Dan Garrett

62 years ago - Dan Garrett is born in Berlin, New Hampshire.

44 years ago - 18-year-old Dan considers the police academy, but chooses to attend Hub University in Illinois to study archeology.

40 years ago - 22-year-old Dan becomes a grad student, studying Egyptology. He goes to Egypt to assist professor Luri Hoshid, and in the tomb of Khe-Ef-Re he finds and bonds with the Scarab, becoming the Blue Beetle.

38 years ago - 24-year-old Dan helps found the All-Star Squadron to stop Vandal Savage from taking over all the world's communications.

36 years ago - 26-year-old Dan earns his masters in Egyptology, and begins his doctoral studies.

33 years ago - 29-year-old Dan earns his doctorate in Egyptology. Between his own travels to Africa and teaching, he spends less time as Blue Beetle.

30 years ago - 32-year-old Dan's retires from the All-Star Squadron to focus on his work as an Egyptologist

26 years ago - 36-year-old Dan works with Anansi the Spider in Algeria to stop a smuggling cartel. When he earns tenure he starts to focus more on teaching, only occasionally becoming Blue Beetle.

13 years ago - 49-year-old Dan has Ted Kord as a student in an Introduction to Archaeology course.

10 years ago - 52-year-old Dan, with the help of Ted Kord, stops Ted's uncle Jarvis Kord from building & selling an android army. Dan is mortally wounded & passes the Blue Beetle scarab to Ted. He can't activate it, but begins building the equipment to become the new Blue Beetle.

From our position here in the present, where there's a modern very popular Blue Beetle who often leads his own series and appears in lots of animated series and his own big-budget live-action movie, and a whole other less but still very popular predecessor who played a large role in lots of prevalent DC history, the fact that there is a third even older predecessor almost feels like a clunky afterthought, a detail you can more or less breeze over on your way to the content that matters.

You'd be doing yourself a disservice to skip Dan Garrett, though. While he's a pretty standard golden age hero, the journey he took to get to the pages of DC is one of the most unique you're going to see of any of the characters now in the DC canon. The fact that he's here at all is just fascinating, and the result is a character we get to adapt to our timeline.

Dan Garrett's Comic History

The Blue Beetle debuted in Mystery Men Comics #1 in 1939 by Fox Comics (or Fox Feature Syndicate), one of the new comics publishers springing up to cash in on the popularity of comic book superheroes. Fox would purchase and publish packaged material from creators, many of them future legends of the industry, and a lot of it with characters that were, as was often the style of the time, very derivative of other popular superheroes. Mystery Men Comics was like a tour of off-brand copies of other comic heroes, like Rex Dexter of Mars, Zanzibar the Magician, western hero the Waco Kid, and the unbelievably racist Chen Chang.

The Blue Beetle was a story by Charles Nicholas, the name clearly meant to evoke the Green Hornet. He was a patrol cop who, on his own, would use some neat inventions to solve crime on the side, creating a masked criminal persona he could exploit. At first, it was just a suit with a scarab cravat and domino mask, something much closer to his namesake, but in issue 2 he was updated into a costume I can only describe as "Golden Age the Tick" before finally arriving at his normal chainmail outfit by issue #3. The Blue Beetle was clearly the breakout star of the series, permanently taking over the cover by issue #6 when he also would start his own ongoing self-titled series, which was not common at the time, as well as his own radio show.

The popularity of superhero comics waned across the industry after World War II, and publishers all shifted their focus. Fox seemed to steer into depicting scantily clad women; tame content by today's standard but I'm sure it was scandalous in the late forties. They notably started publishing Quality Comics character Phantom Lady, thinking she was public domain when in fact she wasn't, which is interesting because something similar happened to Blue Beetle. Charlton Comics, an imprint from the 50s built to keep the printing presses running at night at magazine publisher Charlton Communications, bought the original printing plates for Blue Beetle, but there's no evidence at all that they ever purchased the rights to the character.

Nevertheless, Blue Beetle became a Charlton character in 1955. His origins were reimagined; no longer a vigilante cop, he was an archeologist who found a magic scarab in a tomb that gave him incredible superpowers, including the ability to fly and shoot lightning. Charlton Comic wasn't a company that particularly cared about the quality of its comics, so these early Blue Beetle comics are a little lowbrow, but by the mid-sixties new editor Dick Giordano made some sweeping changes that produced some really great comics. Notably, Giordano wasn't a fan of magic-based heroes, so a whole new version of Blue Beetle was invented by Steve Ditko in 1966, with the story of how Ted Kord became the new Blue Beetle featuring the final adventure and death of Dan Garrett.

Our Dan Garrett Story

Because the story of Ted Kord went on to have a wild journey of its own as he became the breakout star of the Charlton Line, was acquired by DC, and served in the Justice League, references to Dan Garrett have continued to appear and subtly update his story for decades after he stopped appearing in comics... and have continued to do so now that a third Blue Beetle has completely re-thought the legacy of Blue Beetle yet again.

For our purposes, what we really need Dan to do it set up everything we need for the subsequent heroes' careers. This means we need him to be active a generation before Ted Kord, which means we get to use him as part of our All-Star Squadron. This is a unique idea for our timeline; as the Charlton characters didn't join DC until after the Crisis, the All-Star Squadron comics simply didn't have access to Dan, but he certainly would have been there otherwise.

We need to go with the adventuring archeologist version of Dan, not just because the idea of the vigilante patrol cop raises some pretty profound questions, but because this was the version that sets up all the characters that come after him. This means we can build a lot of his timeline on his academic career, as well as imagine a career as an adventurer vaguely evoking Indiana Jones, and even get to give him a one-time partnership with African hero Anansi the Spider. The comic book adventures of Dan Garrett are all pretty dated, but we can still imagine a long career fighting the good fight for this character that sets up one of the most lasting legacies in comics.

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