Guide to Batman: The Brave and the Bold - The Outsiders (Metamorpho, Black Lightning, and Katana)

by Max Doomsday

The B&B episode "Enter the Outsiders!" (which you can find on the new DVD set, on sale now) introduced audiences to three troubled, super-powered teenagers: multicolored shapeshifter Metamorpho; angry, electrically-charged Black Lightning; and silent samurai Katana.

Viewing themselves as misfits and rejects, these three banded together as a team of supervillains called the Outsiders, working in the service of a sewer-dwelling creature called Slug. But in the end, Batman and guest star Wildcat (who I'll profile next time) turned the Outsiders to the side of the angels. In fact, the trio returned in a recent episode of B&B, where Batman had to rescue them from a creep called the Psycho Pirate.

By the way, I've learned that Cartoon Network is now airing B&B on Saturday night, rather than in the wee hours of Saturday morning. Well congratulations, CN. You've figured out that if you have a show starring a beloved pop icon, maybe you should broadcast it at an hour when people are actually awake to see it. You pass TV Programming 101.

Anyway, as we're going to see, the animated Outsiders bear little resemblance to their DC Comics counterparts. Just for starters, Metamorpho, Black Lightning, and Katana aren't teenagers. They were never supervillains and, as far as I know, they've never had any affiliation with anybody named Slug.

Slug is not a character found in comics, though it appears he was based on a very minor Superman villain called Sleez, an alien with psychic powers who was exiled from the planet Apokolips and reduced to living in the Metropolis sewers. In an infamous 1987 story by writer/artist John Byrne (because I feel it's important to identify the guilty parties!) Sleez tried to force a brainwashed Man of Steel to act in a porn film. Needless to say, it was not a high point in Superman's publishing history. (And I'm not making any of this up!)

But let's get back to the Outsiders. The team's history begins in 1983, a time when DC had a real problem with what to do about Batman. Readers' polls showed he was one of their most popular characters, but sales on his titles were consistently poor. One of those underperforming titles was The Brave and the Bold, the very book on which the animated series is based. (I discussed that book's long history here.)

DC decided to cancel the B&B comic and launch a new Batman book with the creative team of Mike W. Barr, who'd written a lot of the final B&B issues, and the late Jim Aparo, who'd been the primary artist on B&B during the previous decade.
One of DC's hottest titles at the time was New Teen Titans, about a superhero team with a roster mixing familiar faces like Robin and Wonder Girl with new, angsty characters like Cyborg and Raven. Two other popular, teen-centric titles, DC's own Legion of Super-Heroes and Marvel Comics' Uncanny X-Men, had similar lineups.

DC thought lightning might strike again in a new team book with Batman at the helm. So, in keeping with the "formula" of books like New Teen Titans, Barr and Aparo put together a group that included both established characters and new creations of their own, with a couple of teens thrown in for good measure. The result was Batman and the Outsiders.

Here's how it went down.

A violent revolution broke out in the fictional European nation of Markovia. Lucius Fox, the head of Wayne Enterprises (a.k.a. Morgan Freeman in The Dark Knight), just happened to be in the country on business when the shooting started. He went missing. So Batman summoned the Justice League to go in and rescue him.

The thing is, the Justice League doesn't get involved in wars. At least, not conventional wars. They'll stop an alien attack or an invasion by the mole men living below the Earth's surface, but they generally steer clear of international conflicts and other touchy political subjects. This is generally true of all mainstream comic book superheroes, and I think we can see why.

If superheroes started involving themselves in fictional wars, readers might start expecting writers to address why these same superheroes don't get involved in actual wars. Why doesn't Superman look for WMDs in Iraq or track down Osama bin Laden? It should only take him a few seconds, scanning the Mideast at super-speed with his telescopic x-ray vision. Hell, he could do that from his office at the Daily Planet!

But if he did that, it would destroy any suspension of disbelief. Comic book publishers sidestep the issue by keeping superheroes out of war and politics entirely (except, of course, in allegorical stories). The Watchmen subplot about Dr. Manhattan's incursion into Vietnam was partly writer Alan Moore's comment on the tradition of keeping superheroes out of real-world international affairs.

So when Batman decided the Justice League should go charging into Markovia, he was breaking the rules. He was asking them to take the unprecedented step of invading a sovereign nation to end a war - all so he could look for a missing employee. But things didn't go the way he planned.

Superman had been on the phone with the State Department and assured them the Justice League wouldn't get involved in the Markovian crisis. Why the phone call was even necessary, given the League's history of non-intervention, was not explained. Superman declared Markovia off-limits to Justice Leaguers - though, not being the team's leader, he didn't actually have the authority to make that stick. Nevertheless, everyone seemed willing to go along with it. Everyone except Batman, who threw a tantrum and quit the team.

After storming out of the Justice League meeting, Batman went into Markovia himself. He took along Black Lightning, who'd been dwelling in the background of the DC Universe since his own title was cancelled back in the late '70s.

Apparently, Markovia was the site of some kind of swap meet for aspiring superheroes. In quick succession, Batman and Black Lightning encountered Metamorpho (a perennial B-lister dating back to the '60s) and three newbies created by Barr and Aparo, each of whom just happened to be in Markovia at the time for their own reasons. These were Geo-Force, a young Markovian prince granted superhuman powers by a scientific experiment; Halo, an American amnesiac who exhibited an array of light-based abilities; and Katana, a Japanese martial artist in possession of a mystic sword.

Batman and his ad hoc team quickly ended the hostilities and restored the government of Markovia - which was a monarchy, by the way, so ... good job? Then Batman decided to take them all back to Gotham and train them as his personal strike force. Ostensibly, they were called the Outsiders because they'd take on the kind of jobs that mainstream groups like the Justice League wouldn't handle. But in practice, the Outsiders became a pretty standard superhero team. But before I get into that, let's have a look at the individual team members.

METAMORPHO

As I mentioned, the Outsiders was a mix of established veterans and new characters. Representing the old guard, in addition to Batman, himself, were Black Lightning and Metamorpho. That was a clever bit of casting, as Batman formed the Outsiders after quitting the Justice League, and Black Lightning and Metamorpho had previously turned down Justice League membership.

Metamorpho said "no" to the Justice League in a 1966 story called "Metamorpho Says No!" The reason was simple. He didn't want to be a superhero.

Metamorpho started out as Rex Mason, a self-described "soldier of fortune." In practice, he was sort of like Indiana Jones, only without the advanced degrees or the teaching gig. While graverobbing in Egypt, Mason was exposed to the rays of an alien artifact called the Orb of Ra, which gave him the ability to transmute himself into any element found in the human body, be it solid, liquid, or gas. In his solid form, he also has limited shapeshifting abilities. He can transform his body - or any part of it - into just about any shape or object he can think of, even complex machines.

But what he cannot do is make himself look like a normal human being. The exposure to the Orb of Ra left him a bald, multicolored freak.

Metamorpho debuted in a 1964 issue of The Brave and the Bold. After a two-issue "tryout," he graduated to his own series, which lasted from '65 to '68. The series, with its wacky adventures and decidedly campy tone, was almost a parody of the conventional superhero comics published at the time.

Personality-wise, Metamorpho follows in the vein of the Fantastic Four's Ben Grimm. He's gruff and good-natured, but views his condition as a curse and is forever in search of a cure.

And that's just how he happened to be in Markovia at the beginning of Batman and the Outsiders. He hoped the country's leading scientist, a certain Dr. Jace, could return him to normal old Rex Mason. Batman convinced him to work with the Outsiders while he waited for Jace to get to work on the problem.

Metamorpho brought with him the baggage from his personal life. He was desperately in love with Sapphire Stagg, the airhead daughter of shady industrialist (and Metamorpho's sometime-employer), Simon Stagg. The elder Stagg was none-too-happy about Metamorpho's designs on his daughter, and went to some pretty nefarious lengths to get him out of the way. To complicate matters further, Simon Stagg's bodyguard, a dimwitted, defrosted caveman named Java, wanted Sapphire for himself. All this made for a somewhat hostile domestic life, a situation that was largely played for laughs in Metamorpho's series.

Metamorpho and Sapphire Stagg finally married in the pages of Batman and the Outsiders, in 1985. As with most comic book nuptials, the wedding was interrupted by supervillains. But it all worked out in the end.

BLACK LIGHTNING

Black Lightning arrived on the scene in 1977, and was one of DC's first black superheroes. (Back in those days, a lot of African-American comic book characters had the world "black" in their names. Were publishers afraid the readers would get confused?)

Black Lightning was almost called Black Bomber. The original idea was a sort of Jekyll-Hyde character: a white racist who would transform, Hulk-style, into a black superhero. This seems like an appropriate place for one of my customary sarcastic remarks. But instead, I'm going to defer to Don Markstein, author of the massive comics and animation database Toonopedia, who described the Black Bomber concept as "an insult to practically everybody with any point of view at all."

DC brought in writer Tony Isabella, who'd previously worked on two of Marvel's black superheroes, Luke Cage and Black Goliath. Isabella threw out the Black Bomber idea and came up with his own creation, Black Lightning. The character starred in a short-lived series from 1977 to '78.

Black Lightning is Jefferson Pierce, a high school teacher and former Olympic athlete who, like many a blaxploitation hero of the era, decided to clean up his crime-infested old neighborhood. In his case, the neighborhood was Metropolis' "Suicide Slum."

Black Lightning had the ability to generate an electromagnetic force field around himself and to hurl bolts of electricity. This was originally attributed to a belt created by Pierce's inventor friend, but later writers forgot about the belt. Black Lightning's electrical powers have since been retconned into a mutant ability he was born with.

Black Lightning's opportunity to join the Justice League came about a year after his series was cancelled. The team's resident liberal hothead, Green Arrow (who I profiled here) decided the all-white Justice League needed a dose of Affirmative Action. He literally demanded that the League induct Black Lightning.

Although that wasn't how the Justice League's membership decisions were made, Green Arrow's teammates decided to humor him by putting Black Lightning through a test. Several Justice Leaguers dressed up like supervillains and attacked Black Lightning one by one, to see how he handled himself.

I want to mention here that the Justice League had never done this sort of thing for any other potential member. And I'm sure that racism had absolutely nothing to do with this unprecedented behavior on their part!

Ultimately, Black Lightning was offered Justice League membership and turned it down. Under the circumstances, I wouldn't have wanted anything to do with those people, either! But the reasons Black Lightning gave were that he was a loner and felt his place was in the Suicide Slum.

Four years later, Black Lightning accepted Batman's invitation to accompany him on the mission to Markovia that resulted in the formation of the Outsiders. Black Lightning not only joined the team, but relocated from Metropolis to Gotham. What had changed?

Well, as we learned in the pages of Batman and the Outsiders, Black Lightning had retired from superhero-ing after an innocent bystander - a teenaged girl - was killed by a criminal he was attempting to apprehend. Black Lightning blamed himself for her death, and his guilt caused him to psychosomatically "lose" his electrical superpowers.

Black Lightning recovered his powers after a pep talk from Batman, and ended up agreeing to join the Outsiders. So he came to the team looking for a fresh start, and maybe a little redemption.

The parents of the girl Black Lightning "killed" eventually forgave him for his role in her death, once they learned he was genuinely remorseful. Of course, that was only after they hired a gang of supervillains to kill him.

That's just how these things play out in the world of comics!

KATANA.

Of the three characters Mike W. Barr and Jim Aparo originally created for the Outsiders, only Katana has broken out of comics and into animation. In Batman: The Brave and the Bold, she's portrayed as a laconic young martial artist who witnessed her sensei's murder at the hands of a rival - a typical kung-fu movie trope. As we'll see, the animated Katana bears little resemblance to her comic book counterpart.

Katana is Tatsu Yamashiro. While she was a young woman in Japan, two martial artist brothers named Maseo and Takeo vied for her affections. She married Maseo, and Takeo responded to the rejection by running off to join the Yakuza. Years later, he returned and killed his brother with the Soultaker, a mystical sword which - as the name suggests - captures the soul of anyone who is killed with it. Tatsu, quite the martial artist in her own right, chased off Takeo and acquired the Soultaker for herself. During the struggle, however, flames consumed the home of Maseo and Tatsu, killing their twin children.

Tatsu swore revenge and adopted the masked identity of Katana. One of her targets was the man who gave Takeo the Soultaker sword in the first place, a certain General Karnz. She tracked him to Markovia, and it was there she was recruited by Batman for the Outsiders. Oh, and don't worry, she caught up with Takeo eventually, too.

Initially, Katana was bitter, cold, and secretive. She struggled to fit in with the Outsiders, but eventually warmed up to her teammates and became a maternal figure to the youngest member, Halo.

Unlike most mainstream superheroes, Katana has no aversion to killing an opponent, especially when carrying out a private vendetta. Batman didn't seem to mind - which was strange, given the decades' worth of stories establishing that Batman was reluctant to take a life under any circumstances.

GEO-FORCE.

During the chaos in Markovia, the country's teen prince, Brion, volunteered for an experiment in which a scientist named Dr. Jace imbued him with "earth-based" superpowers. In addition to the standard superhuman strength and endurance, Brion can increase or decrease gravity and release destructive energy from his hands, which he calls "lava blasts." By combining his gravity powers with these "lava blasts," he can propel himself through the air. In recent years, he's also acquired a power the comics call "earth manipulation" - basically, a telekinetic ability to make rocks, boulders, and chunks of dirt fly around at his command.

Dubbing himself Geo-Force, Brion helped rout the bad guys who'd taken over his kingdom. Afterwards, he joined the Outsiders, hoping Batman could teach him how to use his newfound abilities. (He's the one in the ugly, two-tone brown uniform.)

Geo-Force relocated to Gotham, enrolled in college, started dating a boring American named Denise Howard, and had to adapt to living in a place where people didn't grovel at his feet. He was something of a hothead, and often questioned Batman's orders.

After Mike W. Barr and Jim Aparo created Geo-Force, they learned the creative team on New Teen Titans was about to introduce a new character with "earth-based" superpowers named Terra. Rather than just scrap Geo-Force entirely, or introduce two similar superheroes in two separate books several months apart, the people at DC decided to give the two new characters a personal connection. Terra would be Tara Markov, the illegitimate half-sister of Geo-Force who'd been raised in America to avoid a court scandal back home. Their similar powers were chalked up to having something to do with their royal ancestry.

If you watched that Teen Titans series that ran on Cartoon Network a few years ago, then you know that Terra's association with the Titans ended badly. Geo-Force later distanced himself from Terra by wearing a new outfit with a different color scheme.

Because in superhero comics, you deal with personal tragedy by buying new spandex! To be fair, though, the costume change was an improvement.

HALO.

When Batman arrived in Markovia, he found a teenaged American girl wandering around with amnesia, but exhibiting an array of superhuman abilities. She could fly, fire blasts of energy, levitate objects, and create optical effects. Each power was accompanied by an aura of light that appeared around her body, and the color varied according to which power she was using. For this reason, she took the code name "Halo."

With nowhere else to go, Halo joined the Outsiders and followed Batman to Gotham, where she enrolled in high school under the name "Gabrielle Doe." Batman eventually uncovered her true identity. She was Violet Harper, a juvenile delinquent who double-crossed a crime lord named Tobias Whale (coincidently, an old enemy of Black Lightning). Whale sent an assassin after Harper. The assassin caught up with her in Markovia (of all places!), attacked her, and left her for dead.

At that point, an interdimensional creature of pure light called an "Aurakle," who was curious about human life, entered Harper's body. Harper recovered from her injuries, but the experience of merging with the Aurakle erased both their memories and gave Harper a new, annoyingly sweet and naïve personality. Her superpowers were attributed to her "possession" by the Aurakle.

After learning the full facts about her origins, Halo briefly left the Outsiders and got mixed up in a cult run by the supervillain Kobra (no relation). After Kobra was exposed, Halo returned to the fold. She cut off all her hair, and that seemed to make things all better.

* * *

Once the Outsiders were assembled, Batman brought them home to Gotham, where he used his money and connections as Bruce Wayne to set them all up with new lives. But Batman didn't trust his new teammates with his secret identity just yet, so he told them Wayne was the guy who financed his war on crime.

Here we have a man who's supposedly spent his life protecting his secrets from criminal masterminds like The Penguin and The Riddler, and the best he could come up with was, "I'm not Bruce Wayne! I just take his money ... and live in a cave under his house ... and order his butler around ... and have unlimited access to all his stuff. But that doesn't mean we're the same person!" Kind of defeats the purpose of maintaining a dual identity if you implicate yourself in your own cover story, doesn't it?

Although the Scooby-Doo gang would've seen through this ruse in under half an hour, Batman managed to keep the Outsiders in the dark for a whole year. And when he finally did let them in on the truth, they were actually surprised to learn that he and Wayne were the same guy. Not exactly a promising sign for a group of aspiring crimefighters.

Batman was hardly the ideal leader and mentor for this band of loners and amateurs. You ever see that movie where the underdog football team overcomes adversity and wins the championship? You know the one I mean. Hollywood remakes it every single year. Sometimes, it's a basketball team or a hockey team, but it's always the same story. And in this movie, there's always a wise, fatherly coach who inspires the players, right? Yeah. That wasn't Batman.

In the pages of Batman and the Outsiders, the Dark Knight was a stern, demanding tyrant. He could be moody, deceitful, stubborn, and outright disrespectful. He made questionable decisions and displayed an astounding capacity for self-rationalization (such as when he threw a temper tantrum and quit the Justice League, just prior to forming the Outsiders). In other words, he was a real asshole.

Some of you read that last paragraph and thought, "Yep, sounds like Batman!" That is how most comic book writers have portrayed him during the last twenty-odd years. But that wasn't how the Caped Crusader was normally portrayed in 1983, when the Outsiders made their debut. In those days, he was a lot more well-adjusted and personable.

Mike W. Barr figured a billionaire who dressed like a bat to beat up criminals every night would probably be a little messed up in the head. His version of Batman was angry, deeply-flawed, and lacking in some basic social skills - not unlike Wolverine, Judge Dredd, and other anti-heroes who were becoming popular in comics at that time. Barr's Batman was also a bit more violent than readers were accustomed to. While not an out-and-out killer, he was more accepting of the use of lethal force than in traditional portrayals of the character. This version of Batman was on display each month in Batman and the Outsiders, and I think that had a lot to do with the book's success.

Now here's the part you're not going to read anywhere else.

In 1986, Frank Miller wrote The Dark Knight Returns, a mini-series that revolutionized the way Batman would be portrayed from then on, paved the way for the 1989 movie and all that followed, and, along with Watchmen, ushered in the "grim 'n' gritty" era in comics.

Pop culture historians will tell you that Frank Miller essentially "created" the modern Batman. But Miller's version of Batman in The Dark Knight Returns was just an older, crankier version of Barr's Batman.

Today, Frank Miller gets to appear in documentaries where he boasts that he "gave Batman his balls back," and Mike W. Barr has largely been forgotten. His contribution to the Caped Crusader's history has never properly been recognized.

To be fair to Miller, though, Barr never wrote anything as epic or influential as The Dark Knight Returns or Miller's follow-up, Batman: Year One. Barr did write some great Batman stories during the '80s - including the first Batman "graphic novel," Son of the Demon, in 1987 - but his Outsiders stories were not his best work.

As I've said, Batman and the Outsiders was DC Comics' attempt to replicate the success of popular books like New Teen Titans and Marvel Comics' Uncanny X-Men. These were comic books that presented the superhero team as a sort of dysfunctional family, and tended to be a little melodramatic. That sort of superhero soap opera did not fit Barr's strengths as a writer. Batman and the Outsiders sometimes read almost like a parody of New Teen Titans.

It didn't help that the villains Barr devised with Jim Aparo were not only uninspiring, but often tongue-in-cheek. There was Baron Bedlam, a generic would-be conqueror - more a plot device than an actual character; the Masters of Disaster, a team of conflicted baddies whose powers were based on the four elements; a group of patriotic-themed fascists called the Force of July; the Duke of Oil, a cyborg J.R. Ewing; and the Nuclear Family, a twisted, atomic-powered take on Father Knows Best.

But the biggest problem with the Outsiders was that, aside from Batman, they just weren't all that interesting. Making matters worse, a lot of story arcs in Batman and the Outsiders focused on an individual teammate's personal problems, like figuring out Halo's true identity or resolving Katana's family vendetta. Batman liked to claim that the Outsiders existed to tackle problems the Justice League refused to handle, but the team seemed to function more like a mutual aid society for its members - which would be fine, if not for the fact that the team members and their personal baggage just weren't very compelling.

Despite its shortcomings, Batman and the Outsiders was deemed successful enough by the people at DC to warrant an upgrade.

Until that time, most American comics were printed on cheap, pulpy, newsprint-quality paper, and were mostly sold on newsstands. The early '80s saw the rise of the "direct market" - a fancy way of saying that lots of comic book stores opened across the country. These specialty shops provided publishers with unprecedented access to consumers. Comic book companies no longer had to struggle for space on crowded newsstands.

The direct market resulted in an explosion of small, independent publishers who wouldn't have been able to compete with giants like DC and Marvel in traditional distribution outlets. The direct market also encouraged comic companies to experiment with new, more expensive publishing formats. The flip side of the direct market is that, eventually, comics came to be sold only at comic shops, resulting in the current, shrinking readership.

In the mid-'80s, DC began publishing a few titles on Baxter paper, which was sturdier, glossier, and more expensive than newsprint. Not wanting to take a huge risk, DC experimented with titles that were already proven sellers. Here's how it worked.

In 1984, two of DC's most popular titles were New Teen Titans and Legion of Super-Heroes. Like most comics, they were printed on standard newsprint. DC renamed them Tales of the Teen Titans and Tales of the Legion of Super-Heroes, while simultaneously launching two new comic book series called New Teen Titans and Legion of Super-Heroes. The new series were printed on Baxter paper and sold only through comic shops and mail-order subscriptions. After about a year, Tales of the Teen Titans and Tales of the Legion of Super-Heroes stopped printing new stories and started reprinting the stories already published in their Baxter paper counterparts. So if you didn't want to spring for the pricier Baxter versions, you could wait a year and pick up the cheaper reprints, which were still sold on newsstands.

DC decided the Outsiders were popular enough to graduate to a Baxter paper series of their own. In 1985, they launched a new title called simply The Outsiders. The original newsprint series, Batman and the Outsiders, was renamed Adventures of the Outsiders. Several months later, that book switched from new stories to reprints of stories already published in the Baxter title.

But something was missing from The Outsiders and Adventures of the Outsiders. Something that I would argue was the key ingredient to the Outsiders' success. I'll give you a hint. Here's the cover to the first issue of The Outsiders.

And here's the cover to Adventures of the Outsiders #33, the first issue with the new title.

You figure it out? No Batman.

The circumstances of the Dark Knight's departure mirrored the events surrounding the formation of the Outsiders. Once again, there was a revolution underway in Markovia. Batman heard what was happening in Markovia, but he didn't have a personal stake in the matter this time, so he felt no need to get involved. He thought the godlike abilities of the Outsiders would be put to better use taking down petty criminals on the streets of Gotham City.

He also didn't bother to tell Geo-Force, who was understandably pissed when he discovered Batman had withheld information from him. The Dark Knight got defensive, threw another of his temper tantrums, and disbanded the team. But the Outsiders decided to carry on without him. They went into Markovia and restored order (again!) then relocated to Los Angeles, with the Markovian government financing the team from then on.

By this time, the Outsiders had acquired a new member called Looker. She was Emily "Lia" Briggs, a plain Jane bank teller who discovered she was somehow the long lost queen of a subterranean race called the Abyssians. Due to some gobbledygook involving Halley's Comet, she acquired glowing eyes and a range of psychic powers. The process also physically transformed Briggs into a stunning beauty, complete with a shallow, flirty new personality (much to her husband's chagrin). She was hardly a replacement for Batman.

So the relaunch of the Outsiders was doomed from the start. The headline character was gone, leaving behind a group of people who weren't very interesting on their own. The writing was poor, as it seems Mike W. Barr had already used up all of his best story ideas for the team. Ironically, even as the Outsiders were in decline, Barr was doing some of the best work of his career on Detective Comics, a Batman solo title.

To make matters worse, the artwork on The Outsiders left much to be desired. Jim Aparo was one of the great Batman artists of the '70s (a decade in which he also did some truly impressive work on Aquaman). But by the mid-'80s, he was well past his prime. On the slick, glossy Baxter paper, his artwork looked crude and amateurish. The Outsiders was an ugly book.

The vultures were circling. The Batman-less Adventures of the Outsiders lasted only fourteen issues. The Dark Knight returned to the team he founded in The Outsiders #17, but it was too little too late. The series lasted only eleven more issues.

In the meantime, the Outsiders picked up two lame new members. One was the Atomic Knight, a recycled sci-fi character from the '60s who fights crime dressed in a suit of futuristic battle armor. The other was Windfall, a defector from the supervillain gang called the Masters of Disaster whose arrival was heralded with this dopey comic book cover.

Windfall was an annoying teenager with the power to control air currents. Unfortunately, the Outsiders already had an annoying, blonde, teenage girl with a shady past on the team - namely, Halo. The last thing they needed was another one.

These additions didn't do much to attract new readers - or give old ones a reason to stick around - and The Outsiders was cancelled in 1987. Within the pages of the comics, the team itself was a shambles. Batman, the prodigal leader, had stopped bothering to even show up. In a nonsensical turn of events, Dr. Jace, the scientist who gave Geo-Force his superpowers, betrayed the team to an army of alien robots called the Manhunters. This was part of a larger, company-wide story arc at DC called "Millennium," which was pretty forgettable.

The resulting battle with the Manhunters left Metamorpho dead, Halo in a coma, and Looker stripped of her psychic powers. Katana retired from superhero-ing to take care of Halo, and the rest went their separate ways. The Outsiders had been around only four years, and it looked like they were destined to become nothing more than a footnote in Batman's history.

But at DC Comics, no trademarkable character or idea ever goes away forever. The Outsiders would return.

About a year after the series was cancelled, Metamorpho was restored to life by alien technology. It's a long story. Actually, that turned out to be the first of several deaths and resurrections Metamorpho has experienced since then. He joined the European branch of Justice League International, where he remained well into the '90s. He was also reunited with his wife, Sapphire, and learned they had an infant son who was born with a lethal touch. They found a cure for that in a 1993 mini-series. He was later a member of DC's oddball superhero team, the Doom Patrol.

Aside from Metamorpho, the Outsiders weren't seen much in the late '80s and early '90s. But that changed in 1993, when DC decided to give the Outsiders another shot in a new series written by Mike W. Barr.

In this series, Geo-Force assembled a new team of Outsiders to - once again! - liberate his homeland of Markovia. This time, the country had been taken over by a vampire overlord. Geo-Force's team included Katana, Halo (who'd awakened from her coma), and Looker (who'd recovered her psychic powers).

They were joined by several new members: Sebastian Faust, son of evil sorcerer Felix Faust; an Iron Man knockoff called Technocrat; Charlie Wylde, who had the ability to transform into a bear; and an ancient Kryptonian cyborg known as the Eradicator.

The new Outsiders quickly found themselves framed for a Crime They Didn't Commit and had to go on the run, A-Team style. Along the way, Looker was turned into a vampire - not the evil, suck-your-blood kind like Dracula, but the day-walking, "reluctant" kind, like that guy in Twilight. This was the last straw for her long-suffering husband, and he filed for divorce.

The "Aurakle" possessing Halo jumped to another "host" body, Marissa Barron, the former wife of Technocrat. Violet Harper, the "real" Halo, somehow retained her superhuman abilities and reverted to her original, criminal personality. She turned on the Outsiders, took the name Spectra, and teamed up with Kobra.

Geo-Force's Outsiders lasted only two years before their series was cancelled. Ultimately, the Outsiders cleared their names and restored order in Markovia (yet again), and Geo-Force married his long-time girlfriend, Denise Howard. And then the cast members returned to relative obscurity.

Meanwhile, Black Lightning was moving to the forefront of the DC Universe. After starring in a short-lived series in the mid-'90s, he was named Secretary of Education (in his secret identity, of course) by newly-elected president Lex Luthor.

No, I'm not kidding. In 2000, DC made the ill-advised, disastrously-timed decision to send Superman's archenemy to the White House. Black Lightning resigned a few years later, after his double life was exposed and he became a political liability.

But the story of the Outsiders wasn't over yet. In 2003, the team's name and legacy were appropriated by Green Arrow's former teen sidekick, Speedy, now all grown up and calling himself Arsenal. (I'll be doing a profile of Speedy in a few weeks.) The new team was led by Dick Grayson, the first Robin, also all grown up and now calling himself Nightwing. The mission of this new version of the Outsiders would be to take a more proactive role in crimefighting, seeking out supervillains rather than waiting around for the bad guys to strike first.

The Outsiders have remained more-or-less in continuous publication ever since. The fluid roster has included former Teen Titans and Justice Leaguers, members of the "Batman Family" of Gotham-based vigilantes, returning Outsiders alumni, and an eclectic mix of others.

These others have included Shift, a clone of Metamorpho; and Thunder, Black Lightning's teen daughter from a prior marriage who inherited her father's electrical superpowers. (Black Lightning's other daughter is active with another superhero team, the Justice Society, and goes by the name Lightning.) In 2007, Nightwing handed the leadership of the Outsiders over to his former mentor and the original team's founder, Batman.

The Dark Knight is currently missing and presumed dead in the DC Universe, though he's actually alive and well in prehistoric times (a ridiculous storyline I won't even get into). But he left instructions with Alfred to put together a new, handpicked team of Outsiders to carry on in his absence.

The current lineup includes all of the charter members: Black Lightning and Geo-Force, fresh off recent stints in the Justice League; Katana, whose activities with this controversial team have cost her her Japanese citizenship; Halo, now plain old Violet Harper again; and Metamorpho, who returned to the team to replace the deceased Shift. They are joined by the Creeper, a crazed superhero who has a long association with Batman; and Owlman, a stand-in for the Caped Crusader, himself. And so the Outsiders live on.

The Outsiders have had little exposure in other media. Black Lightning almost hit the big time in the late '70s, when Hanna-Barbera was producing the Super Friends cartoons for Saturday morning television. They decided to inject a little color into the lily-white Justice League with the addition of a few "ethnic" characters like Apache Chief and Samurai. As anyone who remembers Super Friends knows, these were little more than broad stereotypes.

For their "token black," Hanna-Barbera considered adapting Black Lightning for the small screen, but they didn't want to pay royalties to his creator, Tony Isabella. Instead, they retooled Black Lightning just enough to avoid a lawsuit and renamed him Black Vulcan.

Black Lightning never appeared in Cartoon Network's Justice League or Justice League Unlimited, though the latter series paid homage to the Hanna-Barbera characters with an episode featuring the Ultimen, a team of superheroes based on Apache Chief, Samurai, Black Vulcan and the Wonder Twins. The Black Vulcan proxy was named Juice. So, until Black Lightning began appearing on Batman: The Brave and the Bold a year ago, he was the DC Comics character who had the most TV exposure without ever actually appearing on TV.

Metamorpho starred in two episodes of Justice League and had cameo appearances in a few episodes of Justice League Unlimited. Black Lightning and Katana had bit parts in this year's direct-to-DVD movie, Superman/Batman: Public Enemies. But the only time any of these characters have appeared onscreen together as the Outsiders was in Batman: The Brave and the Bold - which brings me right back to where I started.

Next time, I'll talk about the Outsiders' fellow guest-star, Wildcat. Batman: The Brave and the Bold airs on Friday nights at 7:30 Eastern and Saturday nights at 8:30 Eastern.

The "Guide to Batman: The Brave and the Bold" Series:
Blue Beetle and Kanjar Ro.
Green Arrow.
Clock King, Green Fury, Gentleman Ghost, and Dinosaur Island.
Plastic Man, Kite-Man, and Gorilla Grodd.
Aquaman.
Black Manta, Ocean Master, Felix Faust, and The Atom.
Red Tornado, Sportsmaster, and Toyman.
Green Lantern.
Etrigan the Demon and B'wana Beast.