The Rival
1899 - Edward Clariss is born.
1917 - 18-year-old Edward Clariss fights in WWI
1919 - 20-year-old Edward Clariss is injured in WWI, and returns home where he begins to study chemistry at Midwestern University.
1923 - 24-year-old Edward Clariss earns his bachelor's degree in chemistry, begins his graduate work while attempting to make his own secret formula to enhance the human body.
1928 - 29-year-old Edward Clariss's formula is rejected from human testing, and his own tests prove unsuccessful. He accepts failure, and resigns himself to a career as a chemistry professor at Midwestern University.
1933 - 34-year-old Edward Clariss has a young Jay Garrick as a freshman year chemistry student.
1936 - 35-year-old Edward Clariss sees the Flash, and believes he is somehow using a version of his old formula, and decides he will somehow reverse engineer whatever is giving him his powers.
1941 - 42-year-old Edward Clariss befriends new professor (and former student) Jay Garrick.
1942 - 43-year-old Edward Clariss discovers the residual chemicals stored in the university archives that created the Flash, and uses them to make his own version of the formula.
1944 - 45-year-old Edward Clariss successfully creates his own formula that grants temporary access to the Flash's powers. He creates a new identity as a masked reflection of the Flash, giving his formula to his henchmen to help them rob a series of banks before he is found and defeated by the Flash, and is sent to jail.
1954 - 55-year-old Edward Clariss escapes from prison, and begins manufacturing his formula, distributing it as the drug Velocity 9 as a method of human experimentation to make its effects permanent and truly replicate the Flash's powers. The rampant use of the drug creates a speed force singularity that threatens the lives of the people using it. He is absorbed into the Speed Force, his consciousness held in stasis by Jay Garrick as he races the corona of the singularity, keeping it from collapsing.
21 years ago - 55-year-old Edward Clariss is pulled from within the Speed Force by Johnny Quick as he experiments with his own powers, now a disembodied speed force daemon. He is forced back into the vortex by Jay Garrick, who finally exhausts the last of his connection to the Speed Force in order to force Clariss back into it, dissipating his consciousness.
You'd be forgiven for not knowing who the Rival is. Given that all the Flash characters have had their own versions of Reverse Flash, It does make a certain amount of sense that Jay would have one too, but the origin of this particular baddie is actually a pretty strange one. We're going to use him to fulfill a very specific narrative purpose, but he also just fits really nicely into Jay's story.
The Rival's Comic HistoryThe Rival has an incredibly weird comic history. His debut was in the very last issue of Flash Comics in 1949, which is the last appearance of many classic Golden Age heroes before they were reimagined in the Silver Age,, most notably Jay Garrick himself. He was a pretty straightforward palette swap villain character, wearing a mask to hide just who he was until his identity as Jay & Joan's chemistry professor was revealed at the end of the issue.
From there, Rival has made almost no appearances at all. He came back in the pages of JSA as a member of the reimagined Injustice Society, but after that he's only ever appeared in the final issues of long running series. The last two issues of Impulse, where he confronted Bart & Jay as he tried to kill Joan.... and the last issue of Adventures of Superman. I don't know what to take from that, but it's a pretty weird legacy for any character. |
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Our Rival StoryWe haven't kept many of the classic Jay Garrick villains as part of his story. This is mostly because the majority of them have actually all been grabbed up by other more modern stories and been reimagined as other character's enemies, leaving behind only the weird or corny ones like the Fiddler or Rag Doll. The main exception, however, is the Rival. He's not a bad character, he's just unbelievably obscure, as the very last villain Jay Garrick ever faced.
While we're absolutely using his entire story as a professor of Jay Garrick's, the main utility here is that we have two speedsters, both with Speed Force access, giving us a very reliable way to execute Jay's transition into the modern timeline. In the comics, Clarissl continued to appear as a threat for Jay's modern incarnation, but we're not going to maintain Jay's powers, so we don't really need to maintain an enemy for him. We can actually use the final defeat of Clariss as the event that finally exhausted Jay's access to the speed force, allowing him to retire from superheroics and just be a chemistry professor and husband. |