Slightly Misplaced Comic Book Characters Case File #499: Sideways

I sometimes go looking for characters to write up, and I found an awful lot of articles and YouTube videos that, for whatever reason, listed the DC hero Sideways as someone who disappeared but shouldn’t have.  Now, I had the trade for the first six issues of the character’s solo series in my unread trade stack, but as of this typing, I haven’t gotten too far into it.

Still, there are a lot of people who seem to think Sideways is something of a missed opportunity.

Sideways, AKA Derek James, was one of a group of heroes to come out in the wake of DC’s Dark Nights: Metal event in an initiative called the “New Age of DC Heroes.”  And like most of those new titles, Sideways didn’t even make it to its second year.  I vaguely remember that line of books when it came out, and only one caught my eye at the time, that being The Terrifics, a team book where established DC heroes Mr. Terrific, Plastic Man, Metamorpho, and Phantom Girl essentially became DC’s version of the Fantastic Four after a weird accident forced the foursome into an unwanted bond.  The rest, by my recollection, looked like the sort of books that were popular in the 90s, and this initiative started in 2018, about 20 years too late for that sort of violent antihero sort of comic.

Seriously, the other books included The Silencer about a reluctant assassin, Damage about a mutated soldier that turned into a monster and I am guessing caused a lot of damage, The Curse of Brimstone about a demon on the loose, and The Unexpected where one character was required to start a fight every 24 hours.  Factor in as well The Immortal Men was drawn by Jim Lee, and this was a very 90s-looking line of books, plus one co-written by Scott Snyder about a new Challengers of the Unknown that Wikipedia has no real record of.  On the other hand, there are a lot of potential entries for this ongoing series from the looks of things.

But Sideways, as a character, apparently appealed to a lot of people, and maybe not just because he looked and had a backstory similar to Spider-Man’s.  First appearing in February of 2018’s Sideways #1, written by Dan DiDio and Justin Jordan with art by Kenneth Rocafort, Sideways had the power to open portals to anywhere in the multiverse along with some standard superhuman strength and resistance to injury.  The only person in on the secret is his best friend Ernestine, a somewhat bohemian-looking girl who made Derek’s Sideways costume.  In short order in his first issue, the reader learns that Esme has a fashionable and popular twin sister that does not care for Derek, he’s adopted, his parents worry about him, and he gained his powers during Dark Nights: Metal when Challenger Mountain materialized in the middle of Gotham City and sent Derek tumbling through the Dark Multiverse.

Naturally, when he gets back to Earth, his first thoughts is to don a costume and then become famous on social media doing stunts.  But he’s a superhero now, so the weird starts coming, beginning with a cosmic guardian called Tempus Fuginaut that may be an enemy or an ally depending on the story, and then on to some rather colorful supervillains, most notably a guy called Showman, a superhuman internet troll who gains power the more he makes people mad.  Derek also gradually learns how to use his powers.  He can open rifts to anywhere he can picture in his mind or next to someone he knows if he can just picture that person even if that person is somewhere Derek has never been.  Basically, from what little I have seen so far, he has some interesting adventures with colorful bad guys and isn’t just smacking the Joker or Deathstroke around.  Yes, like Spider-Man, he has to deal with the death of a parental figure in the form of his mother, but it looks like he finds her killers before the end of his solo series with issue #13, though he did get an annual co-written by Grant Morrison and DiDio.

From there, it looks like Sideways joined the Young Justice team, but he was last seen rescuing Black Adam during the Dark Crisis mini-series for what was probably one page.  And I gotta agree:  this guy does seem like the most interesting of the “New Age” characters.  That may not be a high bar to leap, but it’s worth noting that a lot of people miss this guy.

Well, maybe he’ll be back at some point.  Or maybe he won’t.  Guys like him have kept this column going for…holy crap, the next one is #500!  I better come up with someone good…