The Blue Beetle

One of the first heroes to chase Superman onto the newsstand, the Blue Beetle debuted in Fox Feature Syndicate's Mystery Men Comics #1 in 1939. In his original form he was Dan Garret, a rookie police officer who donned a costume to fight crime beyond the reach of the law. The character caught on quickly, graduating to his own long-running title and even a radio serial, making him one of the more successful of the early second-tier heroes. The Fox version's costume and gadgetry evolved over the years, but its origins lie squarely in the frantic post-Superman gold rush, when a publisher could turn a masked crimefighter around in a matter of weeks. Because Fox's comics lapsed into the public domain, the original Blue Beetle is now freely available — and the character's name and concept were later picked up and reinvented by other publishers in wholly separate continuities. He stands here as a representative of an entire vanished tier of costumed heroes: popular in his day, then largely forgotten, and now open to anyone who wants to revive him.