BW Media Spotlight

For many of us comic fans, there are two Blue Beetles we’re aware of. Ted Kord, the second Blue Beetle, and Jaime Reyes, the third and current (as of this article) Blue Beetle. There may be awareness of the first Blue Beetle, Egyptologist Dan Garrett, but by the time DC Comics purchased the Charlton heroes he was long gone, mere backstory for Ted and for Jaime’s scarab.

What you may not have known was that there was a fourth Blue Beetle, the original version of Dan Garret (note the one less “T”). I knew him from three sources: Linkara’s “Blue-Sky” retrospective on the character dating back to his earliest appearances to his most recent at the time of the retrospective’s completion (I think it was still during the New 52), the old radio dramas I had started listening to on my walks, and during my suffering through Seduction Of The Innocent where comic hater Fredrick Wertham actually thought Dan turned into a giant beetle to fight crime because somehow the child therapist couldn’t translate the words of a child. That’s a summer that I and those of you who joined me in reviewing that insult to non-fiction will never get back, and I apologize to both of us.

On the other hand, I learned that some of those older comics are in public domain and thus websites could legally post them. So using Comic Book Plus (a better “plus” than most streaming services) I delved into the early adventures of Dan Garret, rookie patrolman, in coordination with the movie based on his namesake that kind of does turn into a giant bug man. I started with his original 1940s appearances in Mystery Men Comics, which I am considering going back and finishing but at the time I opted to jump straight into his solo comic…which was still an anthology like the comic he came out of for awhile, then got sold to another company, then went back to the original company, and then went to Charlton who did four comics with that concept and cast before doing the total re-imagine we know today and will be getting into in the Friday verison of “Yesterday’s” Comic.

As “Yesterday’s” Comic says good-bye to Officer Garret and his friends and before saying hello to the archeologist Dan Garrett and his friends, I wanted to look back on the forgotten history of the Blue Beetle and see what we missed out on, and what went wrong as the series went on. This isn’t a deep retrospective, just me going over my afterthoughts on the whole series up to this point and the Beetle that continuity forgot, plus what if any legacy came from it. Watch the video I linked to earlier for a closer retrospective on all the bearers of the Blue Beetle mantle. This is the highlights.

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