Every Thursday, mightygodking.com returns to the pages of Who’s Who, the classic 1980s DC comic book encyclopedia of their characters. Every week, a character shall be judged on the only scale scientific enough that matters: the Rex The Wonder Dog scale of fantasticosity.
There honestly isn’t that much to say about Carapax, because there’s sort of a trend for villains introduced in the pages of Blue Beetle or Booster Gold during the 1980s when those two titles, you know, existed and stuff. That trend was very simple:
1.) Show up
2.) Get ass kicked
3.) Disappear forever
Very old-school, mid-70s Spider-Man sort of villainy. (Big Wheel! Hypno-Hustler! And so forth.) And not without merit, because come on, when you’re getting your ass kicked by Blue Beetle and you have actual honest-to-god superpowers clearly you need to rethink your approach. Of course, nowadays that generally means “be reinvented as a serial killer” (it happened to Catalyst in JSA), or sometimes “join a larger gang of villains and then get killed off because you are a warm body” (the Madmen, for example).
Carapax is of course no exception, because despite being a man whose body was destroyed and whose mind became trapped within the form of an indestructible battle robot, he got his ass thoroughly outsmarted by Ted Kord, who dropped him into the middle of the ocean. Of course, indestructible battle robots generally don’t drown, so presumably Carapax went off somewhere afterwards to rethink his whole “five-year-plan.” I have no idea if he showed up anywhere else since.
But if he didn’t – well, he is an intelligent indestructible battle robot, and he’s got the whole “superpower as ultimate disability” thing going that’s worked for many a character (“I don’t have a body any more!”), and come on, he looks kind of cool, doesn’t he? Like an evil, bright red cross between Boba Fett and Voltron. Besides, let’s face it: Can you ever really run out of indestructible battle robots?
Mostly for potential and cool appearance, I admit, but let’s be honest: when Carapax briefly showed up, he did not suck. He did exactly what you would expect an indestructible battle robot to do: blow shit up and not get destroyed. And that deserves recognition!
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And then a small army of him showed up in the recent Suicide Squad mini and got blown up REAL GOOD…
Boba Fett and Voltron? I was gonna say a Cylon and a Go-Bot.
I think there could be an awesome story here though. If he’s indestructible and was just thrown into the middle of the ocean, he could have simply been walking back to shore for the past ten years. When he finally makes it back to dry land, he’s gonna be PISSED. I think that potential earns him a few more points on the Rex The Wonder Dog scale.
He’s got no personality, no character and he’s milking the appearances of other bad-ass robots. Voltron was mentioned but he’s also got a definite similarity to Maxamillian from The Black Hole. He might as well emerge randomly from the ground like Big O.
Right now, he’s very, very average.
I might be misremembering, but I think the Carapax thing was only one of a seemingly-endless pile of subplots in Blue Beetle: this, the girlfriend and the company, the cop that was after Ted for his mentor’s suspicious death, whatever the villain for next month was up to, etc, etc. Every month, there was probably between four to eight pages devoted to either marginal character development, or things that might pay off down the line.
That said, Carapax deserves to make it back to dry land every six or eight years, probably only to be dumped back in at the end of the issue. Or wrecking up Atlantis.
I believe Carapax showed up again in the recent Suicide Squad mini… and then was promptly blown up by Chemo. I could be misremembering part of that, though.
Wow, disgruntled archaeologist, huh? That’s real… bad-ass. Woo. What’s next, the disgruntled dental hygienist Rotta Teefs who discovers some abandoned Thanagarian sonic teeth cleaning system and becomes The Toothscrubber, the nefarious nemesis of… let’s see… Animal Man? Look, DC, I just invented a thing!
I think someone stole that design recently. There was a Exiles one shot with someone wearing battle armor that looked a bit like that.
Well, getting outsmarted by Ted Kord isn’t that unusual is it? I mean he supposedly is one of, if not the, smartest people in the DCU.
“Wow, disgruntled archaeologist, huh? That’s real… bad-ass.”
Isn’t that pretty much Indianna FUCKING Jones right there?
Indy isn’t disgruntled, he’s nosy. Nosy is awesome.
How are there like 25 of this guy now? And Indy was set for life: found mystical crap, plenty of college girls, and his dad’s immortal from the Grail.
I think the Carapax thing was only one of a seemingly-endless pile of subplots in Blue Beetle
You think right. Check out the First Appearance portion of his personal data: “(as Carapax) BLUE BEETLE #1; (as the Indestructible Man) BLUE BEETLE #14″. Len Wein spent the whole first year of the book setting up just that thread. I think he only stopped hiking up the Claremont Coefficient (warning: link goes to TV Tropes) in the last few issues, when the book was about to be cancelled.
(I remember when Overthrow, the anarcho-socialist supervillain with the jai-alai-themed power armor, who was also the Manhunters’ agent in Ted’s comic, was unmasked… not as the K.O.R.D. employee we were being led to suspect, not as another supporting character, but as a nobody we’d never heard of before and, I suspect, never heard of again. It was just as anticlimactic as when Steve Ditko was prevented from using it for the Reveal on the Green Goblin.)
Jason – that was Jenny “Spitfire” Swensen, of the “New Universe” title “Spitfire and the Troubleshooters”. From the timing of the original publication, I think it’s just within the realm of possible that Spitfire pre-dated Carapax.
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