Sorry it's been a couple of days since my last post; I actually drew this the same night as Little Barda, but I apparently pushed myself a little too hard because I've been stumbling since. I'll probably take a break from these "Living In The Fridge" DCU revamps for a couple days, but before I do, one more (recent) history lesson, this time of how Didio's DC managed to catch lightning in a bottle, fuck it up royally, yet still be unable to destroy what made the character memorable even as they literally nuked him from orbit.

Let me tell you about Eddie "Gopher" Bloomberg, the Kid Devil.

Back in the 80s, the last days before the "Crisis on Infinite Earths," DC put out a comic called "Blue Devil" about a stuntman/genius special effects tech who was magically and permanently fused to the costume he built for a monster movie, forever trapped as a demonic beast...oh, and by the way, this was a comedy book more in the vein of "Plastic Man" than "Ghost Rider." Shows you what a different place the DCU was in the 80's, the fact that Dan Cassidy WAS upset about his condition and wanted nothing to do with being a superhero like everyone kept suggesting was the joke of the book...he literally developed the power to accidentally stumble into superhero action even as he tried to free himself from the curse and regain his old acting career ("Blue Devil" was the origin of the now-commonplace term "weirdness magnet," I shit you not). Think about that for a moment: once, in the DCU, the NATURAL, EXPECTED response to being damned to a life as a monstrous freak was to join a super-team and fight evil...and people wonder why us fogeys wax nostalgic about the 80s?

Anyway, his best friend and confidante was Marla Bloomberg, a movie producer who had kept him supplied with work even as he was trying to cope with his changes, and in constant low-orbit around the two of them was her nephew, Gopher, the type of super-fanboy character that is nowadays LITERALLY a dime a dozen but, at the time, was still unique enough to be totally hated by both the reading public and his would-be mentor. Seriously, Eddie was a total prototype for Syndrome from "The Incredibles," right down to being a prepubescent tech savant capable of constructing his own super-suit, based off of the original "Blue Devil" costume but with improvements, in his garage "WITH A BOX OF SCRAPS!"

After BD's book was canceled, both he and Eddie languished in comic limbo for a couple of decades, with Dan popping up occasionally as some creator's pet character but never for long (even the best writers would have to eventually own up to the fact that Dan Cassidy is the biggest self-centered douchebag in the DC Universe), and Eddie's sole appearance the entire time was a near-cameo in "Young Justice"...until the "One Year Gap" period after "Infinite Crisis" when it was decided to turn the Teen Titans into the chamber pot of the DCU, and Eddie was the perfect face of what was supposedly wrong with the whole idea of teen heroes. Yep, in any other universe, he'd be the next Tony Stark, but under Didio he was yet another straw fanboy for the creators to use to mock their buying public, his overall ineptitude and bad luck forcing him to abandon his high-tech origins and make a literal devil's deal that turned him into an actual teenage demon.

Funny thing happened, though...perhaps intentionally, perhaps not, Eddie became the most popular new Teen Titan in DECADES, living his dream of superhero-dom and having a ball doing it despite, no, BECAUSE of the inevitable tragic outcome of his new powers. He was more like Nightcrawler of the X-Men than Nightcrawler himself had been since the mid-90's, a fun character who brought out the best in his teammates. He was a light of hope and optimism and heroism in a DCU that had grown dark, bitter, and cynical.

Naturally, he HAD to die.

...but not before they put him in bicycle shorts and a skin-tight vest, then totally depowered him and had him flailing around Titans Tower trying to "fit in" first. Hell, they did EVERYTHING they could to make people hate Eddie...Hell, they even tried to write off his heroic sacrifice to save his friends and, oh yeah, SAN FRANCISCO too from a nuclear supervillain going meltdown by literally putting "ANOTHER Titan Dies!" on the cover!

Fuck you, Didio. In the nostril. Sideways.

All it did was show the readers how horribly wrong the Titans had gotten, and how something needed to be done with the book. I haven't read it since Eddie's death...that was LITERALLY the final straw for me...but I'm told that the current writer has been going back to the old Wolfman-Perez days for inspiration to try and restore them to their previous glory. I haven't been impressed by what I've seen so far, but, frankly, ANY effort to undo the post "Young Justice" decade is appreciated.

So...what does this have to do with the fellow here, since I seem to be using these revamps I'm doing as efforts to create new entries into the hero "gene pool?" Well, it occurred to me while re-reading Eddie's story during the "One Year Gap" period: whatever happened to his old super-suit? Part of the humiliation conga line they put him through involved him, as a teenager, trying to fit back into the uniform he wore originally despite, y'know, being 4 years older and about 2 feet taller; however, it was almost a point that the only reason he couldn't get it to work properly was because he couldn't FIT into the damned thing anymore (and had somehow forgotten that he'd built it in the first place so, hey, why not use his forgotten genius and, I dunno, MAKE A NEW SUIT INSTEAD OF SELLING HIS SOUL TO NERON THE DEMON?), NOT that the suit was defective or broken. So, yeah...that means that somewhere in the Titans Tower storage rooms is a FULLY-FUNCTIONING BATTLESUIT that, according to Comics Vine, could enhance the wearer's strength, speed, agility, and endurance 10-fold, as well as having a number of other gadgets up to and including a LIGHTNING- AND FLAME-THROWING ROCKET TRIDENT. Hell, I'd even like to think that after being depowered, when he wasn't carting around the Standard Didio-Issue DCU Idiot Ball like a fucking Companion Cube, he was tinkering with the suit, updating and repairing it for him to use once again before he died.

But who to WEAR it? There are a few candidates, some I like better than others, but, for my son's sake, I decided on a male wearer...and, by sheer coincidence, it turns out there was a potential "Eddie Part 2" over in the Flash books! See, two of the characters that kept getting shoved into the DCU Fridge but never staying were Iris and Jai (pronounced "Jay" apparently) West, the twin children of Wally West. They'd been through some truly twisted story arcs, flickering in and out of canon existence like an existential light switch rave, before finally culminating in Iris, to save her brother's life due to them sharing a single connection to the Speed Force instead of a double one and blahblahblah cut off his access to the genetically inherited power source of all DCU speedsters. Instead of killing her like she expected, though, it instead stabilized HER powers and she became the new Impulse, taking the name and costume of her once-enjoyable-to-read-about-before-he-became-a-little-prick relative, Bart Allen. Meanwhile, her brother now was a normal human, sitting in the background of every appearance, playing his DS and twirling his metaphorical moustache as he awaits his as-blatant-as-a-chest-wound fall into inevitable super-villainy. So, hey, if DC is grooming him to be the next devil of the Flash Family (odds are he's going to be taught by Hunter Zolomon and become the next "Kid Zoom," just watch), I may as well head them off at the pass and make him a literal one of sorts by have him take up Eddie's legacy, right?

I actually based this version of the suit off of the two potential revamps Todd Nauck drew up for Eddie's cameo in "Young Justice" back in the 90s, partially since that was the last time the suit supposedly WORKED but also because if I'm trying to intentionally invoke YJ in these, why not use the guy who defined their (and the "Teen Titans GO!" comic's) look in the first place?

And, for the record, I have NO idea what he's supposed to be doing in this pic. Really.