When DC Entertainment dropped their Blue Beetle movie with Jaime Reyes, I got the idea to look at the previous versions of the Blue Beetle before DC acquired the character…and really screwed him over before Jaime was even a concept. Created by someone using a pseudonym shared with three different creators (one of them Jack Kirby, but I don’t he was involved–I’m just going by ComicVine’s file on Charles Nicholas Wojtkowski) the Dan Garret that first appeared in the pages of Mystery Men Comics was not the same Dan Garrett from Charlton Comics, and I don’t just mean the extra “t”. He would be replaced in Charlton by Ted Kord, and this the version that was Blue Beetle in the DC Universe.
Starting with Fox Features, then Holyoke Publishing, then back to Fox Features, and finally Charlton, the hero known as Blue Beetle has undergone some big changes as we reviewed their many any adventures before DC picked them up. Some were good, some were bad, and some had about as much interest in character accuracy as Marvel Studio today. Let’s take one last trip through the history of the Dans and Ted. You can catch up by looking up the reviews on this site, including posting Linkara’s “Blue Skying” retrospective of all the Blue Beetles. I’ve run out of public domain reprints at Comic Book Plus. I have not read the Americomics appearance because it’s not public domain as far as I’m aware, or at least Comic Book Plus doesn’t have it.
What follows is a brief overview of each period and my thoughts on it since reading it. Spoiler for the article: this series peaked early.
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