Kid Devil
22 years ago - Eddie Bloomberg is born.
12 years ago - 10-year-old Eddie is invited to work as a gopher on his aunt Marla Bloomberg's movie set. They accidentally release the demon Nebiros, who turns Dan Cassidy into Blue Devil. They work together to put Nebiros back in his prison.
10 years ago - 12-year-old Eddie 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.
8 years ago - 14-year-old Eddie and the Blue Devil Crew got to Cornwall, England to film Blue Devil 3, getting lost and separated in the Fair Lands. Eddie falls for fae magic and is ensnared into the service of Titania until Daniel Cassidy is able to win her favor and secure his release.
7 years ago - 15-year-old Eddie dies in a car accident. He makes a deal with Nebiros, the same demon that cursed Dan Cassidy, to be allowed to return as a demonic agent if he agrees to serve the demon upon his actual death, becoming Kid Devil. He joins the Teen Titans West.
6 years ago - 16-year-old Eddie & the Teen TItans West try to stop the Ravens from stealing a nuclear weapon, but are decimated when Cheshire detonates the bomb in Qurac. Eddie is killed trying to absorb the initial blast to save the city. Dan Cassidy and the Blue Devil Crew travel into hell to free his soul from servitude to Nebiros, allowing him to pass on.
Kid Devil arrived in the Teen Titans membership in a slightly weird way, joining the team more-or-less off-panel in a time that introduced a LOT of potential new members, but he was clearly a character the writers had put some thought into, and he enjoyed a long run because of it. He may not be a character that we would feel compelled to include right away; there are plenty of Titans from the late eighties that have arguably had a larger impact on the team's history, but he happens to help out in a few key spots in our timeline that make him worth looking into.
Kid Devil's Comic HistoryThe 1984 Blue Devil series was a very color-by-numbers slice of comic book silliness, basically just mixing everything that made classic silver age comics fun into one book, shaking and serving. It's pretty telling when the titular hero was given a sidekick, they didn't try to make him a cool teenager or anything, but rather leaned heavily into the book's influences and make Kid Devil unmistakably a child.
Eddie was the redheaded prepubescent child of some of Blue Devil's coworkers. In keeping with the series status of just haphazardly allowing characters access to unexplained 'technology' to hand-wave away why people have what amounts to magical abilities, he built himself a tech suit that lets him fly and move in a way that is noticeably mimicking Daredevil, who had recently been re-imagined over in Marvel by Frank Miller, although the influence clearly didn't extend all the way to his costume. |
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That was basically the last we ever saw of Eddie, until the 2006 Teen Titans series. Geoff Johns sets up a new version of the character, now a teenager and a literal devil. He was introduced in the company-wide One Year Later time jump, and became a mainstay of the new team lineup for the rest of the series run, even after the departure of Johns. As a (basically) original character associated with the Teen Titans, he made regular appearances all over the DC landscape in this era, and was a heavily featured primary cast member in the book itself.
This Titans series ran right up to 2011, when DC reset it's continuity in the New 52. Since then, he's shown up three times; as one of the murdered heroes in Tom King's Heroes in Crisis, in a single issue of Raven's miniseries, and as a teeny blip in a giant splash page depicting the original Crisis, wearing his original costume, in the pages of Geoff Johns Justice League. That makes him a pretty obscure character, but there was a time when he was practically the face of the Titans. |
Our Kid Devil StoryWe decided to use Kid Devil because he does two things for us. First, he's a good member for our Teen Titans West lineup. We're doing a pretty good job of reproducing the original Titans West, but one character that was pretty synonymous with that team was Golden Eagle, basically a teenage spinoff of Hawkman. Weirdly, because Geoff Johns is the guy that invented Golden Eagle's backstory in the pages of Hawkman, he and Eddie wind up being very similar characters, so Eddie becomes a really good fit for that group.
Second... He actually works really well to help advance Blue Devil's story. This is a character that really straddles the silver age silliness that influenced his creation, and the cool horror iconography his story suggests. We need to find reasons to constantly have him questing into hell, to always be playing with his allegiances. The death of his friend Eddie, and knowing that the kid's soul is bound to the same devil that cursed him, is a great way to keep him moving in that direction. Of course, Eddie's also a pretty decent character all on his own. He's not a character with a long legacy, but he still helps build up the larger world of these characters, and that's always the goal. |
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