s crossover event between The Flash, Supergirl, Legends of Tomorrow, and Arrow has been revealed as a wedding story about the marriage of Barry Allen and Iris West, the central romance on The Flash. However, in the grand tradition of comic book weddings, this particular matrimony is to be interrupted by unwelcome visitors from the multiverse/CW Seed in the form of the Ray.
Making his jump from animation to live action the Ray, CW’s first gay character, is set to appear in the wedding episode, hotly pursued by villain’s from Earth-X, a world where the Nazis won WW2 and Supergirl, Flash, and Green Arrow are all Nazi Supermen. Let’s talk Crisis on Earth-X.
To understand what Earth-X is and how it came to be we have to go back, way back to the dawn of comic books. Back in the 1940s when superheroes first emerged as a moneymaking genre there were about 6 major publishers producing material. Now, when the ‘40s ended superhero popularity tapered off so only a couple of the big names managed to survive, with 3 of the previous 6 going belly up before the ‘60s. These three were Fawcette Comics, who created Shazam, Charlton Comics, who created Blue Beetle and Captain Atom, and Quality Comics, our focus today. DC purchased the rights to all three groups and decided to slowly integrate their heroes into the DCU proper, which brings us to one day in 1973.
Len Wein, a geek turned writer and creator of the X-Men as well as everything you love about comics, was tapped by DC Editor Julius Schwartz for the job of writing the annual Justice League/Justice Society crossover story. He’d written it previously to feature a staggering 33 superheroes so this year he wanted to do something even crazier and he settled on introducing the Quality Comics heroes to the DCU. Wein felt that because the Quality Comics heroes enjoyed their greatest success in World War 2 that would be a good setting for their story, which is how he settled on the alternate history setting of a world where the Nazis won.
The story was originally going to be called Earth-Swastika, but Julius Schwartz, having lived through World War 2, refused as he’d never publish any material that included that symbol so instead it became Earth-X. The comic was a huge success and the Freedom Fighters eventually moved to the DCU proper, though their various solo books were never quite as popular and eventually they faded into the DC D-list ranks.
Eventually, the concept was revived in the mid-2000s when DC reintroduced the Multiverse. This version of Earth-X didn’t get much screen time but basically set the tone for it going forward as it introduced the idea of Nazi Superheroes to the world. See, the 1973 version of Earth-X was just Nazis vs. heroes but in this new world, the entire Justice League had Nazi counterparts known as the New Reischmen.
In this world Kal-El had landed in Nazi Germany and they reverse engineered his ship’s technology to win the war and establish a 1000-year Reich under the immortal Overman. It’s actually kind of a chilling concept as we only see this world from the present where the horrors of the Holocaust are considered vacuum-sealed, museum pieces the same way America treats slavery or genocide against first nations peoples. In this world, the Freedom Fighters were reimagined as representatives of the groups targeted in the Holocaust- the return of the repressed seeking justice against the Reich. I reviewed this comic previously if you’d like a more in-depth look at it.
In any event, that the version of the Freedom Fighters that looks to be showing up in the CWniverse, as first seen on the animated series The Ray. Additionally, it looks like they’re even doing the New Reischmen/Nazi Heroes angle with Supergirl becoming Overgirl, Flash as Blitzen, and Green Arrow as Black Arrow, which should be fun in a twisted way. Admittedly the characters designs seem drawn from across the Freedom Fighters’ entire history but the diversity angle is still in place. With that in mind, a brief summary of the various Freedom Fighters assembled for the CW.
BLACK CONDOR
There have been 4 variations of Black Condor but happily, CW is going with my favorite/the one I know most about John Trujillo, co-created by the excellent Jimmy Palmiotti. He first appeared in a mid-2000s reworking of the team as a politically charged, Civil War-esc. type series that nobody but me really liked. He’s of Mayan descent and was granted incredible powers by the Spider Goddess Tocotl. There’s a lot of weirdness in the comic like that that doesn’t quite gel as it was cobbled together from someone else’s ideas and notes after they got hashed up by editorial but none of that matters because Black Condor is awesome.
He’s basically “what if the Falcon was also Storm” and I love it. His mystic powers make him an elemental of air and earth and an incredibly powerful one at that. He can summon incredible winds and earthquakes and has super strength. He basically the saved the whole team when he first showed up and is one of their big guns. He’s also one of the hottest guys in comics so I hope that translates.
PHANTOM LADY
Like Condor there’ve been quite a few Phantom Ladies but in this case, CW’s version seems to be a synthesis of a few sources. Firstly there’s the 2005-2006 Phantom Lady who worked with Trujillo’s team, Stormy Knight. She was the daughter of a senator and brilliant physicist who hid her intelligence behind a party girl façade and acted as her father’s mole in the government’s superhuman programs.
She was a pretty cool character with weird teleportation and invisibility powers. However, elements of the costume design in the CW version suggest they might be going with the 2014 Phantom Lady from Multiversity, who was of Romani descent. I’m interested in how CW might broach this as they really fumbled the ball last time this came up with the character of Gypsy on The Flash.
RED TORNADO
Red Tornado isn’t actually one of the comic book Freedom Fighters but he fits in a way. He was a big part of the original Freedom Fighters crossover adventure and even got to punch Hitler in the face so I’m fine with him being here. Additionally, it looks like we’re getting a variation of the great Red Tornado visual design from Supergirl so I’m glad for that. What’s interesting here is that it suggests this Red Tornado has the mind of his creator T.O. Morrow, which would actually make him Jewish.
Morrow was revealed to be Jewish and to have lost family in the Holocaust during Gail Simone’s Wonder Woman so it’d make sense for Red Tornado to be a Jewish representative on a team made of people targeted by the Holocaust. It’d also be pretty great to get more Jewish on-screen representation in the superhero genre given we basically invented it.
THE RAY
The Ray looks to be a lot like Phantom Lady, a blend of his most developed incarnation with his most recent incarnation. The costume and race of the character are conducive with the version of the Ray DC introduced in the ‘90s as part of an attempt to make modernized versions of the Freedom Fighters. That Ray ended up shockingly popular and stuck around all the way up to the DC reboot in 2011. He’s a fun guy with cool light powers and the distinction of being the son of the original Ray from World War 2, which I like for a legacy hero.
The big change is that CW’s Ray will also be gay like the character was in his 2014 iteration. The only little niggle I have is that during the New 52 the Ray was changed to be an Asian character so it does seem a step backward to make him a white dude again. I understand the warped, spreadsheet thinking that making him gay “makes up” for the change but I can’t name a single gay Asian character in geek fiction so that seems like a missed opportunity.
THE HUMAN BOMB
I’m going, to be honest here; I'm kind of at a loss on this one. There are four to five variations of the Human Bomb but the CW’s version doesn’t overtly match any of them. His power is that he can cause explosions by touching the stuff, which most commonly leads to him wearing an encounter suit but not this case. That suggests to me he might be modeled on Jimmy Palmiotti’s New 52 Human Bomb, who just wore a T-shirt and tactical gear, or maybe Damage, a similar character with explosive powers, but really it’s anyone’s guess. The design of their human bomb doesn’t match either of those characters so I have no idea who he’s meant to represent. The Multiversity iteration of the Human Bomb was a Jehovah’s Witness so it’ll be interesting to see if that ends up the case here,
UNCLE SAM
I’ve already written an entire breakdown on the history of Uncle Sam so this will be a shorter entry. Basically, he’s the living embodiment of the American spirit. His origin is usually pretty fuzzy as he was created back in the ‘40s when it didn’t matter how Uncle Sam was punching Nazis just that he was doing it. The best explanation given is that he’s a kind of American superweapon, a mystical being of ideology created by the founding father’s using black magic (which is pretty common in the DC Universe’s history books.) His costume is pretty much always the same as the famous political cartoon though his powers tend to vary. He always has super strength but in his best incarnation he also had the power to grow to incredible size and had access to an inter-dimensional hideaway called the Heartland.
Now with all that representation flying around, I’ll admit, it makes me a bit nervous. Not because I’m against it, the Freedom Fighters are actually some of my favorite superheroes of all time and I think the diverse reworking only serves to make them more relevant, it’s more about doing that representation well. CW is actually one of the only places that feel like it’s still trying to do the ‘90s style “everyone has a place on the team set-up” with a lot of its groups, which I like, but it doesn’t always work out.
Vixen on Legends of Tomorrow never really felt like she clicked with the team, Wild Dog’s angry latinx persona is far from perfect, and even The Flash felt the odd need to bring on more white dudes. Still, I’m very hopeful and I definitely think the Nazi Heroes will be a dynamite move. Grant Morrison used the concept to reflect the way we excuse our own bigotry and heartlessness only amplified through the lens of history’s greatest monsters so it’d be great to see that play out for Flash, Green Arrow, and Supergirl, especially with the demons they all hold at this point. Color me excited.
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