Vixen (alter ego, Mari Jiwe McCabe) is a super­hero in the DC Comics uni­verse. She was nearly the first female African-American DC super­hero to star in her own series, but the first issue of her series was can­celled in the “DC Implo­sion” in 1978. (It was sub­se­quently printed in Can­celled Comics Cav­al­cade.) Her first appear­ance dis­trib­uted to the pub­lic was in Action Comics #521 (1981).

A super­nat­ural tal­is­man called the Tantu Totem grants her the abil­ity to mimic the “pow­ers” of ani­mals, such as the strength of an ele­phant, or the speed of a chee­tah. She was a mem­ber of the Jus­tice League dur­ing the “Detroit League” era. Later, she joined the Sui­cide Squad and teamed up with the similarly-powered hero Ani­mal Man.

Her char­ac­ter was intro­duced in the Car­toon Net­work ani­mated series Jus­tice League Unlim­ited as a fash­ion model and the girl­friend of Green Lantern John Stew­art. Vixen’s voice on the show is pro­vided by Gina Tor­res. Vixen has become a very pop­u­lar recur­ring char­ac­ter on the show.

Cre­ated by Tony Isabella for DC Comics in the mid 70’s, Black Light­ning was a prod­uct of the Blax­ploita­tion era that ran through the 70’s.

A gold medal-winning Olympic decath­lete, Jef­fer­son Pierce returned to his old neigh­bor­hood (the noto­ri­ous Sui­cide Slum in the proud city of Metrop­o­lis) to become a high school teacher. Appalled by the vio­lence he saw, Pierce tried to inter­vene on behalf of his stu­dents, but quickly learned that The 100, the local crim­i­nal orga­ni­za­tion, objected vio­lently to inter­fer­ence. Peter Gambi, a fam­ily friend and tai­lor, designed the cos­tume and elec­tronic power belt of Black Light­ning. Pierce donned a mask, an Afro wig, a hip way of talk­ing, and Gambi’s out­fit that gave him elec­tri­cal pow­ers to become Black Light­ning, defender of the poor and under­priv­i­leged. (Later, when Black Light­ning was cap­tured by his ene­mies and the belt that gave him his pow­ers destroyed, it was dis­cov­ered that he had some­how inter­nalised the power and no longer needed the belt.)

The orig­i­nal can­di­date for DC Comics’ first head­lin­ing black super­hero was a char­ac­ter called the Black Bomber, later described by car­toon and comics his­to­rian Don Mark­stein as “an insult to prac­ti­cally every­body with any point of view at all.” When the edi­tor who had approved the Black Bomber left the com­pany before the char­ac­ter had seen print, Tony Isabella (whose pre­vi­ous writ­ing expe­ri­ence included Luke Cage, Mar­vel Comics’ first black super­hero with his own title) was asked to sal­vage the char­ac­ter; even with the first-issue dead­line loom­ing, Isabella was con­vinced that the only way for­ward was to scrap the Black Bomber and start again from scratch, and so Black Light­ning came into being.

Isabella wrote the first ten issues of Black Light­ning, before hand­ing over to Den­nis O’Neil. Only one O’Neil-scripted issue came out before the series was can­celled in 1978 as part of a gen­eral large-scale prun­ing of the company’s super­hero titles (which also can­celled the debut of Vixen, which would have been DC’s first title star­ring a female black super­hero). Issue #12 was pub­lished only in Can­celled Comics Cavalcade.

Black Light­ning made a num­ber of guest appear­ances in var­i­ous titles over the next few years, includ­ing a string of issues of World’s Finest writ­ten by O’Neil, and, notably, a two-part story in Jus­tice League of Amer­ica in which the League invited him to join, but he turned them down. Dur­ing this period, Black Light­ning lost his elec­tri­cal pow­ers, but con­tin­ued fight­ing with­out them. The loss even­tu­ally turned out to be psy­cho­so­matic, a symp­tom of a cri­sis of con­fi­dence result­ing from the acci­den­tal death of a bystander dur­ing an alter­ca­tion between Black Light­ning and some gun-wielding thugs.

In 1983, pow­ers restored, he became a regularly-appearing char­ac­ter again as a mem­ber of the Batman-led super­hero team the Out­siders. When The Out­siders ended, he returned to doing the occa­sional guest appear­ance. One such appear­ance, in 1988, resulted in increased powers.

In 1995, a new series of Black Light­ning began, again writ­ten by Tony Isabella. Edi­to­r­ial dis­agree­ments about the direc­tion of the series resulted in Isabella leav­ing after eight issues; the series limped along for another five issues before being can­celled, and Black Light­ning returned once again to guest-star limbo. When Lex Luthor was elected Pres­i­dent of the United States in 2000, he appointed Jef­fer­son Pierce as Sec­re­tary of Edu­ca­tion. He resigned among con­tro­versy over his “worst-kept secret in Wash­ing­ton” iden­tity as Black Light­ning, and his inad­ver­tent killing of a criminally-minded cor­po­rate CEO, for which Pres­i­dent Pete Ross (who had since suc­ceeded Luthor) then par­doned him.

Black Light­ning has never appeared in any of the many tele­vi­sion series based on DC Comics super­heroes. This is in itself not unusual for a char­ac­ter of Black Lightning’s rel­a­tive obscu­rity, but is notable because at least three such series have con­tained specially-created black super­heroes with elec­tri­cal pow­ers who weren’t Black Light­ning — series reg­u­lar Black Vul­can in Super Friends and guest stars Soul Power in Sta­tic Shock (not to men­tion Sta­tic him­self) and Juice in Jus­tice League Unlim­ited — lead­ing fans to spec­u­late that for some rea­son DC is mak­ing a point of not includ­ing Black Light­ning. It is pos­si­ble that DC is not using the char­ac­ter because his use comes with hav­ing to pay his cre­ator royalties.

Most recently, a young Black Light­ning has shown up in the DC ani­mated series Bat­man: The Brave and the Bold.

Steel was born out of the DC COMICS gim­mick known as the DEATH OF SUPERMAN.  John Henry Irons was a sci­en­tist who, armed with a solar-powered suit of armor, fought for truth and jus­tice. He was also the title char­ac­ters of a for­get­table live-action movie star­ring Shaquille O’Neal.

Steel, also known as the Man of Steel, was cre­ated by Louise Simon­son and artist Jon Bog­danove in Super­man: Man of Steel #19 in 1991. Aspects of the char­ac­ter are clearly inspired by the African-American folk hero John Henry, as well as Superman.

Steel is weapons engi­neer John Henry Irons, whose life was saved by Super­man after he fell off a build­ing while work­ing in con­struc­tion. He was buried in rub­ble dur­ing Superman’s fatal bat­tle against Dooms­day, and later cre­ated and donned a suit of pow­ered armor in Superman’s mem­ory in order to stop a gang war that was esca­lat­ing due to the dis­tri­b­u­tion of pow­er­ful weapons he had designed. Dur­ing the “Reign of the Super­men”, he was often called the Man of Steel to iden­tify him in con­trast to the other Super­men, which was short­ened to Steel by Super­man him­self (his fam­ily, who saw right through his dis­guise, referred to him as “the black Super­man”). He had a solo series (writ­ten by co-creator Louise Simon­son and later by Christo­pher Priest), and also has been a sup­port­ing char­ac­ter in Super­man comics. He has also been a mem­ber of the Jus­tice League. Steel runs a tech­no­log­i­cal facil­ity called Amertek Industries.

John Henry Iron has no super­hu­man abil­i­ties. How­ever, he wears a suit of power armor which grants him flight, super strength and endurance. Steel mod­i­fied his suit many times through his career. The ini­tial “Man of Steel” design was armed with a wrist-mounted rivet gun, and the sledge­ham­mer (such as used by his name­sake John Henry) that was ubiq­ui­tous for most of his designs. The orig­i­nal design fea­tured a metal ver­sion of Superman’s “S” insignia in trib­ute to the (tem­porar­ily) deceased hero, which he removed after the return of the “real” Man of Steel. A later design incor­po­rated a sim­i­lar, but dif­fer­ent “S” sym­bol (this time for “Steel”).

John Henry Irons has also appeared in Super­man: The Ani­mated Series (voiced by Michael Dorn), and sub­se­quently in Jus­tice League Unlim­ited (voiced by Phil LaMarr). In the ani­mated series, Irons worked to cre­ate a suit of pow­ered armor for the Metrop­o­lis SCU, but the suit had adverse psy­co­log­i­cal effects on its user. Encour­aged by Super­man, Irons worked to per­fect the suit with the help of his niece Natasha, becom­ing the super­hero Steel just in time to help Super­man in a bat­tle against Met­allo. Steel is also miss­ing the trade­marked cape he adpated from Super­man after Super­man saved his life in Super­man Man of Steel #19.

In 1997 a motion pic­ture was pro­duced based on this ver­sion of the char­ac­ter called Steel, star­ring Shaquille O’Neal in the title role.

Hard­ware was another char­ac­ter in the launch of the his­tor­i­cal com­pany Mile­stone Media.

Hard­ware (Curt Met­calf) is a Mile­stone Comics super­hero. Cre­ated by Dwayne McDuffie, he first appeared in Hard­ware #1 (1993). Hard­ware was the first of Milestone’s titles to be pub­lished, and (along with Blood Syn­di­cate, Icon, and Sta­tic) was one of the company’s flag­ship titles. Cur­tis “Curt” Met­calf is a genius inven­tor who, in his Hard­ware iden­tity, uses a vari­ety of high-tech gad­gets to fight organ­ised crime. A cen­tral irony of the series (of which Met­calf is fully aware) is that Metcalf’s employer, respected busi­ness­man Edwin Alva — who pro­vides the resources Met­calf uses to cre­ate Hardware’s hard­ware — is secretly the crime boss who Hard­ware is try­ing to bring down.

Cur­tis “Curt” Met­calf was a work­ing class child prodigy who was dis­cov­ered aged 12/13 by a big-time busi­ness­man, Edwin Alva (Sr), who with the bless­ing of Curt’s par­ents, enrolled Curt in “A Bet­ter Chance” — “a pro­gram intended to get minor­ity stu­dents into elite prep schools”. Curt proved to be much smarter than all the other prep school stu­dents, grad­u­at­ing aged 14, and earn­ing his first col­lege degree aged 15. Edwin Alva Sr paid for Curt’s whole col­lege tuition up to six or seven col­lege degrees, in exchange for Curt com­ing to work for Alva Indus­tries (in the “Inspi­ra­tion Fac­tory”) after grad­u­a­tion, with his “own lab, entirely too big a salary, and man­date to indulge (his) curios­ity by inves­ti­gat­ing what­ever struck (his) fancy”; and Curt’s inven­tions made Edwin Alva Sr mil­lions of dollars.

After a few years, Curt, want­ing a share of prof­its earned by his inven­tions, asked Edwin Alva for a “roy­alty point or two”. Edwin Alva’s answer was, “Cur­tis let us dis­pense with any mis­con­cep­tions you may be labour­ing under. You are not ‘fam­ily’. You are an employee. Nei­ther are you ‘Heir appar­ent’. You are a cog in the machine. My machine. You are not ‘respected’, Cur­tis. You are merely ‘use­ful’. You may go now.” Curt’s first thought was to quit, but it was in his con­tract that he could not work for a com­peti­tor: “If (he wanted) to work in (his) field (of exper­tise), (he) had to do it for Alva.“
Curt thought that maybe, with some advanced hack­ing, he could find some­thing on Alva Sr to use as lever­age, but found that almost every­thing about Edwin Alva was “Stone Cold Crooked”:
Curt: “It took me weeks to put it all together, but the evi­dence was clear and incon­tro­vert­ible. Edwin Alva is at the cen­ter of an incred­i­bly com­plex web of cor­rup­tion. My bene­fac­tor and role model, the eco­nomic sav­iour and human­i­tar­ian piller of the city of Dakota has con­nec­tions to orga­nized crime. He laun­ders tens of mil­lions of dol­lars in drug money, he has most of the city and state gov­ern­ment in is his pocket, he ille­gally man­u­fac­tures weapons and sells them to for­eign governments.”

Curt decided to stop Alva first by anony­mously send­ing “copies of evi­dence to the FBI, SEC, the state and local police, sev­eral news­pa­pers and, just for fun, Hard Copy and A Cur­rent Affair.” Then he waited a while for the fire­works, but learned that Alva was too big, beyond the reach of the law, so Cur­tis Met­calf then decided that maybe Alva wasn’t beyond his reach; so with Alva’s own equip­ment and resources, Curt cre­ated “Hard­ware — the High Tech Crea­ture of the Night, who’s been check­mat­ing Alva’s ille­gal oper­a­tions for the last ten months is, in a way Alva’s own cre­ation.“
So just about every night Curt dons a selec­tion of his many high tech gad­gets — (which he hides away in an aban­doned basement/bomb shel­ter, con­nected to Curt’s pri­vate lab by a old, sealed-off ele­va­tor shaft hid­den behind a huge bank of machin­ery that can be swung away from the wall like a door) to track down and destroy all of Alva’s ille­gal busi­ness oper­a­tions and Alva’s fac­to­ries where weapons of war are man­u­fac­tured. “This used to be a bomb shel­ter. Now it’s where I keep all the stuff I’ve scammed from Alva. He’s turned the city upside down look­ing for Hard­ware. I live in his basement.”

Amanda Blake Waller is a fic­tional char­ac­ter from the DC Uni­verse, first appear­ing in Leg­ends #1 in 1986.
Nick­named “the Wall”, she is a for­mer con­gres­sional aide and gov­ern­ment agent often placed in charge of the Sui­cide Squad, a semi-secret government-run group of for­mer supervil­lains work­ing in return for amnesty. She also was the for­mer leader (code rank: Queen) of the covert ops orga­ni­za­tion, Check­mate. She later served as Sec­re­tary of Metahu­man Affairs under Pres­i­dent Lex Luthor, before being arrested in the wake of Luthor’s pub­lic fall from grace.

The peo­ple most respon­si­ble for shap­ing the char­ac­ter in her ear­li­est appear­ances were John Ostran­der, Luke McDonell and Kim Yale in the pages of the first Sui­cide Squad series in the late 1980’s. Estab­lished as a wid­ower who escaped Chicago’s Cabrini Green hous­ing projects with her sur­viv­ing fam­ily after one of her daugh­ters and her hus­band were mur­dered, even­tu­ally becom­ing a con­gres­sional aide. Dur­ing that work, she dis­cov­ered the exis­tence of the first two incar­na­tions of the Squad. Tak­ing ele­ments from both of these, she pro­posed the devel­op­ment of its third incar­na­tion to the White House and was placed in charge upon its approval.

A ver­sion of this char­ac­ter has also appeared in the ani­mated tele­vi­sion show Jus­tice League Unlim­ited, voiced by actress CCH Pounder. This ver­sion leads the top secret Project Cad­mus, a group that was formed at the behest of the US gov­ern­ment to cre­ate a coun­ter­force to the Jus­tice League should they go rogue. To that end, the project cre­ates the Ulti­men. As detailed in “Ulti­ma­tum”, the Ulti­men is a team of arti­fi­cial super­hu­mans with implanted mem­o­ries, cre­ated to be loyal to the gov­ern­ment. In addi­tion, the project includes a clone of Super­girl named Galatea (effec­tively a dis­guised ver­sion of Power Girl), revealed in “Fear­ful Symmetry”.

When The Ques­tion dis­cov­ers the project and is cap­tured, Waller and Lex Luthor give orders Dr. Moon to run a full inter­ro­ga­tion on The Ques­tion which is inter­rupted by Super­man and the Huntress who res­cue him. Lex Luthor takes advan­tage of the inci­dent to momen­tar­ily hijack the League’s satel­lite head­quar­ters’ main energy can­non to fire on the now aban­doned Cad­mus base with mas­sive col­lat­eral dam­age to falsely impli­cate the League. While the gov­ern­ment inves­ti­gates the fir­ing, Waller decides to take action. It is revealed that Cad­mus cre­ated hun­dreds of clone copies of the Ulti­men team in order to attack the watch­tower; with Galatea lead­ing them, they mount a full offen­sive against League HQ, intend­ing to over­load the reac­tor and destroy the Watch­tower with the team on it. How­ever, when Bat­man presents evi­dence of Luthor’s decep­tion, Waller calls off the attack and releases the senior Lea­guers who had turned them­selves in as an act of good faith. With the lea­guers in tow, she per­son­ally goes to arrest Luthor and stops his attempt to trans­fer his con­scious­ness into a poten­tially invin­ci­ble copy of Amazo. It is revealed that Brainiac was in fact implanted within Luthor’s body, and the Jus­tice League is forced to defeat the two of them com­bined. Unknown to them dur­ing this bat­tle, Waller was ready­ing a mas­sive air strike to kill the com­bined vil­lains and the Lea­guers as well they should have failed to stop the men­ace. All this occurred in the four-part arc in the sec­ond sea­son, includ­ing the episodes “Ques­tion Author­ity”, “Flash­point”, “Panic in the Sky”, and “Divided We Fall”.

The final episode of JLU’s sec­ond sea­son is set fifty years past the cur­rent Jus­tice League time­line — years after even the events of the Bat­man Beyond series, as we see Bruce Wayne fur­ther dete­ri­o­rated and Terry McGin­nis an adult. In it, he dis­cov­ers that he is genet­i­cally related to Bruce Wayne; know­ing that the Cad­mus Project was the only group to have tech­nol­ogy advanced enough to alter DNA, he seeks out Waller to find out about his own ori­gins. She reveals some of the future of the Jus­tice League — at some point, the gov­ern­ment will appoint a lia­son with the League (a post Waller will fill for some time) and they will fight a recon­sti­tuted Royal Flush Gang, with Ace, from the Jus­tice League episode “Wild Cards”, lead­ing them. Waller also reveals that she was respon­si­ble for chang­ing Terry’s father’s genes; know­ing that Bat­man would never have chil­dren of his own, she used Cad­mus tech­nol­ogy to cre­ate a child with his DNA, so the world would not be with­out a Bat­man.
“Epi­logue” shows the com­plex­ity of the char­ac­ter; at the same time she is talk­ing about the world need­ing a hero like Bat­man and about her faith in God, she also calmly explains that her plan to ensure Terry became a new Bat­man was to have Terry’s par­ents mur­dered whilst he watched. The char­ac­ter is one step away from being a supervil­lain, yet her moti­va­tions — and even, per­haps, her actions — are under­stand­able to the viewer.