Rainbow Raider?!?

[ratcreature]

Who comes up with these kinds of "supervillains"?? Okay, so they're called "Rogues" in Flash comics, but still -- Rainbow Raider?!? (also notice Trickster's fearsome rubber chicken, which I suppose could be some kind of deadly weapon in disguise with Trickster, and yet, it looks very silly nevertheless)

And just when thought that this had to be a low for villain names, I get introduced to one called "Crazy Quilt". WTF?

In case you're wondering, where I came across these... um... colorful characters, I'm reading Underworld Unleashed.

Comments

[greenygal.livejournal.com]

*checks* For Rainbow Raider, that would be Cary Bates, the last writer on the first series. In--good lord, 1980.

RR is an extreme example, but he's actually something you see a lot in the old Rogues' Gallery--it's not unique to them, but it does seem particularly prevalent--genuinely powerful (on top of the rest of his "color-based powers," he's got emotion control), but really difficult to take seriously. I mean, two of the most notable of the Gallery are a talking gorilla and a magician named Abra Kadabra. Uh-huh. They scare me, but I've had a lot of practice and haven't read much of their Silver Age stuff. And the lower ranks tend to be gifted techies or at least somehow possess really cool toys--even Captain Boomerang had his gimmicks--but it doesn't matter how cool the toys are if they never use them for anything but robbing banks. Or if they call themselves "The Top." (The Top, I'd like to stress, is dangerous for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with top-themed weapons: he has a brain. But nobody notices because he calls himself that. See also the Turtle.)