TED KORD: AN ILLUSTRATED BIOGRAPHY OF THE BLUE BEETLE #kryptonianepic
A Brief Summary Of The Entire “American Alien” Version Of The Character. Featuring art by Val Jean Zachary (@val_jean_zachary)
1 — LOCAL HERO
Raised by a single dad in the depressed factory town of Charlton, West Virginia, Theodore “Ted” Kord was first a nearly silent child, and then an invisible, socially awkward teen. Though he enjoyed puzzles and strategic games, Ted’s anxiety about engaging with other people, born from his father’s anger and resentment against the world, left him nearly totally alone.
This struggle with passivity and search for order and meaning led Ted into law enforcement, where Theodore’s natural shyness, bolstered by increasing bouts of depression and social anxiety isolated him from his peers. By 40, Ted was a six year veteran, a low ranking, perennially overlooked officer of the Bludhaven Police Department, where he’d been transferred after under performing at his first assignment in Metropolis.
A burgeoning addiction to pain-killers after a hip injury led into a slow downward spiral, and Ted’s life became a blur, his dingy apartment on the Lower East side lit all night by the blue neon lights outside. Ted had lost interest in everything, now, and usually went straight to bed upon arriving home and drank til he fell asleep.
But one night in August, Ted Kord would startlingly discovery that would forever change the course of his life, while investigating a routine noise complaint. The blur that had been his life snapped into sharp focus.
In the sublevel of an old brownstone, Ted discovered an old man, long dead and rotting after a stroke, his apartment showing all the signs of a slide into dementia. But when he clumsily disturbed the corpse, Kord accidentally uncovered a secret passage in the decrepit hoarder’s wretched apartment.
The passage led to a cramped chamber hidden within the building, holding within its claustrophobic walls an advanced engineering bay, a rusty home gym, and a garage literally covered in experimental technology. And beneath this, slightly flooded by the city’s sewer system, was an advanced prototype aircraft, currently home to a family of rats.
The old man, Dan Garret, it seemed, had once worked as a contract engineer for a subsidiary of Wayne Enterprises, and had become obsessed with a few of the top secret assignments he’d worked on there. Garret was fascinated with the eccentric armors and vehicles WayneTech’s CEO, Lucius Fox, had begun to demand.
But Garret’s arrogant, aggressive attitude sabotaged his career, and after completing a project for Wayne, he found himself suddenly blacklisted and unable to find work. But Garret wasn’t the type to quit so easily.
Wanting to further the designs, he worked alone in his spare time, designing a host of hundreds combat technologies he called“The Beetle Suite,” dedicating the last ten years of his life to the project.
Garret had died before he could ever don the advanced armor he’d designed; it had always been a pipe dream, a secret, somewhat delusional hobby for a frustrated, bitter old man.
Now, his body lay half eaten by his cats, his spectacular innovations sat covered in cobwebs, gathering dust and stinking of sewage, the rotting blueprints for a hero who would never exist…
Ted Kord was fascinated by the laboratory; an unambitious man who’d lived a below-average life, he grew to love the treasure trove of mysterious gadgets and eccentric weaponry, and kept the incredible place secret from his compatriots on the police force. Something was stirring to life in him, and he found himself revisiting this place, The Burrow, almost like a shrine.
As the months passed, the normally somber, stoic, over-weight Ted steadily found himself more and more consumed by a passion, a single minded drive, something blue shining in those lights every night.
But he wasn’t just going home and going to sleep. Not anymore.
Ted began to obsessively watch the archive of ancient CD-Roms the old man had created, detailing everything one would need to become a “super vigilante.” The Beetle technology focused on defense, stealth and diversion, and Ted Kord slowly trained himself, with the tapes and the internet, to become a sort of homespun master of surveillance and spycraft.
Shunning the bullying in the police gym to use the gear in his hideaway, Ted trained himself religiously every day, shedding pounds and studying hard, teaching himself to use the next-gen gadgets, operate the bulky and flawed “Beetle Armour,” and drive the shape-shifting, high speed hovercraft known only as “THE BUG.”
This secrecy turned out to be for the best when Ted Kord’s superior on the Bludhaven Police Force was replaced by a man named Dudley Soames.
The already faltering Internal Affairs Department was not prepared for a man like Soames, a nakedly corrupt monster who cut deals with criminals and deliberately sabotaged and openly harrassed other cops who wouldn’t capitulate to him.
His vulgar attitude was protected by a bargain he’d made with Roland “Blockbuster” Desmond, a vicious crime lord addicted to a gene-enhancing steroid. Terror of reprisal, lack of recourse, and a general sense of nihilism in the police force allowed Soames to work unabated.
The cops that wouldn’t go along were blackmailed. Those that couldn’t be blackmailed began to disappear, until nobody was left to fight back.
There was no crime in Bludhaven. Because now, the cops were the criminals. Ted Kord had found himself as a foot soldier in the fascist take over of an American city, with no friends, and no way out.
Graffiti began to adorn the streets: DON’T CALL 911.
And it was true. Because if you were in trouble, there was a chance the cops would just make it worse.
As pressure at work and at home worsened, Ted Kord fantasized regularly of using the Beetle Suit to enact justice on those he felt powerless against, but never lashed out.
It became a coping mechanism, as Ted retreated even further into himself. It was just a bizarre hobby, a strange secret obsession.
And yet, after he saw the flying, superhuman Metropolis-based vigilante “Superman” on television for the first time, it started to feel steadily more real.
The true turning point came when Gotham’s District Attorney Harvey Dent, a national celebrity and beloved figure, who was believed to have been murdered a year prior, reemerged in Gotham as the serial killer Two-Face. Dent’s month long killing spree left two dozen people dead, and the global media’s fascination with his rise and downfall became histrionic.
There was a growing paranoia about the rise of so-called “super heroes,” a comic book colloquialism that seemed to have grown startlingly real. A monster roamed loose in Gotham, a man flew through the sky in Metropolis, and rumors of costumed assassins and criminals had begun to spread rapidly over the past year.
Despite having no “powers,” Dent, or “Two-Face,” was the first ever publicly recognized “Super-Villain,” and Dudley Soames believed the fall of Dent and subsequent rise of Two Face represented a cultural turning point.
This, he thought, was the end of traditional law of order.
Dudley Soames was overjoyed.
His arrogance and cruelty grew to unbearable levels, and his corruption became ever more brazen, even assaulting the teenage son of Ted Kord’s police partner in front of a group of assembled cops, and later casually murdering a woman they’d picked up for drug possession when her incessant screaming irritated him.
Soames’ cocaine addiction was now bandied out in the open, and the Internal Affairs department was dissolved as Soames helped Blockbuster install his own corrupt police commissioner.
In the end, Dudley Soames was right about one thing. Dent’s disfiguration represented the end of “business as usual.”
Just not quite in the way Soames had anticipated.
Ted Kord had seen enough. Some people would say he “snapped,” but in reality, what happened was a metamorphosis, a final shedding of his old, miserable self in a cathartic burst of fire, as the “Bug” prototype ship launched for the first time, punching a hole in the clouds above Bludhaven.
Drunk, furious, and high on Oxycontin, Ted Kord impulsively used the futuristic Beetle technology to stage an attack Dudley Soames’ penthouse apartment. It was only meant to intimidate and frighten the corrupt police captain, but when Soames and his bodyguards returned fire, the entire building erupted into chaos.
As eyes on the streets looked on in awe, a full scale “super-hero fight” erupted in downtown Bludhaven.
The bulky Blue Beetle armor, emphasizing defense over offense, was almost impregnable to most forms of damage. This, combined with the near indestructible and untraceable Bug vehicle, turned Ted Kord from a mere cop to what was, in essence, a tank…driving a tank.
To conventional weapons, Kord was completely invincible.
But Ted had never been in so much as a fist fight, and in anarchy of his battle with Soames, accidentally murdered the vile dirty cop, sending him plummeting to his doom forty stories onto a balcony below.
Snapped out of his revenge mindset by the reality of the situation, Ted acted fast, raiding Soames’ condo and stealing his databases and computers. When the enraged crime lord Blockbuster attempted to strike back at whoever was responsible for Soames’ death, he found only bizarre witness reports of a living robot-tank flying a blue UFO.
Wrongly believing he was being attacked by the mysterious Gotham vigilante he’d seen on the news, a cannibalistic and inhuman monster called “The Batman,” Blockbuster turned his focus onto Gotham, trusting that his corrupt Bludhaven operation would run itself.
This was Blockbuster’s first mistake. It would not be his last. The Blue Beetle, for now, was invisible, a total mystery to his enemies.
This invisibility gave Ted Kord the opportunity to play out his masterstroke.
2 — BLUE BEETLE CRACKS DOWN CRIME!
Methodically, diligently, with the focus he had trained, Ted Kord worked his way through the officers on Soames’ database, either freeing them from blackmail schemes or, in some cases, concocting new forms of coercion himself.
Kord was determined to drain the swamp of the Bludhaven Police department, and began to feel more and more confident flexing the Blue Beetle arsenal to do it, even manipulating the system to draft good cops from other cities.
No one knew Ted. Yet Ted knew everyone. One cop at a time, Ted began to hunt out Soames’ legacy.
Kord’s chess game against Blockbuster was an incredibly tense, frightening four months for the men and women of the police department.
The Blue Beetle was able to quietly wreak havoc on the paranoid and mistrusting dirty cops, orchestrating confrontations and conspiracies between the more dangerous among them. Everyone suspected that everyone else was the Blue Beetle, but no one ever suspected Kord.
The cops who resisted would find themselves subject to nearly Shakespearean levels of blackmail and intrigue, as Ted, a man with little interest in the arts, flexed his imagination on entrapments, threats, and kidnappings.
A constructed mexican-stand-off between five corrupt police detectives turned into a massacre, and Kord found himself internally promoted. Now there were more eyes on him, yet Kord could not give up the game.
He was too close to achieving something. The feelings of hope that had eluded him his whole life now felt within his grasp, if he could just clear out the last of the filth Soames had spread all over the city.
There were close calls. These were shrewd, dangerous targets, and Ted learned hard lessons, more than once nearly being caught. But every time Ted’s plans failed him, he would reorganize, reexamine his tools, and try again.
Kord would arm every cop he flipped with a unique Blue Beetle Gadget, both ensuring their safety and creating the illusion of an army of Blue Beetles. This was bolstered when, to Ted’s shock, cops began to wear their unique gadgets openly. This public show of loyalty caught Ted off guard, and the remaining dirty cops were terrified.
In the space of a month, Ted Kord had gone from invisible to inevitable.
Though he never intentionally killed again, his attacks on corrupt officials and local criminal operations grew gradually less stealthy, heading more towards shock and awe as the Bug Ship would descend on targets in broad daylight.
In an uncharacteristic display of pure, brazen power, Kord flew the Bug through the Fourth of July fireworks over Gotham Bay, in plain sight of astonished crowds, and then buzzed the Bludhaven Thanksgiving Day Parade, both to raucous applause.
If you were still allied with Blockbuster at this point, it was only a matter of time before the inexplicable, unstoppable, hulking armor of the Beetle silently appeared behind you in your living room, or worse, dropped out of the sky during your wife’s morning run, or silently loomed over your teenager’s prom.
Yeah, they’re all high-fiving it and taking pictures. But why are you sweating?
Bludhaven’s reign of terror had been flipped onto those who had caused it. Ted Kord had never felt this alive.
They had awoken a sleeping giant.
Repeatedly caught on camera in the Blue Beetle armor, Kord anonymously rapidly drew massive media attention. Jimmy Olsen, an outsider-photojournalist for The Daily Planet news conglomerate, labelled Blue Beetle the world’s second-ever “super-hero.”
Olsen’s reporting on his time entrenched with the BPD became must-see TV.
At this point, the vast majority of the Bludhaven police force had been manipulated or coerced into being lawful police officers, and armed with non-lethal Blue Beetle technology. Morale on the force was high, even bringing old corrupt cops back into the fold, and there was an increasingly fierce loyalty to The Beetle, who was thought of as an almost god-like entity.
Conspiracies and superstitions ran rampant, but by the end of the year, Bludhaven’s Police Department, Sheriff’s Department and Highway Patrol were all under Beetle control.
Even though he identified staunchly as a political conservative, Ted Kord’s efforts had inadvertently turned him into a one-man police reform revolutionary, and the equivalent of a modern feudal Shogun. To his own surprise, Ted found himself as the chief of what essentially a warrior tribe, made up entirely of brave, loyal and law abiding cops.
With crime rates plummeting faster than Dudley Soames, the police instead were able to dedicate themselves to becoming a peace-keeping force, and as Dan Garret’s incredible technology rapidly spread to different infrastructure departments in Bludhaven, the formally seedy city was transforming from a grimy casualty of the economy to a glittering, green paradise.
This promise of safety and security didn’t just frustrate criminals, it also attracted unexpected positive attention for the city; celebrities and entertainers flocked to Bludhaven, and the Southside area neighborhoods of Port’s Park and Fort Joseph both rapidly filled with upscale dining and entertainment venues.
Among the people it attracted was a woman named Zatanna Zatara, an illusionist who had come from nowhere two months prior to rise to international fame. Her abrupt rise to the spotlight was bolstered by her claim that she could perform actual magic, and live performances dazzled crowds and stumped the internet.
With her arrival of course came press, paparazzi, tourists, and more celebrities. Bludhaven was booming.
Blockbuster was, understandably, furious.
His ingenious play to flip the police department had backfired at a level he could’ve never anticipated, and his hunt for Batman had come up dry. It was time to return to Bludhaven, and return loudly.
Realizing he’d completely lost control of the city, Blockbuster teamed with a disgraced Gotham Crime Lord called “The Penguin,” and launched a full on assault on Bludhaven on New Years Eve, driving into the city with forty five pick up trucks loaded with loyal soldiers, smashing storefronts, firebombing parks and shooting into buildings at random.
By 12:15, American history had been made. This was the largest act of civil destruction since the Tulsa Massacre in 1921. News outlets reported it as a riot growing out of control, but as the chaos continued it became clear this was an organized operation.
The Blue Beetle and the BPD responded, and collided all over the city with Blockbuster’s caravan of marauders. As Lois Lane, reporter for the Daily Planet, reported from a helicopter overhead, the world watched for the first time as the streets of an American City descended into open warfare.
Things took a shocking turn when the violence reached Zatanna Zatara’s performance space, which had already been locked down by the BPD. The celebrity ingenue shocked everyone present with an explosive display of actual magic, overwhelming and destroying Blockbuster’s assault before collapsing from exhaustion.
Blockbuster’s thugs scrambling retreated from the city, chased out not just by uniformed officers, but civilian citizenry armed with bats and improvised weapons. Bludhaven, it appeared, was stronger than Blockbuster.
Upon her recovery, Zatanna, who preferred to be called “Z,” explained that her abrupt rise to international fame earlier that year as a glamorous celebrity who seemed to appear from nowhere actually hid dark and complicated secrets from her past.
Ted, who had never had any family, found himself surprisingly moved by the young woman’s story, and reassured her that he would protect her. But for Zatanna, that wasn’t enough.
She wanted revenge on those who had attacked her performance.
Seeing Zatanna as his responsibility, Kord deputized the entertainer into the Bludhaven Sheriff’s department, and the two of them got to work. Together, Z and Blue Beetle decimated Blockbuster’s operation less than a week, using overpowering displays of magical and technological power that often led to their enemies surrendering without a fight.
After the Blue Beetle’s protege on the force, rookie beat cop Jaime Reyes, was able to arrest “The Penguin” after a chase through Bludhaven’s labyrinthian subway system, the stage was set for a final exorcism, a purging of Blockbuster’s influence from the city.
Roland Desmond, who believed his genetically enhanced strength could make him a ‘super-villain’ like those he’d seen in Gotham, attempted to confront The Blue Beetle in a physical battle to assert his dominance, trapping Ted into a fight with him atop the Bludhaven Tea Party monument in South Harbor.
This, had it worked, would have been bold. However, in failure, it was revealed as tragically stupid.
You don’t fist fight a tank.
With Blockbuster hospitalized and under arrest by the FBI, and his city scarred by the New Years Eve attack, it wasn’t long until Ted Kord was facing investigations from multiple law enforcement agencies. Unlike cryptic figures such as Superman and the Batman, The Blue Beetle was an easier, more visible target, and the United States Government set out to make an example of the mysterious man who had become known as the Baron Of Bludhaven.
But behind this was a different force; guiding the strike from the shadows, playing pieces like a chess match, was the much rumored creature from Gotham, “The Batman…” in reality the 55th richest man alive, billionaire playboy Bruce Wayne.
Wayne, a delusional, brilliant but mentally-ill authoritarian with billions of dollars and decades of training on his side, had been clandestinely enacting a ten year terror-war against criminals in his home city of Gotham, and had steadily begun to increase his influence to an international level.
It was research for Wayne’s clandestine “Dark Knight” project that had caused Dan Garret to slowly lose his mind and fall into obsession; after his attitude showed him to be a problem, Wayne quietly had Lucius Fox destroy the man’s career to protect Wayne’s secrets.
This kind of aberrant, self-destructive thinking was common to the Batman; the “crusade” was worth the casualties. As long as no one actually died.
Unlike Ted Kord, a childhood trauma had driven Wayne into the violent, extravagant behavior that was eventually masked into “justice” by his Batman persona. Though he refused to kill, the Batman’s brutal reign of terror in Gotham had traumatized not just criminals and serial killers, but also left average citizenry feeling unsafe, paranoid, and afraid to go out at night.
Every way in which Ted Kord and Bruce Wayne were alike was jaggedly juxtaposed by the ways in which they were different. Batman, too blinded by his own psychosis to see the obvious parallels and accept Ted as an ally, instead viewed Kord as an insane, obsessive vigilante, a self-aggrandizing anarchist who took the law into their own hands.
(The irony was lost on Batman.)
For Ted, however, The Batman represented just another criminal to be caught. Another violent, silent weirdo with a clownish gimmick, who thought their high-tech arsenal placed them above the law.
(The irony was lost on Ted, too.)
But the fuse was now lit on both ends.
3 — BLUE BEETLE SAVES THE STREETS!
After very narrowly evading capture by the Batman on a visit to Gotham that left Ted in his underwear frantically doggie-paddling in Gotham Harbor, the Blue Beetle successfully baited his powerful pursuer into Bludhaven proper.
Though Ted Kord would never know it, this night would come to represent one of the most stressful and difficult in Bruce Wayne’s entire time as “The Batman.”
Having recently brought on a new trainee to be his “Robin,” a kind of apprentice, The Batman found himself and his novice partner facing an entire city’s police force, sheriff’s department, fire department, paramedics, and even traffic cops, moving in a tightly coordinated way with total control of the city’s infrastructure.
Most shockingly, Batman discovered he’d arrived in a city in the midst of a massive street festival, The Blue Beetle having coordinated the event so people could watch and film his conflict with the caped vigilante, refusing to go quietly like the maniacs Batman normally hunted in Gotham.
The festival, celebrating the repairs to the city after the New Years Massacre, hid the fact that Ted had taken the opportunity to booby-trap the entirety of downtown. Batman’s intended quiet ambush of Blue Beetle instead led him into a parade, with a massive banner reading:
“BLUDHAVEN WELCOMES THE BATMAN OF GOTHAM CITY”
The mad vigilante found himself pursued by over three hundred police vehicles, fire trucks, and ambulances, six police and EMS helicopters, Zatanna Zatara, with her dazzling arsenal of magical powers, and finally Ted himself, first disguising The Bug as a cop car and then unveiling the sheer overwhelming might of the vehicle in a harrowing chase after Wayne’s own customized “Batmobile.”
The two vigilantes eventually clashed, and though Bruce Wayne’s Batman was undeniably better trained, better armed, and generally on another level than Ted’s self-taught, home-made Blue Beetle, the billionaire from Gotham simply couldn’t handle Ted’s overwhelming numbers and very literal army of allies.
As Jason Todd, The Batman’s new “Robin,” succinctly put it: “GET US OUT OF HERE, THIS WHOLE CITY IS A FUCKING HORNET’S NEST!”
Despite Batman’s ultimate escape, the gigantic amount of civilian, police and news media footage that was captured during the anarchy of Kord’s ambush effectively destroyed “The Batman” mystique. Batman had been revealed to the public not as an urban legend or a blood-thirsty monster, but rather as a human being in an insane costume.
This had been Ted’s real weapon against the Batman. As Ted put it, “You can’t fight a shadow. All you can do is shine a light.”
Bruce Wayne, already struggling with self doubt, isolation, and falling deeper into his paranoia, suddenly had much bigger problems to deal with than the “Superhero Cop” across the river. Stopping Blue Beetle was now deemed “low priority,” as a newly emerged criminal called “Bane” was made the singular focus of Batman’s obsessions.
Yet as Ted Kord left the mind of one billionaire, he entered the mind of another.
Lex Luthor, a massively wealthy businessman Kord had always admired, was suddenly on TV claiming that both Batman and Blue Beetle’s technology had been stolen years ago from his company, LexCorp. The richest man on Earth’s impassioned speech to “return law and order to the world” was yet another cultural turning point, as the burgeoning “super-hero” phenomenon became steadily more politicized.
Despite defeating Blockbuster and escaping Batman, Ted Kord was now in an even more dangerous position, still technically anonymous but now at the center of a national discussion as a result of his choices, and being asked publicly to surrender. Believing there was a chance Dan Garret actually did steal the Blue Beetle technology, Ted considered turning himself in.
But Zatanna passionately dissuaded him from this; she revealed a long and complicated history with Luthor, describing him as “the worst person on Earth” and “an inhuman homicidal monster.”
Luthor, Zatanna claimed, was secretly a power hungry sociopath and serial killer, a ruthless murderer who longed to be the most powerful person on the planet, and had kept her prisoner for a decade in search of unlocking the keys to her magical powers. She ran down a list of horrific tragedies Luthor had caused, and explained that his current fixation on the Beetle was most likely just an attempt to get to her.
Ted, though at first shocked at the contrast between Zatanna’s story and Luthor’s spotless public image, chose not to surrender.
For nearly two and a half years, Washington DC had had no idea how to deal with the developing situation in Bludhaven, a place that media outlets referred to interchangeably as a utopian paradise, a glamorous tourist destination, and a dangerous and lawless rogue nation ruled by a brutal robot in an invisible helicopter.
The United States government was between a rock and a hard place; to take back power in Bludhaven would now involve invading a US city with the National Guard and arresting in the neighborhood of 3,000 government employees who were, functionally, doing amazingly well at their jobs in the only city in the United States that unilaterally loved their police department.
As Gotham’s Police Commissioner James Gordon famously said, “It would be like invading Camelot and arresting the Knights of the Round Table.”
But now, Luthor’s money and political sway forced their hand.
The National Guard surrounded Bludhaven and attempted to blockade the city, only to immediately be met by massive protests by the embattled citizenry. The protests and counter protestors clashed at the National Guard line, causing chaos, as Blue Beetle’s loyal army of police valiantly struggled to keep the peace, even as they clashed with traditional officers from all other levels of US Law Enforcement.
This situation was a powderkeg, but all of that was a smokescreen for what was revealed to be Lex Luthor’s real operation: the devious kidnapping of Zatanna, the murder of Ted Kord, and the violent theft of all of The Blue Beetle technology.
While the infighting between police forces and protestors served as a distraction, Luthor, working clandestinely with the United States government, sent in a squad of the world’s best mercenaries to kill Ted and “reacquire” Zatanna. This interchangeable squad of assassins, known as Luthor’s “Suicide Squad,” attacked Zatanna and Ted at Zatanna’s rooms at the Grand Dixon Hotel.
Though they escaped, fleeing towards Ted’s brownstone, both of them were badly injured, the city was about to burn to the ground, and the Suicide squad was already regrouping to attack again.
Zatanna, losing blood from a gunshot to the stomach, was carried through the empty streets by Ted, as the sounds of rioting and violence echoed from the city’s edges.
Ted looked to the sky.
The dream was over, and all hope seemed lost.
4 — SUPERMAN: DO-IT-YOURSELF!
Under direct assault in Ted’s brownstone apartment building, Kord and Zatanna found themselves in an intimate, blood-splattered war of attrition against the world class assassins.
Highly trained, costumed killers with names like “Lady Shiva,” “Deadshot,” and “KGBEAST” were at a different level than anything Ted had encountered, and with Zatanna injured in a surprise attack, the two fled in desperation to Dan Garret’s secret chamber, The Burrow…
…Where they discovered another famous “Super-Criminal” named Edward Nigma, known publicly as “The Riddler,” waiting for them, along with a strange, enthusiastic but awkward man named Clark Kent.
Nigma explained that himself and Oliver Queen, yet another unusually active member of the global economy’s 1%, had secretly helped create a project called “The Society,” a loosely conflated group of “super-heroes” that could come together and help each other solve “the unique issues facing the modern world.”
Even under pressure of imminent death, Ted was unsure of this, thinking it sounded insane, and worse, socialist, and maybe even fascist, but Nigma appealed to him that it was very likely the only option left for the embattled Beetle.
The excitable stranger called Clark stepped forward and implored Beetle to consider joining him, promising he’d have a voice in whatever came next, and saying that he thought that the “Blue Beetle was just about the coolest thing in the world, I love what you’re doing man, it’s so cool, please do our team with us, it’ll be so fun, I swear!”
“Or they’ll kill you.” Nigma added.
“Sure or whatever.” Clark hurriedly tacked on. “No presh big guy.”
Seeing no other way out for Zatanna, who he’d come to love like a daughter, Ted reluctantly agreed.
No sooner had Ted accepted the offer than the man named Clark Kent startlingly revealed himself to be none other than the incredibly powerful, international phenomenon Superman, shocking Ted into silence. This was, after all, the individual whose altruism had initially inspired him to take back his police force, and in doing so, take back his life.
Ted was dumbstruck with awe.
Clark Kent, who in his job as a journalist had crossed paths several of the assassins currently blasting their way towards him in an attempt to murder a man he admired, confronted Luthor’s team and attempted to offer a peaceful solution. This failed.
Throughout his career as “Superman,” Clark Kent rarely killed, but the chaos in the city, potential for massive civilian casualties, and increasing violence between the various militarized forces was enough to force his hand.
When the assassin called “Deadshot” refused to surrender and ordered the Squad to begin killing everyone in the building, the still relatively inexperienced “Superman” was cornered into using lethal force.
The show of power terrified everyone present, eliminated four of the most dangerous assassins on Earth, and effectively quelled the riots in Bludhaven, with the both sides retreating.
Over the next two weeks, working with Zatanna and Riddler, Kent and Queen faked Ted’s death, destroying the lab, and giving his protege, Jaime Reyes, power in Bludhaven.
As the city disappeared in his rearview, Ted Kord wondered where this road would take him next.
Now part of Oliver Queen’s “Society” project, Lord often clashed with the other members due to his hard headed and occasionally stubborn and aggressive personality, lack of humor or intellectual curiosity, and occasionally his conservative politics. Oliver Queen, a handsome, effeminate and stylish ladies’ man and outspoken democratic socialist, was exactly the type of masculine presence that Kord felt intimidated and irritated by, and their initial dynamic was tense.
This was tested on a mission to recruit Arthur Curry, the “Aquaman,” that led the newly formed team first on a horrifying journey into madness, murder and mystery in a small town on the East Coast.
Uncovering shocking truths about the Aquaman’s past, their path stretched from Massachusetts to deep in the Arctic North, where terrifying secrets from a hidden history were revealed, and Ted Kord began to understand that his new friend “Superman” might be at the center of a much greater story…
…an epic 500 years in the making…
…But where did that leave him?
5 — THE SOCIETY: TOYMAN
Upon his safe return to America from the Arctic, Kord couldn’t help but feel a growing sense of remorse and directionlessness. He struggled with thoughts of his old, boring life, occasionally wishing to be a “normal person” again.
Kord, far from home, cut off from his family and friends, technically dead to the world, suffered a reemergence of his addictions to painkillers, and the return of his loneliness and depression as the “Society” awaited their first chance to prove themselves. Kord had just come from a situation in which he was a revered hero, who now felt small and insignificant within the new team, echoing his lifelong feelings of alienation and resentment.
But when shit finally hit the fan, Kord was instrumental in the Society’s first ever mission; the entirety of the island of O’ahu, Hawaii had been taken hostage by the techno-terrorist called “Toy-Man.” This cataclysmic event was an international incident, with the Chinese and the United States rapidly accelerating into conflict at a nuclear level as it became clear “Toy-Man” couldn’t be stopped in any conventional way.
Ted coordinated the team’s battle with the rogue technocrat’s army of androids, and was able to score them a memorably decisive and heroic victory in the bay of Honololu.
The new team’s televised defeat of the criminal and daring rescue of his hostages brought Blue Beetle’s name up on an international level, as well as more deeply intertwining them with Luthor, whose haunting madness was at long last revealed to Ted in person. “Toy-Man” had been a manipulated victim, and though they had no way to prove it, the society discovered Luthor himself was behind the mayhem in Hawaii.
But the big news for Bludhaven was: Blue Beetle isn’t dead. Parades. Fireworks.
And with that celebration came his final unmasking.
Kord, a man who’d lived a quiet life as a cop, and now lived a quiet life in hiding, again found world upended. For the good of his friends and city, Ted publicly gave over the role of leader in Bludhaven to the now much-beloved Detective Jaime Reyes, finally leaving the husk of old Officer Ted Kord behind and fully embracing his new life as the Blue Beetle.
As the only formally trained law enforcement officer on a team of a goofy reporter, an arrogant billionaire, a hotheaded refugee, a murderous mutant fugitive and an actual bonafide serial killer, Kord rapidly took on the role of group tactician. He shone within this role, and the initial interpersonal tension slowly dissipated.
As a year passed, the Society was able to non-violently stop genocides merely be arriving and making their presence known, end droughts and reverse natural disasters, contain man-made disasters and, in doing so, slowly became internationally beloved by nearly the entire population of Earth.
Ted again had purpose. He was…A super-hero. That was his literal job, now. And he had Queen Expense Account to prove it.
The public repeatedly called the team the “Super-Friends,” to Ted’s great chagrin and Clark’s delight, but as time passed, Ted came to realize that was exactly what they were.
His friendship with Clark Kent blossomed into a deep and rewarding friendship, and his relationships with the rest of the team grew closer as well, as their heroics inspired art, music, popular music, and shifted the global conversation.
Oliver began to find Ted’s common sense outlook totally invaluable, and though they never saw eye to eye, a deep respect was forged between the two very different men. Ted became a bit of a surrogate father to Oliver’s young son Connor, and the “Connor has two dads” jokes very rapidly turned from teasing to functional reality. Though they’d both like to deny it, Oliver and Ted had qualities the other envied, and from this envy grew respect and eventually a constantly-teasing but never cruel friendship.
Kord maintained a sense of healthy awe and distance regarding the post-human Arthur Curry, and never lost his father/daughter relationship with Zatanna, which only evolved grew further as Clark began to take it upon himself to train the occasionally reckless and rage-prone young woman to become a proper “superhero.”
Whereas Oliver called the group “a team,” and Clark called the group a “posse,” Kord always referred to The Society as “the project,” and this language spread to Z, Riddler and Aquaman.
Because for Ted, this new venture was simply an extension of the many long nights he’d spent alone, training in a claustrophobic basement lab. Unlike the other heroes, who had side jobs or their own mysteries to solve, this was the single great pursuit of his life.
Working to make the world a better place. For everyone.
On that, Ted had no politics.
6 — BATMAN : DEATHWISH
Kord again proved invaluable to the team when he was able to track and capture the Batman-inspired criminal Azrael, able to at last, spiritually, help end the legend of Batman, the dark mirror that had haunted him his whole career as a vigilante.
Ted found himself getting along better; their various adventures had bonded him with Clark, Ollie, Z and Eddie.
He could no longer consider these people simply team mates; they were family.
7 — SUPERMAN : FOR ALL MANKIND
This newfound camaraderie would be tested when Ted, along with the rest of the team, found himself under attack by Lex Luthor’s “Justice League.”
Luthor’s team, composed of manipulated or coerced super-humans Luthor had assembled under the auspices of “justice’ was far more powerful than the Justice Society, and Dick Grayson, Batman’s alienated former apprentice, urged Clark Kent and his team away from a disastrous direct confrontation.
Indeed, their one attempt at a stand up fight, in an ambush with Luthor’s mysterious super-soldier “The Wonder-Woman,” was an outright disaster, with the entire team nearly killed by a single individual. A fight against the whole team, it seemed, would not be an option.
Instead, Ted Kord, working together with the Riddler, engineered a series of stilted engagements, using guerrilla tactics to ambush members of the team individually and denying Luthor the direct, media-heavy confrontation he so desperately craved. One by one, The Society was able to dismantle Luthor’s “League of Heroes,” thanks in no small part to Ted’s machinations.
Things took a surprisingly-rare positive turn turn when self-serving, cowardly and conniving “superhero” Barry Allen, the vigilante called “The Flash,” sick of being under Luthor’s thumb and seeing a way out, responded to the Society’s pressure by publicly outing his own identity, and accusing Luthor of blackmail.
With no one left to protect him and at last, an actual criminal charge, the Society, along with the Metropolis Police department and a FBI task force, arrested Luthor at LexCorp’s headquarters in New Troy.
Ted cuffed Luthor himself, though Luthor never broke eye contact with Superman.
8 — THE SOCIETY : ENDANGERED SPECIES
Feeling better than he ever had in his life, Ted Kord was able to return to Bludhaven, though he allowed Jaime Reyes to stay on as the new Blue Beetle. Finally allowing himself to relax, Ted became increasingly interested in Dan Garret, the man whose legacy he had inherited. For the first time in years, Ted allowed himself a vacation, researching Dan’s family and eventually finding his daughter living in Metropolis.
Tracey Garret, a single mother up to her eyeballs in debt, was shocked to hear of her father’s genius. Dan, in life it seemed, had been a quiet, reclusive man…Not unlike Ted had been himself.
Soon, Ted and Tracey found that this serendipitous connection was more than a friendship, and the two fell in love. They married, and Ted finally left tattered his brownstone in Bludhaven, the building that had come to represent so many changes in his life.
He had no idea that elsewhere, a five hundred century saga of greed, insanity and murder that had killed billions was, piece by terrible piece, approaching its bloody climax.
9 — SUPERMAN : THE STARLIGHT EMPEROR
Ted Kord awoke one cold November morning to discover all electronic communications had gone dark and the world’s internet was in a global shutdown.
Venturing outside, Ted was aghast when he saw that the entirety of the sky in Earth’s western hemisphere was now dominated by the surface of a distorted, burning, hellish and hostile alien planet, lumbering into close orbit. The continental United States was cast into shadow, and Ted could feel that something unknowable was reaching its culmination.
As the National Guard and the United States military flooded the city, Ted saw the first pillar of smoke in the distance, and watched in numb horror and confusion as a skyscraper by the bay simply tumbled over, falling into the water, pushed down like a sandcastle.
Unable to use anything but his Beetle communicators, and spread all over the east coast, the Society frantically tried to organize a response to the apocalyptic cataclysm.
Rendezvousing with Clark Kent and Louis Lane in Metropolis’ Centennial Square, the panicked group moved with a large crowd of people to evacuate the city. Continuous, deafening sounds of destruction grew steadily closer, along with an awful bellowing noise that sounded almost like a roar. Ted, having called in the Bug to help evacuate, saw that Clark Kent intended to stay behind, floating out above the crowd in his civilian clothes to face the enigmatic onrushing horror.
Clark, who similarly had no idea what was going on, urged Ted to take Lois and go. Having just exposed his powers to a massive crowd, Clark had effectively ended the myth of Superman. Realizing the weight of this decision snapped Ted out of shock.
But before he rose again into the air, Ted grabbed his friend’s arm.
Ted Kord then spoke to Clark Kent for the last time, as something came crashing through a collapsing skyscraper on Moore Street.
“Clark, I love you, man. I love you. We’re all with you.”
After evacuating the core staff of the Daily Planet, Ted immediately returned to Metropolis in full armor, and was one of the legion of Earth’s super-humans who assisted in the battle with the mysterious, monstrous and nearly invincible creature, which seemed to have appeared from nowhere with the simple goal to kill as many as possible.
Though the Bug was badly damaged and his armor was destroyed, Ted Kord survived his encounter with the rampaging genocidal monster unscathed, and was the first to send off flares when friend Clark Kent defeated the creature…at the cost of his own life.
The first to uncover Clark’s mangled, nightmarish smoking corpse, Ted’s mind was reeling. Superman was dead, and it appeared the world was ending.
As a hostile alien planet continued to blot out the sun, Ted stood among wreckage, looking at a scale of peace-time destruction unprecedented in human history. While many combatants went into shock or had been injured or killed in the battle, Ted, reliable as ever, kept a cool head, coordinating with Batman’s former apprentice Dick Grayson to finish evacuating the city.
Clark Kent’s corpse blossomed strange alien flowers all over it, and Lois Lane, normally calm and even-tempered, was manic and disassociating. She began to insist there was a chance Clark was still alive. Clutching on to any hope there was still potentially a chance to save his friend, Ted gave an emotional goodbye to his wife, and used the Bug to fly a small close-knit group north….
…To the frozen wasteland they had visited years ago…
What they found there was again more of a larger story, already in motion. The humans, exhausted and traumatized by their battle in Metropolis, discovered that there had already been a series of betrayals in the icy domain, leading to the release of a psychopathic alien criminal.
Ambushing the weary group at the entrance to a long abandoned alien crypt, the creature was able to kill one of Clark Kent’s closest friends, before Ted, now armed only with a double barrel shotgun, injured and then chased the devious extraterrestrial through pitch black, icy tunnels, giving the rest of the group enough time to get to safety, even as they were forced further into the labyrinth.
He confronted the creature at a communications console, where it attempted to ask for mercy, showing the words:
HELP ME. I CAN SAVE PLANET.
To which Ted had only one response.
The wounded creature fled out into the blizzard, the lethal, frostbitten winds of the arctic. Ted had no proper cold whether gear, but he knew leaving this unfinished would risk the monster getting back inside…
And so for the last time Ted ventured out into the night in search of a criminal. Blinded, freezing and terrified, Ted gave one last call to Zatanna Zatara, simply telling her he loved her and was proud of her.
Moments before his death, Kord realized the creature had gotten behind him, and turned to face the alien.
With no knowledge of its deeper origins or goals, Ted understood the creature only as the killer of one of his closest friends.
“You won’t win. Whatever you’re doing, you won’t win.”
The alien murdered Ted Kord outside the Fortress of Solitude, with a blast that reduced the hero to a ghastly red stain on the snow. Ted would never know the fate of the Earth, but died doing the one thing that had driven so much of his life:
Protecting his friends.
While driving Clark Kent home one night years earlier, Ted had accidentally articulated the heartfelt belief that drove so much of his life.
“Small worlds are worth saving too.”
Ted Kord was survived by his wife, Tracey Kord, and his son, Daniel.
If you are concerned about the fate of Planet Earth, please subscribe to my youtube channel, where The #KryptonianEpic will be told in its entirety. I’m Uptomyknees.
Thank you for reading.
