FAQ: Character's We've Removed
We used to do a blog post each time we decided to take characters that we'd previously built into the project back down again, but over time it became clear that this needed its own page. The earlier entries here will actually be from those old blog entries, but we've actually had to go back and edit them a few times because SOME of those characters have found their way BACK into the timeline! Will that happen for any of these?
Probably not. They are pretty bad.
Probably not. They are pretty bad.
Red Panzer II
~ "I really do miss Red Panzer II because I find the concept behind him absolutely fascinating but I have to say that this redirection of Spellbinder into a Troia villain is incredibly clever and creative."
Red Panzer II, a character introduced in Devon Grayson's Teen Titans series to create an enemy for Donna Troy, originally played the same role in our timeline. We eventually went on to replace him with our updated version of Spellbinder, and we got this comment in response to the change.
I do want to add that while we do still have a few nazi themed characters set back in the World War II era of our timeline, we generally find that any reference to the existence of nazi ideas in the modern timeline is just unpleasant. One of the cool things about building a whole fictional world is that you're under no obligation to include ideas if you don't want to use them, so we have the privilege to just keep our nazis locked in the past and thoroughly defeated, thank you very much. |
The Omega Men
More characters that we removed... originally, our timeline featured two different spacefaring teams, the Omega Men and L.E.G.I.O.N. The original version of the Omega Men were led by Tigorr and included classic members like Ryand'r, Doc, Broot, & Elu. Eventually, the two teams broke apart and joined together as a new, larger Omega Men to take on Lady Styxx.
Eventually, it became clear that almost all of these characters were included just to pad out these teams, they didn't really have a role to play or do anything otherwise. We broke both teams down, removing a few characters from L.E.G.I.O.N. like Stealth, Garryn Bek & Strata, and retold the story of the remaining characters so it felt more like a more consistent connected story where all the characters have a role to play. I do think all these characters have their fans, and I can also see how people might prefer to have this big cast of interesting LOOKING characters, but in this case, I just think we did a better job of building something interesting. |
Hellhound
In the grand scheme of characters we removed from the site, this one has a much less complicated explanation. I think we originally added Hellhound in one of the earliest rounds of creating our lineups for the Suicide Squad. I think he managed to stick around because we'd made a few minor connections between him and Catwoman, amd because he was a victim of Atomic Skull during one of the plots we'd invented for the team...
But of course, none of those stories were necessary. We even said on his page, this isn't a character we need, he's actually just here because we like his costume. I'm honestly suprised he managed to stick around as long as he did, but I think that's more just because he was such a minor character we actually kind of forgot he was there. |
Arani Desai (Celsius)
Our original Doom Patrol, build way back when we were first putting our timeline together, was deliberately structured around the actual history of the team which included the death of the original team and the brief period when a new replacement team came together. We ignored most of that lineup, but in an effort to represent that era we did include their leader Celcius, for whom we only used her actual name, Arani Desai.
Frankly, this character has always been pretty problematic. She was introduced as the wife of the Chief that we'd never actually met. In practice, with this team being immediately followed by Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol where the Chief was estabilished to be kind of a monster, this relationship was built out of some of the most problematic tropes you might imagine. That by itself might be forgiveable if she was a very cool character with a unfortunate origin, but as she is she was pretty quickly passed over over once Morrison's Doom Patrol got swinging. She's actually appeared in some of other media versions Doom Patrol, and it's clear that, just like us, most creators saw her as a blank slate that at least had the trappings of a neat looking character that could arguably be interesting given the right context. The fact is, though, that our version of the intermediate Doom Patrol team, with it's mission to hunt down the missing Chief, was clunky at best, Once it came time to redo their timeline the cleanest solution was just to use Caulder instead of her. |
Johnny Thunder
Johnny Thunder is a founding member of the Justice Society, and has a pretty long-lived legacy in DC. He's a hard character to translate becase he isn't exactly a superhero in the traditional sense, but is instead just a guy who has an extremely powerful genie sidekick. It's important to remember that the Justice Society characters all came together only a year into the lifespan of the entire idea of superheroes, so there really was no general concensus for what one of them would look like. Johnny Thunder as originally depicted actually has more in common with characters like Jimmy Olsen, Snapper Carr, or Marvel's Rick Jones... which is to say, designated sidekicks.
We had Johnny in our timeline as part of the lineup of the original Justice Society... primarily because it really didn't cost us anything to include him. But as we built out the history of the team, and removed the Ragnarok even from our timeline... It just became clear that this wasn't' a character that was contriputing to our overall story. Admittedly, this could largely be because no on involved in our project is a big fan of this character, because I've absolutely met Johhny Thunder fans, and I do feel a little guilty about taking him out just for their sakes. Still, the goal here is to try to only include stories that we feel are contributing to the whole, and in this case we just didn't have a way to use this character that anyone felt was necessary. |
The Modern Spy-Smasher
This take on Spy-Smasher was an invention of Gail Simone, so we're immediately situated to at least want to include her. This isn't one of her strongest creations, honestly, just part of a single arc in Birds of Prey.
We included her because our version of the Freedom Fighters at the time needed to include goverment lisason officers, and we thought we could use her and play out the storyline where she winds up being a double agent. The problem was the whole thing was pretty clunky to begin with, and remained clunky in our timeline. Once we started restructuring the goverment agencies involved, it actually made way more since to use Rick Flagg instead, making it immediately obvious that she just didnt have a role to play. We are glad we had her, though, because I don't think we would have included the original Spy Smasher if we hadn't, and he's a lot of fun. |
Caitlyn Fairchild
I actually think Caitlyn was on the list of characters we wanted in the timeline way back when we FIRST started it. She was the only Wildstorm character we had at all, even predating our version of the Elite. Why was it so important to include her? I really don't know. I'm told that I actually went to bat for her, working hard to justify her inclusion.
Maybe it's just me being a 90s kid again. I remember Gen 13 being such an important series when i was in Junior High, although I can't for the life of me remember any of the stories. I just loved the characters. Be that as it may, she was really shoehorned into our story, and the second I started taking the Freedom Fighters apart to put them back together stronger, She was obviously someone we could lose. |
Vigilante III
There are notably a lot of characters who use the name Vigilante; one of them might be seeing an uptick in popularity soon since he'll be appearing in the James Gunn / John Cena Peacekeaper series, so we'll see what comes from that. In the meantime; we originally included Patricia Trace Vigilante, who in continuity is, I think, Vigilante III. We included her because of her connection to Deathstroke, which we though made her a compelling addition to Team 7, but in practice she really just felt like an unnecessarry tacked-on character rather than her own person.
This happens with a lot of 90's characters; they might have been fun to read and look cool, but they just never feel like they actually fufill any narrative purpose. It is pretty frustrating that Team 7 only has one woman in their lineup now, although imagining Amanda Waller as a young Pam Grier character on that team is insanely cool. |
Phantasm
Phantasm was introduced as a group of objects being psychically manipulated by a telekinetic kid named Danny Chase who was literally standing off panel, which is absolutely ridiculous. Later on when Danny 'died' it became an entity built from the souls of Danny, of Raven's mom Arella, and of all the souls of the denizens of Azerath.
I mean, the design here clearly speaks for itself, this guy looks really cool. But even as a fan of the character, you kind of have to admit that his whole modus operandi is laughably silly. Even later on, when Phantasm was an actual magical entity rather than a Halloween prank, it's just a very cart-before-the-horse concept, and that the whole timeline is just cleaner without him. |
Mirage
I am not going to sit here and try to explain the Team Titans to you. I READ these comics and I barely understand them. I can say, quickly... team of superheroes from the future sent back in time to stop Donna Troy's son from becoming evil super villain in the future. Eventually, this whole timeline was undone and they were... unwitting sleeper agents? From a false timeline? I have no idea.
Mirage was a popular character, though, and actually went on to be part of other Titans teams later on. She had illusion powers, and even though including her felt very basic and pointless, we still had her just because people liked her. In the end, though, she just wasn't doing anything unique or useful for us, so she was easy to lose. Also; this character used her powers to trick Nightwing into sleeping with her. Which... I mean... that's not good. Sometimes we take characters out of our timeline and I feel a little bad about it. I'm still wondering if there's something we can do with Ryan Choi to make him unique and useful somewhere. But these two.... yea. They were filler. |
Alas, Poor Jericho...
A blog entry from 03/26/2020 - Written when we made the decision to remove Jericho from the timeline.
If you asked me a month ago for my feelings about Jericho, you would have gotten a resounding 'Meh'. He was a big part of the Marv Wolfman Teen Titans, a series I love, but I never really developed a strong connection to the character. He was just THERE.
Dick Grayson's first appearance as Nightwing... totally being ruined by this other guy.
Then I started working on rebuilding his page, looking for new art, and rethinking his timeline. As I did that, I started getting really excited about him. He's such a unique design, something so clearly from the mind of George Perez. The innovation to make him mute, speak entirely through sign language, and to never even have thought bubbles was a huge act of inclusion for disabled characters. His powers are creative and different, if hard to depict visually. His personality was unique; a gentle, thoughtful artist who brought a whole different energy to the Titans. This character is cooler than I ever gave him credit for. I got really excited when I started looking for new artwork and found tons of awesome fanart that reimagined him in so many creative ways. I was so excited to redo his timeline.
Suddenly I found myself completely stymied with what to do with him. The Marv Wolfman Titans are one of the greatest comics of all time, but if you go back and actually READ them... the stories really all come to fruition right about when Jericho shows up. The comic continues to be a fun read, but if you're going to assemble your own timeline out of it's core arcs, there really aren't any that include Jericho that you'd feel compelled to include. He's just... there.
By itself, that wouldn't be so bad. Despite our insistence to avoid adding characters just to add them... we've certainly done it a few times. But the question becomes, what do we do with him? In the comics, he winds up being killed by his own father when he becomes evil in Titans Hunt, a story I must have blocked from my memory because when I went back and read it again... just... wow. We're not doing that one, and really, we're not doing any stories with him. Do we... just completely repackage him and use him somewhere else?
At some point... you just have to realize that the character doesn't have a role to play. We like Jericho... but ultimately even in the comics, he just never had a reason to be there.
By itself, that wouldn't be so bad. Despite our insistence to avoid adding characters just to add them... we've certainly done it a few times. But the question becomes, what do we do with him? In the comics, he winds up being killed by his own father when he becomes evil in Titans Hunt, a story I must have blocked from my memory because when I went back and read it again... just... wow. We're not doing that one, and really, we're not doing any stories with him. Do we... just completely repackage him and use him somewhere else?
At some point... you just have to realize that the character doesn't have a role to play. We like Jericho... but ultimately even in the comics, he just never had a reason to be there.
Characters We Didn't Use
A Blog entry from 01/09/2019 - These are characters that actually were in the project at one time, but were later taken out.
Striker Z & Witchfire
I'm a pretty big fan of the Kurt Busiek series Power Company which ran in the early 2000s. It's an 18 issue series featuring largely original characters by a writer I like. It's easy to collect and I'm a fan of the characters; these two in particular.
Originally, we were going to use them as in our Global Guardians team, but as we tried to make timelines for them they just didn't come together, and it became pretty clear pretty quickly that we were just adding them to add them. Like many of these characters, if a role can be found in the story that gives them a part to play, then I'm sure we'd snatch these two up right away. |
Ryan Choi
This one was frustrating, because you really want to do as much as you can to include new, younger versions of classic characters. Especially people of color.
The real problem was that while Ryan's actual comic stories are really cool, they never really differentiated Ryan himself enough from Ray Palmer, the character whose place he took. He never felt like his own thing. I've seen versions of the character in other fan continuities that go well out of their way to add Ryan by adding him to versions of the Teen Titans, but as he is we just couldn't figure out how to work him into the story we were telling. Ryan gets suggests a LOT. It's really clear that people want to see him, and the demand probably won't go away any time soon, but he remains almost the poster boy for a character that we WISH we could figure out how to make work. |
Kid Eternity & Bulleteer
These are both entirely my fault, and I'm including them together because it was the exact same problem; I'm a huge Grant Morrison fanboy. Both of these characters had Morrison adaptations, and they're both utterly dripping with that particular weirdness that Morrison uses so well.
I went WAY out of my way trying to come up with ways to build them into the timeline despite being told by pretty much everyone that I hadn't really justified them, and even built their pages; but they were pretty obviously not meant to be there. Some stories are just better when you let them be their own thing. |
Crimson Fox
Admittedly, none of us were what you'd call huge fans of Crimson Fox, so we weren't exactly PULLING for her to be included, but we did at least all acknowledge that she's a pretty well-remembered inclusion in a particular era of the Justice League, and if we were going to do this, we owed it to both this character and to the League to at least try to come up with a version of her that would play.
We did have a draft of a timeline, but it really just never came together, Ultimately, there was just no reason for this character to exist, or at least a reason we could come up with. |
Solstice
Kiran Singh was introduced to the Teen Titans RIGHT before the New 52, and while she was immediately designed for the new book in a way that was way less interesting, we all agreed that there was nothing inherently wrong with her original appearance and design, and we had a sense that a good creator might have been able to construct simething interesting out of her.
We took a pass at adapting her rudimentary origins into something we could use, but in the end there just wasn't enough there and we found ourselves struggling to find anything to do with her. |
Rainbow Raider & Abra Kadabra
We were really on a roll when we were doing Flash's Rogues, but these two ground us to a complete halt. Abra Kadabra's entire schtick is that he's from the future. We already went well out of our way to allow Reverse Flash to be from the future even though We're working very hard to keep time travel to an absolute minimum, to do it for a character that basically does nothing else was just not something that would work.
Rainbow Raider... I can tell you right now, someday some writer is going to find a way to make this character very cool. I'm just not that guy. |
Peek-A-Boo
We included a few modern Flash Rogues, but for the most part a lot of them seemed to have a certain villain-of-the-month flavor. Peek-a-Boo struck us as at least having a redemptive arc where she could the become an ally to Wally, so we made an effort to include her.
I created these timelines in a big leather-bound book of graph paper, and I bring it to comic conventions to have different creators sign it. I wanted to find a unique character for Scott Collins to sign, but his disappointment when I asked him to sign Peek-a-Boo was palpable. It made me really re-evaluate the character. Wally really isn't hurting for allies and redeemed villains. Ultimately she's a one-issue character at best, and I decided to just leave her out. |
Iman, El Muerto & Acrata
DC invented a whole slew of international heroes from different parts of the world in their Planet DC event in the year 2000. A lot of them are pretty forgettable (I think one of them was a Argentinian character with a horse head?) but there were a few that I happen to really like. Janissary, the Turkish hero, was introduced here.
I've owned this issue of Superman for a long time and I've always really liked the worldbuilding at play here. This was a fun triumvirate of characters, and it seemed natural to try to use them. Ultimately though, I just don't think we were able to set these three up in a way that gave them anything to do. (Notably, these three have come up quite a bit in our conversations about possible international heroes, particularly El Muerto, so don't be suprised if they manage to turn up again down the road) |
Coldcast
Joe Kelly's Action Comics #775 introduced the Elite and served as a small revolution in the entire medium of superhero comics. We're using it as a framing device for a whole part of our timeline, and for the most part we're using almost all of the original Elite.
The exception is Coldcast. DC already has two unrelated characters with the exact same power set in Black Lightning and Static that just happen to be African American, which isn't really a big deal, but to introduce a third, and to define that character as a large violent shirtless criminal wearing broken wrist chains... it was just a swerve in a weird direction. We used Major Disaster in the same role, and are totally open to making him a person of color. |
Fever
There have been a few different line-ups for the Doom Patrol over the years with some original characters that are pretty forgettable, and it was easy to just leave the bulk of them by the wayside when we built our Doom Patrol timeline.
For a while, though, we intended to include Fever, a member of early 2000's version of the team. We even had a rough idea of her story. At some point, however, we realized that there wasn't really anything in particular about her that made her interesting, it was just her look. She would probably make a pretty good student over in the X-Men, but it just wasn't worth the effort to invent something interesting about her here. |
Contessa Erica Alexanda Del Portenza & Queen Clea
These are a pair of, at least on the surface, powerful female villains that I really wanted to include. The Contessa was Lex Luthor's ex-wife who discredited him and took over his businesses, while Queen Clea was a vintage Wonder Woman enemy that was actually from Atlantis. When it came time to create their timelines, though, once I got past their concepts there just wasn't anything else to add. The Contessa takes over, and then later loses the businesses back to Luthor, so she basically does nothing.
The story we told with Clea just wasn't great, but notably we actually went back later and reused her, making her the first character to come out of the project, and then go back in! |
And Finally... All These Legionnaires...
Not these ones specifically, obviously... but a lot of them. There was just no way I could use ALL of the Legion. The work that went into building the single timeline we've assembled for the Legion is perhaps the single largest chunk of work in this entire project.
We used so many of the characters, but in the end there were a lot that got left behind. Some of them might even surprise people; the fact that characters like Monel, Dreamer, or the Legion's version of Starman might seem like sacrilege. In the end it came down to how their stories worked in our timeline, and what we felt like they really brought to the table overall. |