Vibe

25 years ago - Cisco Ramon is born in Star City.

17 years ago - 8-year-old Cisco joins his older brothers as part of a dance crew.

12 years ago - 13-year-old Cisco's metagene powers start to manifest, gerating, absorbing, and redirecting kinetic energy. He uses it mostly as part of his dance.

11 years ago - 14-year-old Cisco meets Cindy Reynolds, a magic-wielding street kid, and helps her make a home in Star City.

10 years ago - 15-year-old Cisco & Cindy Reynolds meet Roy Harper and begin to follow his lead, using their powers to prevent street level crime and help the neighborhood.

9 years ago - 16-year-old Cisco joins Roy Harper's new team the Outlaws. They try to go up against William Tockman but are systematically picked apart. Cisco's powers are negated and he is shot and killed.

The members of the infamous Detroit Era Justice League got a pretty bad shake. This era is generally not remembered fondly, but for the time, within the context of the series, these characters were all very competent executions of their concepts, even if those concepts were pretty dated and silly. Gerry Conway is very good at what he does, and for people willing to go back and actually read these comics they are absolutely worth their time.

That said, these characters had a pretty limited impact on the rest of the DC landscape, and when putting together our project is was pretty clear that they simply weren't necessary. That is, at least, until we developed our version of the team the Outlaws, and discovered an absolutely perfect role for Detroit Leaguers Cisco Ramon and Cindy Reynolds. We got to develop our versions of them, and we hope you enjoy them!

Vibe's Comic History

in 1984, after 200+ issues and 20+ years of publication, the Justice League's storied lineup was changed for the first time. New members had JOINED the league, but this was the very first time we had an entirely new team makeup. Existing leaguers Aquaman. Maritan Manhunter, Zatanna and Elongated Man stuck around, but we were introduced to Steel, a legacy version of an original character by series writer Gerry Conway, and Vixen, a re-thought version of a character that had been intented for her own series before the DC Implosion of 1978 led to it never being published. We also met two completely new teenage characters; Cindy Reynolds, a runaway girl with invisiblity powers, and Cisco Ramon's 'Vibe'.

Vibe had the ability to make shockwaves, but that was definitely the least relevant thing about him. He's one of the very first Puerto Rican superheroes in comics and the first for DC, but he's also a character invented in the mid-eighties. He's a teenage street gang member who actually wound up embroiling the league in the shenanigans of his former gang. The stereotypes at play with his teammate Cindy were more subtle, but with Cisco they were incredibly obvious, to the point where modern readers may find themselves taken completely out of the story.

Another clear indication of Vibe's status as a product of the mid-eighties is his connection to break dancing. Building a character based entirely on a rapidly expiring dance trend is probably not the most forward thinking idea. This was the same year the movies Breakin' AND Beat Street came out, which is a clear indication just how played out the trend was. I just don't think people were quite as aware of the inherent mortality of this sort of thing at the time.

A few years later, as the series was coming to a close, Vibe was killed by one of Professor Ivo's androids, making him the very first Justice League member to ever die. He's made some appearances here and there in various flashback stories, but didn't actually return to comics until after the New 52. He was stripped of a lot of his more problematic (or silly) elements, and was given a new origin; he was caught in the event horizon of a boom tube during Darkseid's invasion, which gives him vibrational powers that tap into interdimentional physics. The character was also part of the regular cast of the Flash TV series, played by Carlos Valdes, who is so intensely likeable that, even though his character has almost nothing in common with the comic version, most people would argue he's the only version worth including. So of course... we're not :)

Can This Actually Be Good?

The comic version of Vibe has a few core flaws that really get in the way of the character working correctly. A big part of the problem is the rampant ethnic stereotyping, but thankfully that's an easy thing to just not do. Cisco can be Puerto Rican without behaving like the bad guy in an episode of 21 Jump Street.

The bigger hurdle, I think, is the fact that this is a dance-based character. Yes, at the time he was all about break dancing in an effort to chase a trend, but that doesn't actually have to be his thing. I don't know how much overlap their is between fans of comic books and fans of dance, but having him be a dancer, part of a neighborhood dance crew, is actually a pretty cool character archetype. We toyed with the idea of his powers a little bit; rather than just generating vibrational waves, what he's doing is absorbing, redirecting, and even generating pulses of kinetic energy. Imagine that in the hands of a kid that grew up dancing, and who decides to use it to help protect his neighborhood as a low-level superhero. There IS a cool character in there and while you could just take his name and a version of his powers and give it to a scientist character played by an unbelievably charismatic actor, I think this execution of the concept actually celebrates the original idea in a way he never actually got to experience.

Our Vibe Story

The changes we're making to Vibe's powers and to his relationship to his neighborhood are all actually pretty subtle; in effect you can tell the same story with largely the same character. Making his powers about kinetic energy manipulation while he dances makes him a sort of very powered down, low-impact speedster, and that actually works super well here.

Making him part of a local dance crew sets Cisco up to be a really positive, likeable guy. He would be someone who really believes in the people around him and who wants to do good by everyone. He's the first person who meets and takes in Cynthia after she runs away from home, helping her set up her living space in the warehouses around where he grew up. In a lot of ways, by building the character this way, he becomes the heart of the team that Roy puts together.

The Outlaws aren't meant to be around for long, and they are deliberately built to explain Roy, Grace, and Artemis's worldviews moving forward, so we needed something really tragic to fuel that change. Losing this version of Vibe, along with the already loveable Cynthia, really feels like the sort of gut-punch that would effect someone for life.

Allies & Teams