Characters We’re Shocked Still Haven’t Come to The Arrowverse

At this point, the number of DC characters featured across the handful of DC superhero shows sharing a universe on The CW has to be nearing triple digits.

From heroes like The Flash and Green Arrow to villains like Ra’s al Ghul and Deathstroke to supporting characters like Felicity Smoak and Cat Grant, the DC Universe (especially on Earth-1) is a densely populated place…

…but yeah, not everyone you would have expected to see by now has acutally shown up.

There are some characters who are either so blindingly obvious, or at least so close to the heroes of the Arrowverse, that it’s kind of surprising that they haven’t made themselves known yet.

Here goes…!

LADY SHIVA

A character who appeared in the short-lived Birds of Prey storyline, and another assassin in the vein of Talia al Ghul, Lady Shiva seems like a gimme when trying to find a way to revisit some of Arrow‘s past successes without the show turning its back on character progression made by people like Nyssa.

Lady Shiva, the mother of Team Batman member Cassandra Cain (formerly Batgirl, now Black Bat), is potentially the world’s deadliest assassin and one of the few people to win a fight with Batman outright in the comics.

Like Ra’s, she has a legion of followers, although there’s less of a cult-like devotion and more of a mercenary sensibility to most of them, allowing for a relationship that’s more like HIVE’s or even Deathstroke’s Mirakuru soldiers than the League of Assassins had.

…Yeah. In the absence of the League of Assassins, it’s hard to argue that it might not be cool get the Brotherhood of the First moving in Star City.

And — again like Nyssa and Talia or, for that matter, The Huntress, she’s alternately a villain or a kind of brutal antihero, depending on what circumstances and the story calls for.

 

TED KORD

This one is kind of a cheat; it’s commonly understood that The Atom was originally Blue Beetle before he was deemed unavailable for whatever reason.

(That reason seems to be that Beetle will appear in the Booster Gold movie, but we’ll see.)

Still, one way around all of that would be to use Ted Kord — whose name is plastered all over numerous props on Arrow and The Flash — as a tech magnate and leave the Blue Beetle elements of the character unexplored, at least for now.

Besides the props, there’s also some story here: Felicity Smoak briefly worked at Kord Industries between seasons 2 and 3 when Queen Industries had failed and Palmer Tech hadn’t yet popped in to fill the void yet.

 

CAPTAIN ATOM

We’ve seen Firestorm, and a number of related characters, scientists, and villains who in the comics pull double duty as supporting characters for Captain Atom.

In the first season of The Flash, there was even The General, a character who has been closely tied to the Captain Atom project in the military in some stories.

The problem? Frankly, he’s so powerful — especially when written the way he has been in recent years — that it can be like a Superman problem: it’s challenging to add him to a story without it taking over the narrative a bit.

Hell, used in certain ways, his abilities can be so imposing that a Captain Atom knockoff was Captain Atom, the godlike antagonist in Watchmen.

 

THE QUESTION

The character has a rather complicated history with DC Comics. Like Captain Atom and Blue Beetle, the vigilante originated over at Charlton Comics before DC Comics acquired the character in 1983. From there, the latter publisher took Question and gifted him with his own solo series.

The new series imagined Question as an aggressive journalist who went after stories that no one else would touch. He reports for a new station called KBEL in Hub City and uses his alter-ego to get answers outside of the law. Focused on his city’s politics, Question is similar to Green Arrow in how he goes after Hub City’s corrupted underbelly.

Hub City has been regularly referenced on Arrow, The Flash, and Legends of Tomorrow — and has even appeared on-camera a few times.

Probably the character who has been most frequently requested as a potential Arrow addition, The Question has always felt like a character who would fit in on Star City…

…but there’s the added wrinkle that when Vic Sage passed away, he passed the mantle of The Question onto Renee Montoya. The fact that she was a major part of Gotham‘s first season might make it difficult to move The Question over.

 

BOOSTER GOLD

Booster Gold, a time-traveling superhero from the 25th Century, is most notable to the Arrowverse for his family.

That is, his son: Rip Hunter, Time Master.

Becuase of the vagaries of time travel, in the comics, Booster doesn’t know that Rip is his son, and Rip is actually Booster’s mentor in the ways of time travel.

Again, the issue here may be availability. As mentioned earlier, there’s a Booster Gold movie in development, and it’s sometimes difficult to get clearance to use movie characters in a TV setting.

He’s a character who’s been teased numerous times, but never promised, so it’s the kind of thing you might be lucky to see unexpectedly cast one of these days.