Slightly Misplaced Comic Book Characters Case File #347: Big Sir

Since I seem to be on a roll with Suicide Squad and Suicide Squad-related characters lately, how about one more?  I sort of covered this one briefly before, but it seems to be, if you want to show just how rough life on the Squad can be, let’s take a look at Big Sir.

Big Sir was, no joke, a man named Dufus P. Ratchett.  OK, maybe it is a joke.  He was a large, simple-minded man that Barry Allen’s Rogues figured would be a good fellow to send against the Flash.  Flash was, at the time, already on trial for the murder of the Reverse Flash, so it wasn’t hard to find out where he was.  Giving Dufus a special suit of battle armor that granted him some basic power armor abilities combined with his above-average but not superhuman strength, and Dufus was now Big Sir.

Of course, the armor also made him vulnerable to telepathic suggestion.  The bottom line was it wasn’t that hard to convince Big Sir that the Flash had done something that set Big Sir off….he was told the Flash killed a mouse.

Big Sir, of course, wasn’t really a match for the Scarlet Speedster.  In fact, Flash was able to subdue Big Sir and took him to Gorilla City where the advanced tech of the gorillas gave Dufus an intelligence boost.  Now a near-genius, Big Sir helped the Flash subdue the Rogues who set him up, and that would seem to be that.  The Crisis was coming, and Barry’s time as the Flash was coming to an end…you know, until relatively recently.

Then Big Sir came back as a member of the Injustice League, and his intelligence apparently went back to what it was before.  This was during the humor years of the Justice League, and while most of the members of this group would come and go as needed, Big Sir stuck to team leader Major Disaster like glue, during which he briefly displayed a card-counting ability to break a casino’s bank.

Of course, that also means he was part of Justice League Antarctica, but I covered that story before.

So, what happened to Big Sir?  Well, the plotter for that era of the League was Keith Giffen, and at one point, he started a Suicide Squad series.  His first issue showed his Injustice League going on a mission, still bickering like they always did…and most of them died.  Major Disaster alone survived the mission, and only barely, and Big Sir was the first to go, stopping to offer comfort to what he didn’t know was an explosive robot.

That’s one way to establish a tone for a new series for an established creator.

Now, since he was a Flash foe, the character has, after a fashion, appeared on the CW’s The Flash.  There, his name was David P. Ratchett, a wrongfully convicted man with normal intelligence that helped Barry Allen when both were in the same prison.

Oh, and he was played by pro wrestler Bill Goldberg.

The Flash ended up busting this Big Sir out of jail and running him to live out his life peacefully in a Chinese monastery, something the wrongfully-convicted Ratchett really wanted.

That sounds much better than blowing himself up trying to hug a robot.