Slightly Misplaced Comic Book Characters Case File #425: Ted Kord

So, I was watching the trailer for the upcoming Blue Beetle movie when I spotted something very familiar:  the Bug, the famous insect-shaped flying machine for second Blue Beetle Ted Kord.

Then I figured Ted probably warranted an entry here.

I wrote up about the many Blue Beetles once before, mostly to note how each Blue Beetle has been a more or less radically different character than the others.  The original Blue Beetle was Dan Garret.  Originally a cop who took special vitamins to gain some modest superhuman powers, by the Silver Age, Dan used a magic scarab to grant himself all kinds of superpowers like flight, strength, and energy projection.  The third (and current) Blue Beetle, Jaime Reyes, got a scarab of his own, possibly the same one, that attached itself to his spine and turned out to be an alien artificial intelligence that talked to him and granted him a wide range of powers while likewise giving him a bug-like appearance.

Ted, however, was just an acrobatic inventor, a Bruce Wayne/Tony Stark type who built gadgets and ran a massive corporation, Kord Industries.  Dan Garret had died, and Ted was his friend.  As Ted was there when Dan died, he swore to take on the Blue Beetle name and legacy without using any sort of superpowers.  He just had his Bug to fly around in, plus a gun that shot off blasts of compressed air or maybe acted as a really bright flashlight.  That was it.  Ted fought crime more with his wits than whatever Dan or Jaime had at their disposals.

Now, Ted was originally part of Charlton Comics’s superhero line, and like many of those characters, Ted was created by Steve Ditko.  Fellow Charlton hero and Ditko creation the Question often had a back-up feature in Ted’s solo book, just as Ted himself got his start as a back-up in Captain Atom’s book.  That first appearance of Ted’s time as the Blue Beetle was in November of 1966, and while his solo series didn’t run long, he must have been memorable enough of a character that when DC bought out the Charlton characters and integrated them into their new combined Earth, Ted represented his Earth for a meeting during the Crisis on Infinite Earths before getting his own solo series and joining the Justice League International.

That’s actually the point where arguably Ted was his most recognizable and likewise the most out-of-character considering what he’d been before.  That Justice League era was famous for its humor, and someone realized Ted made a good pair with newcomer Booster Gold.  Despite the fact both heroes were played pretty straight in their respective solo books, both became big time jokesters who got involved in get-rich-quick-schemes.  Granted, that move actually made Ted and Booster more distinct as characters, especially in Ted’s case.  That was a run where the Justice League was played more like a comedy team, and the further the run went, the less the team actually fought evil.  That said, those books could get very serious when they want to, and the intergalactic despot Despairo actually said Ted’s mind was only second to the Martian Manhunter’s in terms of strength of will and intelligence, but you wouldn’t know it the way he behaved in the book.  Heck, Ted actually put on a lot of weight and became a chubby guy whose costume didn’t quite fit at one point.

It was when the humor era ended that people remembered Ted was actually a pretty capable hero in his own right.  Dan Jurgens’s JLA run often depicted Ted as the smart guy on the team while in other books, he actually became something of tech support for Barbara Gordon’s Oracle.  Heck, he got the most like his original incarnation in the special issue he died in.

Honestly, I think it was the fact Ted was hypercompetent while everyone else was ignoring him, going out as defiantly as he did, was probably why I didn’t have any issues with his death.  But as with Dan Garret before him, Ted’s death led to a new Blue Beetle, namely Jaime, though unlike Ted, he hadn’t met his predecessor before becoming the latest Blue Beetle.

That said, this is comics, and Ted did come back from the dead in the New 52, first as a grad student who was inspired to do more after his father was murdered by the Crime Syndicate, and it looks like in the current comics, he’s basically back as the Blue Beetle, with his old history more or less intact but without the dying part.  He and Jaime met, and Ted may have even been something of a mentor to the kid.  The recent Dark Crisis on Infinite Earths showed a world where, since the Justice League was presumed dead (they weren’t), Superman’s son Jon Kent, also a Superman, put together a new Justice League that included both the Ted and Jaime Blue Beetles plus Booster Gold, but that team didn’t really get to do much and disbanded at the end of the story.

But right now, DC has two Supermans, two Batmans, and a whole lot of heroes sharing names.  Basically, two Blue Beetles is no big deal.  Plus, he does team up quite a bit with his old buddy Booster.

Besides, Ted was the inspiration for Nite Owl over in Watchmen.  Even if Jaime is going to the big screen first, Ted at least had that going for him.

You know, I did mention Booster Gold quite a bit here…