The sidekick was a time honored tradition back in the Golden and Silver Ages, but not every hero had a kid sidekick. Or did they? Well, no, they didn’t. But that’s where retcons come into play, creating storylines that make changes to the past in ways that sometimes work. For example, the Winter Soldier was basically just a change made to an old Stan Lee and Jack Kirby story based on the idea that, well, no one exactly saw Bucky die. But these things don’t always work, and sometimes how well the changes work might depend on any number of factors.
Case in point, the jury is still out on Judy Garrick, the Boom.
Judy Garrick is a new character, but her story is set in the past, connecting her to longtime DC hero Jay Garrick, the original Flash. Judy is Jay’s daughter and onetime sidekick. She first appeared in The New Golden Age from January of 2023 by writer Geoff Johns and artist Todd Nauck. Essentially, a bunch of stuff Watson hated happened. Apparently, because both Barry Allen and Dr. Manhattan couldn’t leave well enough alone, 13 heroes were wiped out of existence, Judy being one of them. The Time Masters intervened and saved the 13, but Per Degaton, known time-traveling fascist, also couldn’t leave well enough alone, meaning the pods holding the 13 failed early and they were reintegrated back into the timestream before the Childminder, a hideous bird-woman who may have been a warped Mother Goose, kidnapped Judy and a host of other Golden Age sidekicks on behalf of what turned out to be Rip Hunter’s own kid sidekick Corky all grown up to be a horrible man.
As for the kidnapped kid sidekicks, they were a nice mix of actual kid sidekicks and made up characters, such as the original Newsboy Legion and the Crimson Avenger’s sidekick Wing for the real ones and kid sidekicks for characters like Miss America, the Red Bee, the Human Bomb, and Dr. Fate for the new ones. Generally, the new ones showed a bit more racial and gender diversity, hence the way to pick out the new ones. But Judy was one of the new ones. Essentially, Emiko “Red Arrow” Queen and Courtney “Stargirl” Whitmore went looking into some mysterious disappearances and found the missing heroic sidekicks, rescuing them from the Childminder and future Corky, but due to the nature of their disappearance, they couldn’t drop the kids off when they disappeared, so they had to be deposited in the present where apparently they are going to form the Young Justice Society.
But what about the Boom? OK, Judy Garrick was the daughter of Joan and Jay Garrick. At the age of 13, she was kidnapped by bad guys who used the same experiments on her that gave her dad superspeed in some sort of evil plan that obviously would never work. Now endowed with superspeed, Judy called herself “the Boom,” as in Jay was “the flash” of lightning, which is always followed by “the boom” of thunder. But then there was that bit with the 13 lost heroes and her disappearance. And due to the nature of her disappearance, everyone basically forgot all about her, including her parents. DC did have some hints she existed, like Jay very briefly remembering her during the Dark Crisis, but that was about all.
You know, until Stargirl rescued her and brought her back to her parents. And then, well, they remembered her.
These days, Judy seems to be living with her now-elderly parents and…wait, how old are Joan and Jay? Did Jay’s superhero career still start in World War II? They have a teenage daughter now?
Something tells me this is going to get a bit messy. Anyway, Judy is a new character that is supposed to be a forgotten older one. Unlike the other characters from that Stargirl mini-series, she got her own mini-series (with Jay) that just started. Maybe she’ll stick around this time.
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