Top 10 Characters DC Wants You To Forget

The DC Universe is a colorful place, but this might be taking it a bit too far. A struggling artist who failed to impress his peers thanks to his absolute color blindness, this technicolor rogue turned to crime when his father invented a pair of goggles that allowed his son to control beams of solid, rainbow-colored light. So, logically, he used this technology to become a professional art thief and a recurring Flash villain. As if lame powers and an even lamer costume weren’t bad enough, this villain’s real name is actually Roy G. Bivolo, a groan-worthy play on the “Roy G Biv” mnemonic device used for remembering the colors of the rainbow.

It’s hard to imagine an apple falling further from the tree than Gotham Police Commissioner James Gordon’s ill-fated son. First introduced as a baby in 1987’s “Batman: Year One” and basically forgotten until he resurfaced in a 2011 arc in “Detective Comics,” despite, or perhaps because of, his father’s reputation as an unfaltering lawman, Jr began to develop sadistic tendencies at a young age, eventually turning into a full-blown serial killer. But rather than a bold new addition to Batman’s roster of enemies, the character felt more like a wannabe Joker who was thwarted during a haphazard scheme to poison baby food. He was at one point a member of the Suicide Squad, but not even that can redeem this snoozer of a villain.

The Legion of Superheroes is one of the largest teams in DC, with dozens of members from every corner of the galaxy. But despite counting the likes of Matter-Eater Lad among their ranks, the Legion has some standards. This offshoot team was formed by would-be Legionnaires who were rejected after they tried out for the team. And can you blame the Legion for saying “no thanks” to the likes of Infectious Lass, Stone Boy or Color Kid? The power to eat anything has at least a few uses. The power to turn into an immovable rock or change the color of any object or person? Not so much.

The 60s were a weird time, and if any comics character reflects that, it’s this one. An ordinary store mannequin dressed in “hip threads” by some hippies and then brought to life by a bolt of lightning, this character spent two inexplicable issues just kinda wandering around having weird stuff happen to him. The character was intended to be a kind of wandering outsider having darkly poetic adventures, not unlike Swamp Thing but with a veneer of hippie, sensibility draped over him. Unsurprisingly, this didn’t really take with audiences and he’s only made a small handful of appearances since. Gee, we wonder why that could be?

Taken at face value, this Bludhaven-based vigilante is a perfectly fine, if generic, addition to the DC roster. A former FBI agent turned masked crimefighter, her extreme methods make her the kind of foil that Batman and his family have been having encounters with for years. What makes her stand out, and not in a good way, is an infamous storyline involving her and Nightwing in which Nightwing is rendered near catatonic by a nervous breakdown, prompting the arachnid avenger to sexually assault him. We’re all for addressing the issue of male sexual assault, but the storyline is handled so clumsily that we’d rather just forget about it and move on - and we’re pretty sure DC agrees.

There are a lot of characters with interesting, multifaceted superhuman powers in the DC universe. But when your powers can best be summed up with the phrase “turns stuff into guns”, don’t be surprised if you don’t last very long. After being bitten by an alien parasite, this young man gained the power to fire energy from any object he holds. Not a very exciting or interesting power, is it? Add in the 90s costume to end all 90s costumes, complete with thigh-high boots, hair window, and fingerless gloves, and you’ve got a hero so forgettable, we’ve already forgotten his name. Was it Discharge? Recoil? Let’s be like DC and pretend this never happened.

One of the powers of art is to address the fears and concerns of the time, often using metaphor or allegory. In the late 1980s, the AIDS epidemic was one such concern, and when DC stepped up to the plate to discuss the ongoing pandemic... they whiffed pretty hard. This thankfully forgotten villain was a vampire created by a white supremacist group in a plot to infect minorities with HIV. This brought him into conflict with a superteam called The New Guardians, and several members were infected during the battle, including Extraño, who was flamboyant and stereotypically gay. It’s a tactless handling of a serious issue, and best forgotten.

And speaking of terrible attempts at addressing serious issues in the pages of “The New Guardians”, let’s talk about the supervillain fuelled by cocaine. And not in a Tony Montana kind of way, either. This baddie gains superhuman attributes including enhanced strength, speed and the power to control fire, so long as he’s literally high out of his mind on cocaine. So naturally, he’s the leader of a powerful Colombian drug cartel and worships cocaine as his god. A hard-hitting, gritty portrayal of the evils of the drug trade this isn’t. Thankfully, he was killed in an explosion and never returned.

The link between superheroes and virility has always been fairly pronounced. It’s not hard to pick up on the fact that many, many superhero stories are power-fantasies, but just in case you need things to be absolutely crystal clear, may we present the supervillain who uses a weaponized codpiece. Thanks to an inferiority complex about his, er, equipment, he constructed a weaponized *ahem* package that he used to rob banks. The character is pretty clearly meant as satire, but even so, this is pretty on the nose.

The contributions of Will Eisner to the medium of comics cannot be overstated. In the pages of his groundbreaking series, “The Spirit”, Eisner brought a level of depth and artistry to the medium that few other creators have since - heck, they even named the biggest award in comics after him! But we can’t in good conscious give him a pass for this character: an unbelievably offensive racial stereotype named Ebony White who served as the hero’s sidekick and driver. The character has since been revamped many years after DC acquired the rights to The Spirit when they purchased Quality Comics, but we’d rather not think about his roots as an offensive stereotype, and DC probably feels the same way.