Michael Holt

A self-made man and Olympic-level athlete, Michael Holt channeled his extraordinary intellect into becoming the superhero Mister Terrific — the third-smartest person on Earth — using advanced T-spheres and his own genius rather than any superhuman power.

Few characters capture the spirit of DC's late-'90s renaissance quite like Michael Holt, who stepped onto the scene in 1998's The Spectre #62, brought to life by the celebrated team of John Ostrander and Tom Mandrake. Over nearly three decades of publishing history, he's proven himself a genuine fixture of the DC Universe, racking up 78 catalog appearances across landmark titles like JSA, Detective Comics, and Batman — sharing pages with heavyweights like Superman, Batman, and Robin along the way. Four of those appearances carry key-issue status, a testament to how meaningfully he's shaped the stories around him. If you're tracing the modern evolution of DC heroism from the Copper Age forward, Michael Holt is absolutely a name worth having on your pull list.