Supergirl: Who Is The Guardian?

Earlier today, The CW released the first photo of James Olsen (Mehcad Brooks) in full costume as The Guardian on Supergirl.

Olsen hasn’t been The Guardian in the comics before (unless we’re forgetting an old Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen adventure, which is distinctly possible), but he’s hardly the first guy to get the gig.

That said, it seemed like with the costume (after a fashion, anyway) showing up on TV, it was as good a time as any to talk about The Guardian.

First thing’s first, let’s just rip this Band-Aid right off: he’s a lot like Captain America. Created in 1942 by Jack Kirby and Joe Simon (the men who created Captain America), Jim Harper was a fed-up cop who wielded a shield and had kid sidekicks in his war on theats both foreign and domestic. Later iterations of the character would be enhanced.

Harper took a group of juvenile delinquents who would come to be known as the Newsboy Legion under his wing, and along the way had plenty of adventures with Jimmy Olsen, ironically enough. After he started to age out of the Guardian role, the Newsboys, now successful scientists with the top-secret DNA Project, tried to clone him. When he discovered what they were doing and tried to stop it, he was murdered by others within the Project. The clone would ultimately be used to replace him as Guardian, with the older Newsboys cloning a group of younger Newsboys to work with him.

The DNA Project, incidentally, would soon evolve into The Cadmus Project — something we’ll be hearing a lot about on Supergirl this year. Last year, James Harper appeared, played by Eddie McClintock, in the episode that revealed the existence of Cadmus.

Eventually, while there were numerous Guardian clones, there was one main one who served as a mentor and guardian to Superboy (another Cadmus clone) and the Newsboy Legion. At one point, Superman encountered another, vastly more powerful Guardian clone called Auron in space, having been modified to carry out research where conventional rockets couldn’t reach.

The Guardian and the Newsboy Legion were prominent for a while in Jimmy Olsen’s ongoing comic, but ultimately vanished almost entirely for several years, before being brought back in the Superman titles in the late ’80s and early ’90s. They played a significant role in the Death and Return of Superman saga in 1992-93, and from there developed a following among the new fans those stories brought to comics. Eventually, The Guardian would become the head of Cadmus, replacing its corrupt systems from within.

In the post-Flashpoint DC Universe, The Guardian was reinvented. Rather than being a costumed hero who became a security agent for Cadmus, “Michael” seemingly took the gig as “Guardian-01” and inherited the suit and shield.

Other people who took the alias were Mal Duncan in the Silver Age and Jake Jordan, the Manhattan Guardian, whose look James Olsen’s costume most resembled. Introduced during Grant Morrison’s 7 Soldiers of Victory story, Jordan was an African-American man who became a superhero only after having taken on the costume and identity of The Guardian essentially as a mascot for a local newspaper.

Following the 7 Soldiers of Victory storyline, in which he started out to rescue his kidnapped girlfriend and ended up helping a group of magic-users to defeat an evil race of faerie, he fought alongside DC’s heroes during the Battle of Metropolis in Infinite Crisis and again during World War III (52). After that, he kind of faded back into the background, although a character matching his design was used as The Guardian in the animated series Young Justice.