Five Comic Characters We'd Like To See Play Hockey

Casey Jones

One of the few comic book characters to actually play hockey, Casey Jones is the human sidekick/ally of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Jones is best known for wearing an old school goalie mask to conceal his identity, as well as his occasional use of a hockey stick to beat criminals and ninja into submission.

How much time Jones actually spends on the ice varies depending on the cartoon/comic/movie. In some continuities, Jones was a professional hockey player turned vigilante after injuries derailed his career. Other times, Jones is just a sports fan with good taste in protective headwear. In IDW's current Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series, Jones is a varsity hockey player at a New York city college, although his poor grades (due in part to his nighttime activities) have threatened his scholarship.

Regardless, Jones has remained an important friend of the Teenage Mutant Ninja turtles and inevitably winds up married to April O'Neil, which basically makes him the luckiest guy in existence.

Wild Dog

Arrow fans are getting acquainted with Wild Dog, a somewhat obscure DC superhero who's best known for wearing a hockey mask and mowing down mobsters with machine guns. Wild Dog isn't actually a hockey player by trade, but he did play football in college. Wild Dog went into the vigilante business after mobsters killed his girlfriend.

Wild Dog is clearly a scrapper, which means he'd be a perfect fourth line grinder for a team looking to add some grit to the bench. While enforcers (hockey players that are solely on a team to fight) are a dying breed, Wild Dog would also gladly drop the gloves to go after anyone who he feels has wronged one of his teammates.

Sportsmaster

DC doesn't have any professional hockey players turned superheroes, but they do have a master athlete...who's also a gifted criminal. There's been multiple Sportsmasters in the DC Universe, all of whom are superior athletes turned supercriminals after they realized that burglary and theft pays better that pro sports. (Obviously, Sportsmaster was a Golden Age creation before most professional athletes were millionaires.)

Although it was never specified what sport Sportsmaster played, he did use exploding hockey pucks in his arsenal. Since the Sportsmaster would definitely be a complete hockey player, we'd like to think that Sportsmaster was the Gordie Howe of the DC Universe....only evil instead of a Red Wing.

Like the previous characters on this list, the Young Justice version of Sportsmaster also wore a metal goalie's mask, because those things just look scary.

Wolverine

We've never seen Wolverine lace up skates and take to the ice, but he is Canadian so we'd expect that he's played pond hockey at least a few times as a kid. Any hockey player would love nearly indestructable bones and a healing factor, and Wolverine's brawling abilities would also come in handy for when some idiot inevitably tries to pick a fight with him.

Since Wolverine is a good Canadian, we even know what his favorite hockey team is. As a native son of Alberta, Canada, Wolverine is a Calgary Flames fan and has even been shown wearing a Flames jersey from time to time in the comics. We're not sure why Wolverine roots for the Flames over their in-province rivals Edmonton Oilers, since the Flames didn't move to Calgary until 1980, but it's nice to see that Wolverine has a hobby that doesn't involve stabbing people with his claws.

Unus the Untouchable

Every hockey team needs a goalie and we couldn't think of a better person to stop pucks than Unus the Untouchable. Unus the Untouchable was an early Marvel mutant who could create impenetrable force fields around his body, making him impossible to touch. Provided he could keep his force fields from knocking his goal off its pegs, we'd think that any NHL team would love to Unus in between the pipes.

Unus even had a similarly powered son named Radius who might have even spent some time playing hockey. Radius grew up in a Canadian orphanage and hockey is Canada's national sport...so it's easy to assume he played at least a little bit of hockey before his mutant powers kicked in. Radius went on to join a version of Alpha Flight and even got to fight Wolverine once before he disappeared into obscurity along with most other mutants after M-Day.