Blue Devil

37 years ago - Daniel Patrick Cassidy is born in Royal Oak, Michigan to Irish Catholic parents.

26 years ago - 11-year-old Daniel first starts making special effects for his own home movies.

20 years ago - 17-year-old Daniel leads his high school football team to a state championship.

21 years ago - 18-year-old Daniel chooses film school over his football scholarship. He moves to LA, where he meets Marla Bloomberg & Norm Paxton.

16 years ago - 21-year-old Daniel does his first film with Marla Bloomberg & Norm Paxton, doing the special effects & stunt work. He first works with his co-star Sharon Scott.

14 years ago - 23-year-old Daniel gets his SAG card and starts doing regular stunt work. He, Marla Bloomberg, Norm Paxton & Sharon Scott plan to do their own movie together.

13 years ago - 24-year-old Daniel meets Wayne Tarrant, a history undergrad at the University of California, who is working on a story based on an ancient demonology text. They begin preparing to make Blue Devil the debut movie of Marla Bloomberg’s company. Dan designs the costume he will wear as Blue Devil, the creature in their movie, including a trident prop with internal combustion systems.

12 years ago - 25-year-old Daniel and the production of Blue Devil, including gopher Eddie Bloomberg, begins filming on location on Ile Du Diable off the coast of French Guiana. Staging ancient rituals in the ruins of old temples, they inadvertently open the prison of Nebiros, an ancient high demon, who believes Dan is a real lesser devil. Performing a reverse baptism, Dan’s body is transformed. He is able to hold off Nebiros from killing the crew while Sharon Scott reverses the demonic prison doorway under the direction of Wayne Tarrant. Norm Paxton films the entire battle, giving them what they need to cut the movie.

11 years ago - 26-year-old Daniel seeks out help and meets Zatanna. They return to Ile Du Diable to confront Nebiros and break his curse. They discover that he is not cursed at all, but permanently transmuted. Escaping his domain Dan discovers Nebiros’ Trident. He and Zatanna go on a date.

10 years ago - 27-year-old Daniel and the Blue Devil Crew go to New Orleans to film Blue Devil 2 in the House of Mystery. They are lost in the paths beyond but manage to unlock the secrets of the house and return home, finishing the movie.

9 years ago - 28-year-old Daniel meets Jason Blood, who agrees to help hunt for a pair of tablets Wayne Tarrant discovered that could hold the secret to undoing Dan’s transmutation. They find them in the Dibang Valley in Arunachal Pradesh, revealed to be a trap laid by Nebiros, allowing him to escape imprisonment. Blood ensures that he is unable to leave hell or enter the mundane world.

8 years ago - 29-year-old Daniel and the Blue Devil Crew got to Cornwall, England to film Blue Devil 3, getting lost and separated in the Fair Lands. Dan fights in a battle against the Troll King Dovregubben to win the favor of Titania so she will release Eddie Bloomberg from her service. The footage is psychedelic, and Blue Devil 3 gets award buzz. Daniel and Sharon Scott finally decide they should start dating.

7 years ago - 30-year-old Daniel and the Blue Devil crew suffer a tragedy when Eddie Bloomberg dies in a car accident, only to return as the earthwalking demon Kid Devil and joins the Teen Titans West.

6 years ago - 31-year-old Daniel learns that Eddie Bloomberg traded his soul to Nebiros to become Kid Devil, and is now serving him after dying with the Teen Titans in Qurac. Dan and the Blue Devil crew venture into hell to save Eddie from damnation. Nebiros almost kills and claims them all. Dan offers to serve Nebiros as a true demon in exchange for everyone's lives. Eddie’s soul is released, and the others are permitted to return. Dan is fully transformed, and serves Nebiros as a bounty hunter, carrying the Trident of Lucifer.

5 years ago - 32-year-old Daniel is contacted by Zatanna. The Blue Devil Crew has found a possible loophole so he can escape his servitude to Nebiros. He is found in hell by Zatanna & Jim Rook, with help from the lesser demon Scorch, who help him forge a deal with Etrigan, who raises him in the hierarchy of hell until he now technically outranks Nebiros, and can finally defeat him. Dan now serves Etrigan and claims Nebiros’s domain, including an imprisoned angel, Lin Lee. Freeing her, Dan was permitted an audience in heaven and his demonic contract was expunged, freeing him from service. Now able to walk in the mundane world, he is unable to return to his old life but thanks his friends for saving him. He joins Jim Rook at the Oblivion, traveling into Myrra.

3 years ago - 34-year-old Daniel joins the group working together to stop Felix Faust from manipulates the spells binding Siobhan McDougal & Valerie Beaudry, using them to attempt to rewrite the rules of magic, taking the name the Shadowpact.

1 year ago - 36-year-old Daniel participates in the 5th Shadowpact, forging the spells that allowed Mageddon to manifest in our reality where it can be stopped by the collected heroes of Earth. He is approached by Jefferson Pierce & Nathan Adam to join the newly-formed Justice League Task Force.

Blue Devil has one of my favorite behind-the-scenes origin stories. Creators Gary Cohn & Dan Mishkin were evidentially trying to come up with a character to entice Steve Ditko to come work for DC, so they combined elements from their favorite Marvel characters; Iron Man's tech suit, the Thing's concept of a person stuck in a monstrous form, the humor and acrobatic movement of Spider-Man, and the demonic design of Green Goblin. Even the name, Blue Devil, was because Steve Ditko's wife was from North Carolina and he was a fan of Duke University. This is a great example of how awareness of a particular creator evolves over time, because even a casual fan now would know just how far from Ditko's sensibility Blue Devil actually is. He passed, and they wound up doing the series with artist Parris Cullins.

Blue Devil has undergone a pretty remarkable evolution over the years, and adapting that evolution has proven to be a good time! We got pretty in-depth in this timeline, but we hope you have as much fun with it as we did!

Blue Devil's Comic History

Blue Devil debuted in a 16-page pullout comic packaged in Fury of Firestorm, technically issue #0 of his ongoing series, from 1984. This just introduced the Blue Devil costume, which has all sorts of special effects built into it as well as servos that enhance the wearer's strength and agility. It's in the first issue that, while filming a movie on "Ile Du Diable" or Devil's Island they inadvertently release a real honest-to-god demon, who Dan fights while wearing the Blue Devil costume. He's zapped with demonic energy, and afterward he discovers that the suit is now a part of him. It still has all its circuitry and whatnot, but it's all interwoven into his body, and the latex is now his skin.

It's an explanation that didn't really hold up when examined too closely, but the book was never meant to be taken all that seriously. It was a Silver Age-style humor comic through and through, maintaining a tone that would be just as well-suited for a book of anthropomorphic animals. Still, it maintained it's solid superhero visuals, featured appearances from other DC Heroes, and fully participated in events like the Crisis of Infinite Earths. If anything, what really made the book stand out was the sometimes jarring juxtaposition of those two ideas. Eventually, in the post-crisis reimagining of DC, Blue Devil just proved to be too old-fashioned an idea, and the series ended in 1986.

There was a period with very little in the way of Blue Devil appearances, other than a 4-issue arc in Showcase '93. In 1995, in what marks less of a high point for Blue Devil and more of a low for the team, Blue Devil joined the Justice League entirely for the publicity. This led, however, to a pretty major moment for Dan in Mark Waid's Underworld Unleashed. It's a story about villains trading their souls to the Devil Neron for power, and for the most part this is generally a footnote in DC history for most characters, but it's a huge deal for Dan, because it's in this series that he actually evolves into a true Devil, now wearing Golden armor and a tail. This version of the character is actually killed in the pages of James Robinson's Starman, but would return in a series of magic-based miniseries across the late 90s & early 2000s.

Then in 2005 a collection of miniseries all led up to the big crossover Infinite Crisis, and one of them was Day of Vengeance, which featured a new collection of magic-based characters teaming up to save the world. Dan was the team's big bruiser, now thoroughly redesigned as a cool earth-walking demon a million miles from the playful joke character he'd originally been. This team called themselves the Shadowpact, and were an immediate hit, scoring their own ongoing series. This is absolutely the version of the character that is now referenced in the post-flashpoint DC whenever the character comes up.

Our Blue Devil Story

We absolutely know where we want to GET with the character, but while we want to ultimately arrive at the badass tough guy of the Shadowpact, we also want to get there by starting with the fun adventuring stuntman, and that meant we had some work to do. The original premise really only works in a joke comic environment, because the idea of his body being interwoven with the technology of his suit is like something out of a Cronenberg movie if you think about it for two seconds, to say nothing of the fact that it would be completely impractical for a movie stunt man to build a self contained suit that can do all of that.

So in our imagination, it's just a costume. He's been transformed so that he has the body of a devil by demonic magic, and all his powers come from that. More to the point though, we really wanted to get the tone of those original adventures, and that meant we had to lean into the idea of Dan and his crew of moviemaking buddies all continually making these weirdly cursed movies, but just getting through them out of pluck and determination like a mix of Scooby-Doo and Supernatural. In a way it reminded us of Bruce Campbell and the crew of Evil Dead, and that vibe just works for the concept.

Once we'd squared away how to adapt Dan's early career, the hard part then becomes how to transition him from just a guy in the body of a devil to an actual full demon... and also what to do with his crew of buddies? We knew that we wanted Kid Devil to have basically sold himself into servitude to a demon for his powers, and we knew that Dan was going to somehow offer himself in service to free him, We decided to actually incorporate the whole Blue Devil crew on those adventures in hell. Dan winds up giving himself completely to save everyone... which means they all need one more mission to free HIM.

We deliberately made what comes next as complex as we could. It involves Zatanna (who Dan has a little history with), Jim Rook, and a heavy dose of demonic bargaining with known Hell-power-player, Etrigan. It involves freeing a hell-trapped angel who is certainly not a reference to anything. It even gives us an opportunity to introduce Scorch, a character we'll use elsewhere, and to shake up the whole power balance of hell. We did a lot with this one and it touches a lot of other stories, but in the end it makes Dan an earth-walking devil, free from his hell contract but unable to return to his old life. He starts to work for Jim Rook, which sets him up to be part of the Shadowpact... and later to be invited, full circle, back to the world of superheroics with the JL Task Force. It's a character arc that, we hope, feels earned.

Blue Devil's Look

There's a really interesting progression for Blue Devil's costume, and it actually does help to follow it because it actually tracks the progression of the character. His original costume is, I would argue, pretty classic and should absolutely be considered the outfit that he not only originally wears, but also wears in each of his Blue Devil movies. Even in that original series, however, he would regularly be depicted in just normal street clothes, so it should be clear that that outfit is a costume he wore over his big blue devil body.

When he finally appeared in the Justice League, he arrived bare-chested in pants, like a genie. This is what he wore in the beginning of Underworld Unleashed, but by the end he had his demonic armor, which he continued to wear when he was killed in Starman, and resurrected in the Day of Judgement.

I don't know if it's deliberate, but the character undergoes one more change in a minor miniseries called JLA: Black Baptism. He is, I am not kidding, tortured by a group of demons with chainsaws, and in the process loses his golden armor, and one of his horns is broken off. This is in 2001, when the incredible popularity of Hellboy was now well established... and if the modern Blue Devil had been gently evoking Hellboy before, the resemblance was now more than overt.

This brings us to the Day of Vengeance series, where Dan joins the Shadowpact. Here we get a very new take on Blue Devil when he's introduced as the bouncer of the Oblivion Bar, with a cool zippered leather coat that would later come off to reveal studded wrist bracers and an equally studded thick belt. Its a very complete design that really tells the story of this character in a way we all like. The subsequent Shadowpact series simplified everyone's costumes, putting Dan instead in a simple black t-shirt and jeans. It was almost certainly easier to draw, but we all really do miss the very cool design from Day of Vengeance.

So, for our take on Blue Devil's look, we think it should be pretty straightforward; he starts out looking more like his original design (with a costume he wears in movies and as a sometimes superhero, but once he becomes a full earth-walking demon, he should favor the black studded design.

Blue Devil by Dan Schoening

Blue Devil's Future

The later years of Blue Devil's story are really defined by his relationship with the staff of the Oblivion. We do like the idea that he was basically just working there even before the team ever formed. As a full demon, Dan I'm sure struggles to find a place in the mundane world, and the Oblivion is a sanctuary for people like him even before they form the Shadowpact.

The Shadowpact is, in fact, a modern manifestation of an ancient spellcraft bringing groups of magic users together to forge spells that change the fabric of the world. Once those spells are cast those people can't be a part of it again, and so the group will go their separate ways. Dan does of course still work for Jim Rook at the Oblivion, but his time with the Shadowpact we imagine, has given him a sense that he may still have more to contribute to the world even in his demonic form. This is a guy who spent years walking around in a Devil body while making a series of successful horror movies, after all.

As we leave our timeline, Dan has been invited by Black Lightning & Captain Atom to be part of their new Justice League Task Force, a branch of the League meant to work in tandem with the American government. Hopefully, if he has some success there, maybe he might build up enough confidence to actually reach out to the rest of the Blue Devil Crew? The fan forums have been pretty vocal about wanting a Blue Devil 4...

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