Legion World Forums LEGION COMPANION Dr. Gym'll's Cultural Rarities The ALL-Gay Male Harlequin from Infinity, Inc. Thread!

This may be well-known, but I just found out about it by accident the other day.

Anyway, Roy Thomas originally planned on including a gay male Harlequin among the members of Infinity, Inc.! Looks kind of cool!

I actually have never heard of this before! They should totally introduce that character now!

Here\'s the original article from which it's taken!

That would have been great! I'm sure the fact that Obsidian turned out to be gay is really more coincidental than anything else, but it is a nice parallel.

I still haven't actually read the article, but it looks like Obsidian started out as a junior version of the Spectre, which is kind of interesting!

I just read the article. It seems like Obsidian was always a GL offspring. In the first part of the article, Roy states that they considered the Spectre and Dr. Fate too powerful and so they didn't make offspring for them. But then later on he talks about an adopted African-American son for the Spectre.

I was reminded of the almost-existence of this character yesterday!

I wonder what his parentage would've been? Maybe a son of Molly Mayne by a previously unknown husband in the 1960s?

I guess Brainwave, Jr. also kind of stole the "child of villain" shtick.

Ooh, what if *he* was Merry Pemberton's son instead of Brainwave, jr.?

Would be cool if he were the step-brother of Obsidian and Jade! The timing wouldn't have worked for him to be the biological son of Molly Mayne and Alan Scott, though. But it would be cool for both Molly and Alan to have had children before their final, happy marriage with each other.

I much prefer that version EDE.

I note that the article has "Nightwind" instead of Northwind" at one point, just to add some Legion goodness.

"fun loving valley-boy" sounds like a male version of Comet Queen too.

Yeah, that would be cool. I love the idea of the team having two gay characters with very different personalities. Harlequin would the more flamboyant, very comfortable-with-himself one and Obsidian the dark, brooding one. And making them step-brothers makes for a potentially interesting dynamic.

Yeah! I can just imagine Harlequin inviting Obsidian to a brothers' night out. Jade pushes him to go, saying he should give it a shot, and tells him that she and Harlequin have already gone out. And Harlequin drags him to a gay bar, where he flirts easily with all the cute guys and tries giving Obsidian some tips.

and for bonus points, both Harlequin and Obsidian strike out - but while Obsidian obsesses over it, Harlequin is all "ah well, those guys don't know what they're giving up!"

Of course, this would be before Obsidian finds boyfriend Damon, as I love their relationship. And when Obsidian introduces Damon, Harlequin will be all "Oh my god, Todd, you really learn fast! And now you've surpassed me, your gay coach! I hope you two never break up, but if you do, I've got dibs - just kidding!"

I now completely dig this character and he totally exists in my personal alternate Earth-2 continuity!

Here is "Blue Dolphin" incidentally:

Deep Blue - with ties to Neptune Perkins? or Aquaman? these water-based characters often end up getting the shaft though

and I notice that Hourman II was originally supposed to freeze time. A nice twist on the Hourman powers!

Isn't that what Morrison's version ended up doing as one of its powers?

The robot Hourman? Yeah, I seem to remember it doing just that!

It's interesting that there were proposals for a "children of the JSA" team going back to the late 50s. That would've massively screwed up the timeline, if they were supposed to be adults, as they would've had to been born in the mid-late 30s at least, prior to most of the JSA having super-hero careers!

Infinity, on the other hand, were starting to stretch things pretty late in the timeline for the JSAers to be having kids. Really, it probably would've made the most sense for any kids to be born in the period from 1951-1963, while the JSA was officially disbanded. I think the birth years given for the Infinitors in the original series tended to put them just a little bit later than that.

1940 - Sitting at the circus, 25 year old Bruce Wayne sees the tragic death of the Flying Graysons. He'd been thinking of taking on a partner. But he saw this as a sign not to endanger the lives of others. Instead, he would train his own son to help him. Soon, crooks across Gotham would fear the name of Bat-Tot!

But who is the mother?

No doubt a subplot for Bat-Tot to explore in Detective Comics. or he could just check to see who gets to change nappies when daddy's out fighting crime. No wait... Alfred does that.

The logical conclusion is: Bat-Tot is a clone!

>gasp< That sets up a really good parallel decades later when they encounter Ras Al-Ghul and his offspring, Ra-Tot! One trains clones as partners over decades while the other depends on a single one, but uses a Resurrection Pit to keep it healthy.

Ra-Tot would in fact hop from clone body to clone body - remember the dozens of fully-grown, mindless Ra's clones from the DNA era?

The ones that M'Onel and Star Boy couldn't take down because they both had gigantic Idiot Balls at the time.

Crumbs! If Ra-Tot is using Batman and Bat-Tot's cloning technology in the future, it would mean that Ra-Tot won!

Unless the clones that came out of the chambers only looked like Ras and Ra-Tot, but had in fact been reprogrammed by Bat-Tot to place the personalities of himself and Batman into different bodies!