Created by Dan Mishkin, Gary Cohn, and Paris Cullins for 1984’s Fury of Firestorm #24, Blue Devil is Dan Cassidy, a Hollywood stuntman and special effects whiz who gets magically bonded to a costume he made for a movie. The suit makes Dan a magnet for otherworldly phenomena, which he handles with the no-nonsense gruff of a working man.
Plastic Man
When Grant Morrison revived the League for JLA #1 (1997), they approached the big seven as representations of the Olympic gods: Superman was Zeus, Batman was Hades, Wonder Woman was Hera, etc. Yet, Morrison found the Seven made for an incomplete pantheon without a Dionysus, a shape-shifting trickster. To fill this gap, Morrison added the ever-adaptable Plastic Man to be the uncontrollable agent of chaos.
Created by the incomparable Jack Cole for 1941’s Police Comics #1, Plastic Man was once Eel O’Brian, a small-time hood who falls into a vat of chemicals after getting shot. The chemicals changed the make-up of his body, allowing him to take any shape he desires. In those original comics and in Morrison’s run, Plastic Man was the ultimate oddity, a guy so incredibly powerful that it boggles the mind and whose mind is so thoroughly boggled.
Aztek
Plastic Man may have been a favorite of Morrison’s, but was not a Morrison creation. Aztek, however, does come directly from the famed writer, who created the Mexican hero alongside Mark Millar and N. Steven Harris in 1996. The result of both scientific engineering and occult magic, Aztek is the champion of the Q Foundation, a secret society devoted to serving their god Quetzalcoatl’s battle against his twin, Tezcatlipoca. Aztek wears a battle suit designed by the Q Foundation, and enters the world with both the slanted view of someone raised by extremists and the heart of someone who wants to do good in the world.
Aztek’s presence puts an interesting spin on superheroing, especially since the original incarnation had a finite life. Aztek remained simultaneously cheerful and fatalistic, right up until he sacrificed himself to save the League. But if that’s too heavy, the DCU could use his recently-introduced successor, Nayeli Constant, a software engineer from Texas recruited into the Q Foundation’s mission.
The Question
Originally created as a way for legendary artist Steve Ditko to espouse his Objectivist philosophy, the blank-faced sleuth known as the Question has gone through many incarnations, most famously inspiring the Watchmen anti-hero Rorsach. Whether as a Zen detective, a conspiracy theorist, an urban shaman, or, most recently, a hard-boiled gumshoe, the Question does not seem like a team player.