Welcome back to another edition of Demanded Characters. We have been looking at the senior members of the JSA, and while they are popular, we can’t forget the younger members as well. These youngsters range from new heroes to legacies, and more recently they seem to have striking resembles to their Kingdom Come counterparts. When we started a look at the JSA we focused on Alan Scott, and I thought it only fitting to start the younger crowd with his son, Todd Rice, Obsidian.
Last week there was not much debate, but a great call for both versions of the original Scarlet Speedster, Jay Garrick.
As with most heroes, Alan Scott fell in love with a villain. There is just something about the bad girls that make all the heroes go wild at one time or another. The problem is that when you fall for an unbalanced villain, you have the possibility of having an unbalanced kid. Todd is one of those kids, and he has straddled the line between hero and villain all of his life. Not only is his personality conflicted, but his sexual preferences are as well. Todd had a hard life growing up. He had a mentally ill mother and was abused as a kid. This left him scarred and resentful of his hero father.
This identity problem made Todd very unstable. His powers work around shadows and his ability to control them. He could blanket a city in darkness, challenging even Superman. His inability to keep his temper and his emotions in check is a concern even to this day. When Luthor’s Everyman project named one of his heroes Jade, Todd ran off to confront them and did not care what he had to do or who he had to go through to get to them. Currently Todd has come back to being a hero, as part of the JSA, but seems to be embracing his dark shadow side in his current look.
There are two major looks for Obsidian: his older spandex look and his modern shadow look. Most people would agree both are looks that easily identify the character. The look that he is very well known by is his cape and spandex look. The color scheme is very simple, using mostly blue and black. Depending on the the artist and time he sometimes has some white rings around the neck and belt. He also has a lighter color cape, ranging from gray to black to white again, depending on the look the artist is
going for. This would be a simple character to make, maybe even reusing parts from Manta, Hal, or the newer Mr. Miracle.
His newer look would be visually interesting and more complex. The shadow look makes giving him any defined features hard and the wisps of shadows coming off of him much more intricate in design. I think this is a challenge that is well suited for the Horsemen. Making a hero a little twisted and a little less normal would fit in great along side his fellow JSA’ers like Atom Smasher.
So DC fans what do you think: Should we see a modern or classic Obsidian?
Some images courtesy Comic Vine
Additional Links