Blue Beetle Turns 75 Years Old Today

Mystery Men Comics #1, pictured at right and below, was released on June 15, 1939, according to the Library of Congress Copyright Office’s date of publication records (via Bleeding Cool).

Fox Features Syndicate published the first Blue Beetle stories in Mystery Men Comics, with #1 being written (probably) by Will Eisner and drawn by Charles Nicholas Wojtkoski, who is widely believed to have created the character.

There have been three superheroes to go by the name of the Blue Beetle in comics (plus one on The Electric Company who is closer to The Tick‘s Arthur than to anything seen on the printed page). The original, Dan Garrett, was first a police officer and then an archaeologist (continuity was also not as much of a thing back then as it is now) who got superhuman powers from a magic scarab. When he died, he passed the scarab and the identity onto one of his archaeology students, Ted Kord (created by Spider-Man co-creator Steve Ditko). Ted couldn’t make the scarab work for him and so became a technology-driven hero, inventing his own weaponry and using his family’s considerable wealthy to make himself a Batman-style themed arsenal, including an airship called The Bug. When he died, the scarab was in the hands of the wizard Shazam, who dropped it to Earth, where it was found by Jaime Reyes, a teenager who soon learned the scarab wasn’t magical and egyptian, but damaged alien science.

Garrett had a radio show and was considered one of the biggest hits of early superhero comics. Ultimately Fox sold the character and other comics properties off and Blue Beetle ended up first at Charlton (where Ted Kord was created) and ultimately at DC, where it remains.

Following Kord’s death in Countdown to Infinite Crisis, it was Booster who helped usher in the Jaime Reyes era by locating the boy who had found the scarab. Following Infinite Crisis, Blue Beetle was launched and ran for a while, establishing and resolving the alien-invasion plot of The Reach, the race who designed the scarab. That plot got reworked and retread a little bit when the New 52 relaunched the character with another new #1, but that book, too, was cancelled.

If Ted appears as a recurring character with a superhero identity on Arrow, it will be the first major live-action adaptation for that character. Jaime got a brief appearance in Smallville and Ted an even-briefer one where he wasn’t at all super.