Ambush Bug
36 years ago - Irwin Schwab is born in Antelope, Oregon.
27 years ago - 9-year-old Irwin's parents are among the subjects of Glorious Godfrey's experiments on Earth.
23 years ago - 13-year-old Irwin attends the concert thrown by the Forever People. He finds an abandoned costume once worn by the Bugs of New Genesis.
11 years ago - 25-year-old Irwin somehow becomes Ambush Bug? He tries his hand at villainy, but is stopped by Superman. Inspired, he turns over a new leaf and decides to be a hero. Nobody likes that.
8 years ago - 28-year-old Irwin, working as a private investigator, takes a job to investigate the Doom Patrol.
Comics love 4th wall breaking characters. Obviously the current gold standard is Deadpool, but there are quite a few others you can name off the top of your head; The Sensational She-Hulk, The Tick, Gwenpool, Superboy Prime... to a certain degree Harley Quinn will sometimes fit into this type of storytelling. There's generally a spectrum running from an at least passingly still in-world reality to increasingly Bugs-Bunny-esque antics, and the far end of that spectrum is unquestionably Ambush Bug.
We're trying to keep our timeline free of the ridiculous multiple-reality hijinks, but we'd still want the character to basically be a Looney Tune. To that end, we're keeping our version of his timeline pretty deliberately vague. We just want him free to pop in and out of stories and generally confuse everyone.
We're trying to keep our timeline free of the ridiculous multiple-reality hijinks, but we'd still want the character to basically be a Looney Tune. To that end, we're keeping our version of his timeline pretty deliberately vague. We just want him free to pop in and out of stories and generally confuse everyone.
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Ambush Bug's Comic HistoryAmbush Bug is a Keith Giffen original character. Maybe the MOST Keith Giffen character. He first showed up in DC Comics Presents #52, a Superman/New Doom Patrol crossover. Ambush Bug actually shows up like someone that could reasonably be an actual Superman villain; he kills(!) the district attorney of Metropolis before he hijacks the news announces himself to the people of the city. As the issue goes on, the New Doom Patrol's Negative Woman loses control of her energy body, smashing through the city during a parade. Ambush Bug pinballs through the issue, making screwball comments that kept him just barely coherent. He appeared again in the same series, this time accidentally piggybacking with Superman to the 30th Century where the Legion of Substitute Heroes hunted him in the Superman museum before he finds anything that reveals his secret Identity.
After those few appearances where he was at least a passably functional canon character, his big arrival was in his own miniseries in 1985, where he functionally operated firmly outside the 4th wall. This was followed by several specials and follow up miniseries, all operating out of that same space. To be clear... Ambush Bug does continue to exist in canon. He pops in and out of books like Lobo, Superboy, Guy Gardner, even Kingdom Come. He made a brief appearance in the pages of 52 as part of an extremely short-lived replacement Justice League, and after being wiped OUT of canon in his 2009 miniseries, he came back again in Keith Giffen's Doom Patrol. During the new 52, when they started ending every book with out-of-continuity news reports trying to explain the latest timeline mashup boogaloo, Ambush Bug was the reporter, which is probably where he had his highest visibility ever. |
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Our Ambush Bug StorySo this is a little tricky to get right. I do want Ambush Bug to exist, in that I want him in the world and to be able to pop in and out of stories as they happen. From within the timelines we create here, we have dipped our toes into some vaguely meta concepts, but never so much as a character just fully operating with awareness of the 4th wall. That's just not functional.
(You could make an argument that perhaps the Ambush Bug costume is giving Irwin a version of Super-Sanity, the explanation for Joker's madness invented by Grant Morrison in which he becomes aware that he's in a comic book... but even if that's the case that's not something you would acknowledge from within the timeline, right? we'd only hint at it here). We're being deliberately vague about a lot of the details of Ambush Bug here, because that's really the correct way to do this. We don't know HOW Irwin becomes Ambush Bug, just THAT he becomes Ambush Bug. We know he interacts with Superman and with the Doom Patrol, but the 4th wall breaking antics of those stories would be confined within them, so that our verisimilitude can remain intact. |