With Blue Beetle set to do nobody’s-quite-sure-what at the box office — either exceed every expectation or crash and burn spectacularly, with seemingly no room for a middle ground in the opinions of social media users — comic book movie fans are familiarizing themselves with the character’s relatively short history. The iteration of Blue Beetle featured in the movie is a character named Jaime Reyes, and he only popped up in the DC Universe back in 2006 as the third(ish) character to carry the Scarab — and the first to do so in a heavy-metal sci-fi Mega-Man-laser-blasts-and-buster-swords kind of way.
The Reyes Blue Beetle hit the page user-ready and avoided so many of the growing pains experienced by many new heroes, and that wasn’t by accident. It was thanks to veteran comic book writer and artist Keith Giffen, who came up with Reyes with the help of Leverage co-creator John Rogers.
Giffen is probably the least celebrated comic book creator that you’ve ever owed a “thank you” card to. He’s responsible (or co-responsible) for the creation of Rocket Raccoon, Maxwell Lord, and Lobo, among dozens of others, and the work he did to reimagine B-listers like Booster Gold and the Blue Beetle that preceded Reyes changed the course of comic book history. In 1982, 24 years before introducing the world to Jaime Reyes, he gave readers another bug-based super guy — a character a decade and change ahead of his time, who has experienced a bizarrely short list of expensive on-screen adaptations considering that it’s 2023 now and Madame Web is getting her own movie.
This man, this bug
Ambush Bug, also known as “Irwin Schwab,” also known as “probably something else actually, he’s a notoriously unreliable narrator,” is a sometimes-villain, sometimes-hero, most-times-neutral character who’s been doing the Deadpool schtick since before there was a Deadpool. Powers include teleporting, super-awareness that he’s a comic book character, and not being able to take his suit off. Weaknesses include most things and his love of cheap American beer.
Ambush Bug hit the pages of DC Comics Presents back in 1982. The concept, according to Giffen, was a self-aware Bugs Bunny type, using cartoon mayhem as a force for evil. The character evolved pretty quickly into a Howard the Duck type — an outlandish character with landish outlooks, trapped behind a fourth wall that only he could see through. Less likely to start a fight than he was to pull up a lawn chair and watch one, he was all of us: an oddball with too much superhero trivia in his head, offering color commentary as his life ticked by, panel by panel.
Bug’s stories got more and more bizarre. Putting aside the origin story in which a clotheshorse on a dying planet launched his wardrobe to Earth in order to save it, inadvertently giving rise to an evil argyle sock in the process, our hero would adopt a kid sidekick who was actually just a doll that he’d dress up in costumes. He’d introduce an anime version of himself, only to see him devoured by kaiju. His limited series, Son of Ambush Bug, remains one of the funniest, most innovative pieces of writing in the history of the medium.
In his 40-plus-year history, and despite his popularity with us, the most annoying kinds of fans, Ambush Bug has made an astonishingly small number of appearances on screen. The best use of the character outside of the comics to date was in the series finale of Batman: Brave and the Bold, in which Ambush Bug tries to stop Batman from jumping the shark. He’s voiced by Henry Winkler. It is perfect.
Aside from that, though? A.B. mostly pops up as a quick and easy bone thrown to DC nerds. He hangs around in DC Universe Online and the first Lego Batman video game, and you can make him appear in Scribblenauts Unmasked. To be fair, you can make Elongated Man and Bat-Cow appear in Scribblenauts Unmasked, too. It was sort of a completionist’s nightmare.
Still, it doesn’t cost anything to dream, and fans of Ambush Bug have already pointed out that he’d be a great fit for fresh-faced DC Studios head James Gunn’s sensibilities. Could a new age be upon us? An Ambush Bug renaissance? And more importantly, can we get Fonzie back to do the voice?