DC Comics

This is a /co/ related article, which we allow because we find it interesting or we can't be bothered to delete it.

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DC Comics, proper name Detective Comics, is the oldest of the two most popular comics companies of all time. If you haven't heard of them, you've been living under a real rock. They are iconic for their work in the Supers genre.

Compared to Marvel Comics, the DC Universe mostly defines itself by a "Supergods" motif; its characters tend to be extraordinarily powerful and it views their adventures in a largely "neo-mythical" light. Whilst it does have its share of street-level heroes, most DC stories are about national-level threats at least. In general, DC has consistently stuck closer to the Silver Age in general feel than Marvel, with a heavy emphasis on aliens, monsters, weird science and colorful heroes who were created or bought up by DC and kept around for decades after. In the Bronze Age this led to a slump in sales; the DC Universe was collapsing under the weight of its own canon, while Marvel had retconned or written out characters as needed to keep its universe fresh and unified. DC had also largely lost the "social consciousness" race to Marvel, which cost them even more sales with younger audiences and is something they still haven't fully lived down. Considering Marvel was presenting civil rights and integration in a matter-of-fact, this-is-how-it-is-now-so-deal-with-it fashion and the "Distinguished Competition" decided the best way to respond was "Lois Lane spends the next 24 hours as a Black woman!" it's not hard to see why.

These factors (plus DC editors tired of being buried in letters from the IRL version of The Simpsons' Comic Book Guy over minor continuity errors) became the seed of DC's other, more dubious claim to fame: massive, turgid metaplot events, shoehorned into the company's entire output with about as much subtlety as a roleplaying game's metaplot and often ending with a mass retcon of the entire universe. When this was first done in the 80s with Crisis on Infinite Earths it was a fresh and exciting way to replace the ancient DC canon with something new readers could digest, but these days it happens about as often as Exterminatus in 40k and with about as much enthusiasm from the audience.

Notable Heroes

Superman

Considered the first true superhero, although he actually built on tropes that had appeared in early pulp novels. Superman is famous; the last survivor of the alien planet Krypton, whose parents managed to launch him to Earth in an escape shuttle before Krypton's core destabilized and the planet exploded. Raised by good-hearted farmers in the Kansas village of Smallville, he dedicates himself to fighting for truth, justice, and The American Way liberty for all a better tomorrow.

He is perhaps most infamous as (one of) the most absurdly overpowered character in comics, with an arsenal of abilities that includes flight, superhuman strength and speed, nigh invulnerability, ocular heat rays, superhuman hearing and vision that can see through walls, and a freezing breath weapon. Ironically, he actually started out almost mundane; in the original comics, Superman's powers stemmed from his species having evolved on a planet with significantly higher gravity than Earth, making stronger and toughter than any human. Instead of flying his super-dense muscles allowed him to run at astonishing speds and leap vast distances; this is where the "leap tall buildings" thing came from. The very first cartoons retconned him into being empowered by the light of Earth's yellow sun and gave him the ability to fly for dramatic effect, and that as where it started. Later, a popular radio drama introduced his most iconic vulnerability in the form of Kryptonite, the radioactive remnants of his homeworld. The Sliver Age would expand this to the point of absurdity; there's an entire blog about it called Superdickery because the shit from that era pretty much has to be read to be believed.

We have a seperate article about him, mainly because he's iconic in his own right. Superman is one of the only superheroes who has won against evil in real life: that radio drama had Supes fight the Ku Klux Klan and make them look like such chumps it depressed their recruitment for years.

Ironically, compared to Batman, he has the smallest "family" of superpowered knock-offs, of which the only relevant ones are his cousin Supergirl and his super-powered dog, Krypto. There's also Power Girl, an alternate dimension's version of Supergirl mostly known for her huge rack who crossed over into the mainstream dimension and stayed there after her own was destroyed. However post-Crisis it was decided Superman should be the Last Son of Krypton and not the penultimate one. Only Supergirl and Power Girl survived, but both stuck with increasingly odd new origins (like "merged with some quasi-angel" and "daughter of a sorcerer whose son from the future then impregnated her with himself") before everyone just gave up and restored their original ones. They also killed Supes off for a while and had four knockoffs show up to keep fans guessing as to which, if any, was the real one. The only one of any historical relevance is Steel, a black man in power armor who got to keep hero-ing with the "S" logo after the real deal came back and was the subject of a terribad Shaq vehicle.

For decades, DC's official policy was that Kryptonians aren't cross-fertile with humans and they avoided introducing a Superbaby despite Clark Kent being married to Lois Lane for several years. (A certain essay by a famous SF writer may have had something to do with it.) This would be changed when one of their regular continuity shattering events undid the retarded New 52 and brought back the old continuity. After this, the main Earth's Clark and Lois had a son, Jon, while they were off screen and he's now ~10+ish. Despite needing a retcon to exist, Jon was well loved due to good writing, especially his father-son relationship with his dad and friendship with Damian Wayne as the "Super Sons", and that he struggles to control his powers instead of being a Mary Sue. Naturally Brian Micheal Bendis set out to destroy all that when DC went full retard and hired him despite being obviously insane and no longer capable of writing his way out of a paper bag.

Batman

You know who Batman is. In many ways, he is a direct continuation of the shadowy avengers and vigilantes that proliferated in pulp fiction; even his backstory as a wealthy man who has spent years training and preparing for a war on crime is straight out of old pulps, while his colorful collection of crazed criminal contemporaries owes as much to the likes of Dick Tracy's circus-freak gangsters as it does to pulp supervillainy.

We have a separate article about him, as much like Superman his icon status and /tg/ relevance is mostly separate from the DC Universe. The most notable part of Batman's appeal is perhaps his versatility: the core of his character is so archetypal and has been developed in so many directions that you can do almost anything with him and make it work with a little creativity.

Wonder Woman

One of the first recognizable superheroes and arguably the first female superhero, Diana is a magical woman - a clay baby brought to life as a superhuman Amazon by the Greek gods - reared on the hidden paradise of Themyscira‎, home of the Amazons. After their isolation was broken by a male international spy who crash landed on the island, she willingly embarked on an expedition to "man's world", both to return him and as an ambassador of the Amazonian ways of justice, compassion, tolerance and love. (Also teaching grade-schoolers how to harness their feminine energy to lift tanks, but most people try to forget that.)

Ironically, despite being considered one of "the big three" with Batman and Superman, Wonder Woman has long struggled to actually keep her titles afloat. This might have something to do with the fact that she is generally defined as "The Feminist Superheroine", meaning every writer attached to her has used the Amazons to push their specifc vision of what feminism is on readers, going back to her creation at the hands of William Marston. (This includes positive and negative versions of feminism; mentioning that time Themyscira attacked the US with giant killer bees is a good way to get some eye-twitches out of a comics geek.) Marston being a grade A sicko who called femdom with bondage a "respectable and noble practice" in the 1940s probably didn't set a good precedent in this regard, but it did set a good precedent in lots of art of Wondy getting tied up with her own mind-controlling Lasso of Truth. Combined with the continued publication of her title being based on a contractual mandate rather than strong sales and Diana herself lacking a consistent personality of her own and it's not surprising that she's had a rocky history despite being such a major character.

She had a TV series in 1976, loosely based on the Golden Age comic's wartime stories. Needless to say it was less than wondrous, though par for the course of 70s television; it's most fondly remembered for the sweet R&B theme song and Lynda Carter's ability to fill out the character's classic leotard in a flattering manner.

The Flash

Jay Garrick was an ordinary college student until a freak accident turned him into the fastest man alive. One of the first "legacy heroes", with the Silver Age version using a new character with the same powers named Barry Allen. The story that had them meet ("Flash of Two Worlds!") spawned the idea of the original Golden Age characters living out their lives in a separate "Earth-Two" and the multiverse mess that's been giving comics readers headaches to this day, while Barry would be succeeded by former sidekick Wally West (Kid Flash) in turn. Usually a giant fucking nerd, a crude goofball, or both. His rogues gallery is literally called the Rogues and is known for having some of the silliest villains to have survived to the present day with minimal edgy reboots, like Captain Boomerang (literally an Aussie bloke with a bunch of trick boomerangs) and Mirror Master (a dude in an ugly yellow unitard who does party tricks with his reflection).

Martian Manhunter

J'onn J'onzz is a green Martian. He was essentially created as a Superman-but-not; DC was worried about devaluing their most popular characters through overexposure at the time. He even has a long-lost female cousin called Miss Martian to mirror Supergirl. Originally transported to Earth by a scientist in a freak accident, the shock of seeing him causes the scientist to die from a heart attack. Stranded, J'onn assumes the identity of "John Jones" and decides to fight crime as both a superhero and a mundane detective; initially this was a temporary thing until Martian civilization could effect a rescue, but stories written after probes proved Mars was dead depict him as the last of his kind so he can engage in some shared brooding with Supes. Tying into this, J'onn often struggles to fit in with human society and tends to be one of the more cerebral members of the Justice League. Martian Manhunter, unlike Superman, managed to keep his absurd and poorly-defined slate of powers even after the Silver Age: shapeshifting, flight, intangibility, telepathy, telekinesis, regeneration of the "from a single cell" variety, and more. And despite all of that, he's still vulnerable to fire somehow. Well, fire and Oreos, though whether the latter is an actual addiction or an attempt to give an overpowered chracter some foibles varies with the writer.

Green Lantern

Alan Scott was a railroad engineer who survived a sabotage induced train wreck thanks to a lantern that, unknown to him, is an ancient magical artifact. The lantern tells him how to forge its green metal into a ring, Alan uses its vast and poorly-defined powers to go after the guy responsible for the wreck and becomes a superhero. Alan would drop out of continuity in 1948, bob in and out of the DC Universe a few times over the decades and finally be revived as a gay man in the 2020s in one of many reboot events.

The revival in the 1959 reboot would change the man holding the title and, unlike Flash, the basic concept. Hal Jordan, a test pilot, receives his power ring from a dying alien and travels to the distant world of Oa, where he becomes a Lensman-style space cop. The Green Lantern Corps operates under the self-proclaimed authority of the Guardians of the Universe, a group of wrinkled blue Jewish (the "poster boy" Guardian, Ganthet, is based on the likeness of Israel's first prime minister) midgets who claim to be the first sentient species to evolve. In this version the power ring is a "living computer" and universal translator; each ring channels the limitless psychic energy of the Guardians, shaped by the user's will into green energy constructs that can do effectively anything, limited only by the Green Lantern's imagination and willpower.

Since then, the title character has changed a few times, and the series has become a playground for writers and artists looking to do trippy science fantasy stuff with lots of weird aliens. In the 2000s DC started introducing other colors of lantern powered by emotions rather than will, like the Red Lanterns who are literally powered by rage and recruit from some of the angriest beings in the galaxy.

Both incarnations have had really lame weaknesses in comparison to their incredible power. Alan Scott was unable to affect things made of wood, while Hal Jordan and most of his successors can't impact anything that was yellow-- the details vary. Less weaksauce is the charge limitation: The ring needs recharging on a regular basis via a special Lantern, at first once every local day, nowadays working more like a cell phone battery that depletes with use.

Green Arrow

Oliver Queen is Batman but with a bow and arrow. Attempts to separate him from that, a shared series with Green Lantern (which existed for no other reason than the two characters with less than great sales having names starting with green) where the two butted heads over political issues and Robin Hood influence have gradually given him socialist leanings. Got more popular after he a TV show that made him a slightly more willing-to-kill Batman, though it's often really easy to tell the writers wanted to do a Batman show but got cockblocked by WB. His Robin but with a bow and arrow sidekick Speedy is more notable than he is since the aforementioned comic turned him into a junkie; obvious puns about "speed" aside the writers wanted an existing character to avoid the pitfalls of using a "bad kid" with no history but whom nobody actually cared about enough to cry foul over, and Speedy fit the bill. Since then he's been used as a paper doll by DC creative for whatever story idea for a non-powered hero comes along, especially stories that call for an angsty but sexy bad-boy types.

Aquaman

A Namor ripoff that has become better known than the original due to Marvel's refusal to include Namor in non-comics media... mostly because, unlike Aquaman, Namor is consistently characterized as an arrogant asshole. The lame Superfriends cartoon made an entire generation consider him a joke character since broadcast standards, bad writing, and sharing many powers with the rest of the group led to his main uses being swimming and talking to fish, ignoring his title as King of Atlantis and the superhuman strength and endurance that lets him operate at the crushing depths of the ocean. Later writers have gone out of their way to try to dispel this stigma: later comics and the DCAU ditched his goofy goldfish suit and recast him as a grizzled badass who only works with the Justice League because the things they fight are a bigger threat to Atlantis than human pollution, while Batman: The Brave and the Bold would make him outrageous, a boisterous oaf who could quote Minsc and not break character.

Captain Marvel

Billy Batson was an orphaned twelve year old living with a miserly, abusive, uncle that kept him around to leech off his inheritance. One day he wandered onto a train that took him to a wizard, who judged him worth of a magic power: by calling the wizard's name "Shazam!" Billy can transform into the champion Captain Marvel, blessed with the "wisdom" of Solomon, strength of Hercules, endurance of Atlas, power of Zeus, courage of Achilles, and speed of Mercury, plus the lesser-known ability to give your classics teacher fits. If Captain Marvel is merely Billy in a buff magical alternate form or a separate person entirely has varied over the years, though modern incarnations go with the first. Billy is perhaps the earliest child superhero that wasn't under adult leadership. He would later gain a long-lost sister named Mary, and she quickly gains the power of the wizard as well. Unlike her brother, saying SHAZAM! transforms Mary into Mary Marvel, who looks like Mary in a version of Captain Marvel's costume and possesses the Grace of Selena, Strength of Hippolyta, Skill of Ariadne, Speed of Zephyrus, Beauty of Aurora, and Wisdom of Minerva. Since Hippolyta was already taken in the DC universe as Wonder Woman's mom the different empowering entities was dropped post-Crisis. Retards have claimed her "only change is the costume and powers" nature makes her the first magical girl, but this would mean Go Nagai wasn't first at something and is therefore objectively wrong.

Originally created by also-ran Fawcett Comics, their similarity in abilities to Superman led to legal brawls that were resolved when Fawcett got out of the superheroes game during the 1950s interregnum and sold their properties to DC. After this the Marvel Family started crossing over with the DC universe and was incorporated into it proper after the Crisis on Infinite Earths. Captain Marvel's interaction with Superman is of note because while their powers and, in many ways, personality (childlike innocence vs. honest boyscout) are very similar, the slight differences make a really big impact: Superman has the life experience to realize that he can't save everyone and being good doesn't always mean being nice, while the Captain's magical origin means he has an inherent advantage as Supes' obscene toughness doesn't include a ward save. He also has the dubious dishonor of sparking a long-running feud with Marvel Comics over a similarly named series of characters that DC ultimately lost, forcing a rebranding of the guy as "Shazam". This is incredibly stupid (how can he say his own name without changing back?) but that's modern comics for you.

John Constantine

Star of the "mature audiences" series Hellblazer, John Constantine is the posterboy for the "tricksy urban mage" concept and was doing it before Harry Dresden was even a twinkle in Jim Butcher's eye. His creator Alan Moore and several of the writers that succeeded him have sworn up and down to have met John in real life at least once; while the latter are definitely bullshitting we can't be sure about Alan, considering the crazy fuck's as close to a wizard as you'll find.

John rarely actually "does magic", and instead tricks his enemies into doing what he wants, such as promising his soul to multiple demon lords at once, risking a new Blood War for the soul of one measly mortal if they don't cure him of his cancer. A big part of his characterization is that he doesn't really believe in magic, but the demons and ancient spirits he's dealing with do, so when he does need to "do magic", he uses his high Charisma score and Arcana checks to bullshit Kandarian demons into destroying themselves. As long as the caster doesn't break character and throws enough magic spell components together, the universe just lets it happen, much like a GM letting you cast spells so long as you've got "some gold" and "a component pouch."

He actually is magical, though, being the current incarnation of the "Laughing Magician," all of whom are just as shitty as he is; it's also actually implied that he was never supposed to be the Constantine, and that was supposed to be his twin brother, who he killed in the womb and has been tampering with his life ever since, orchestrating events so that one day John will give up to despair and give his soul over to him. Another running theme through all of his incarnations is that he'll sacrifice his friends and use them as pawns to get ahead of whatever's trying to kill him at the moment.

Was for a long time kept in a sort of limbo: he was the posterboy of the Vertigo imprint ("mature" horror/fantasy with social commentary, technically canon to DC but very rarely interacting with mainline titles) until DC folded everything with a reboot in 2011. Since then, he's been more or less a part of the DCU even though his solo-run comics aren't, because DC's done a lot more rebooting since then (including a reality reset by Dr. Fucking Manhattan, which made Constantine and Watchmen's creator Alan Moore very mad).

The Justice League

The biggest and most notable superhero team in the DC universe, made up of all its best and brightest. The precise backstory varies between iterations, but generally boils down to Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, and whichever other "big name" DC heroes the writers feel like promoting (there's usually a Flash and/or a Green Lantern onboard) hooking up to face some massive threat that proves too much for any single one of them to handle alone and then deciding "hey, teamwork rocks, and it's actually nice to hang out with other people who get this crazy costumed do-gooder shit; let's do this again!" and founding a team.

The Justice Society of America is an equivalent organization made up of Golden Age (aka, World War 2) superheroes and/or their proteges. Sometimes may exist in an entirely separate branch of the multiverse.

Teen Titans

A Justice League knock-off made up of younger superheroes and former sidekicks. The original version was made up of the five most famous sidekicks of the Silver Age; Robin (Dick Grayson), Kid Flash (Wally West, who later became The Flash), Wonder Girl (Wonder Woman's sidekick whom nobody remembers these days aside from being a continuity clusterfuck), Speedy (Green Arrow's Robin rip-off) and Aqualad (Aquaman's sidekick). This version didn't do very well. Then the New Teen Titans came out in the Bronze Age, and this is the team that everybody remembers; Robin returned to lead, and brought Wonder Girl and Kid Flash back, before fleshing it out with Beast Boy (green animal shapeshifter and former sidekick to the Doom Patrol), Cyborg (Afro-American teen turned into a cyborg by his father after an experiment hideously mutilated him), Raven (angsty half-demon Goth psychic), and Starfire (gorgeous alien flying brick).

The New Teen Titans, aside from being much darker and edgier than the original team (with a high death rate to match), also inspired the two Teen Titans cartoons of the 2000s (save that both dropped Kid Flash and Wonder Girl as main characters). Over time interest for the New Teen Titans started to peter out thanks to a mix of meddling executives and long-time writer Marv Wolfman feeling the fatigue working on a book where he was forced to use characters he didn't like (and being on the same comic for almost 16 years straight is a LONG time), and the book was cancelled in the mid-90s. Several relaunches were attempted including one with most of the old team, but they either were trash fires or just didn't sell well, and the creation of Young Justice poached most of the more interesting characters. Then the cartoon came out and the then-ongoing Titans and Young Justice were axed in favor of a comic based on the show. After that run ended the Titans comic became extremely edgy and kept violently killing off its characters. From there the comic devolved into a series of false starts on runs that didn't last long either through quality, nobody cared about them because they were not the "main" cast or DC decided on yet another reboot. The Titans are languishing to this very day, being only a shadow of what they were in the 80s even with most of the bronze age cast being there.

And Beast Boy still isn't allowed to grow up past being a teen.

Static

Nerd Virgil Hawkins is pressured to go to an upcoming gang meet and shoot one of his tormentors. He rejects the temptation but the meet soon turns into a war and police deploy an experimental marker they believe will mark gang members to be tracked down later. This winds up giving a lot of people superpowers, Virgil included, or killing them instead. As a comic nerd granted electricity powers in a city that now has a bunch of superpowered criminals, he naturally becomes a superhero. Much like fellow teen hero Spider-Man, he enjoys mocking his enemies to throw them off guard.

One of the many, many black males with electric powers. Originally part of the Milestone imprint and its separate canon, Static proved to be by far to be the most interesting and popular character from the line. While it's not that big an accomplishment (note the distant second, Icon, managing to be an interesting person dragged down by horrifically bland powers), he managed get an animated series (originally in its own canon but later clumsily merged into the DCAU despite previously mentioning DC heroes as fictional characters) which propelled him to mainstream popularity.

Doctor Fate

A sorcerer wearing the Helmet of Fate, within which resides the Lord of Order, Nabu.

Animal Man

Not as notable but still pretty well known, he's the avatar of the red who can take the powers of all animals, his comics are known for being very weird, meta and breaking alot of conventional superhero tropes.

His original comic run was very meta, with alot of 4th wall breaking and shocking moments, on the 26th issue he even met the author (It sounds very self masturbatory but it's actually really good.)

Had a new run for the New 52 that while not as good as the original, it still had a lot of charm and was very well written.

Notable Villains

Lex Luthor

Superman's archenemy. Started out as a mad scientist, then turned into a corrupt businessman with slimy politician undertones in the 80s. Currently tends to be depicted as a combination of both; he's a legit supergenius in his own right, but unlike other mad scientists, he was business-savvy enough to parlay his inventions into a mostly legal fortune and now he uses his wealth to employ other mad scientists or criminal underlings rather than doing the dirty stuff himself. Whilst he likes to delude himself that his vendetta against Superman is a case of normal humans standing up to oppressive alien gods, the comics make it very clear that he's actually just jealous of Superman being more powerful and/or popular than he is, and/or he resents that Superman's actual power makes him somebody that Luthor can't bully into submission.

Deathstroke

Slade Wilson was an American undercover operative who gained low-level regeneration abilities as part of a black ops bio-augmentation experiment. It also drove him kind of cuckoo, but his wife leaving him after he accidentally got his son's throat slashed (which he survived, but he was left mute) drove him deeper over the edge and he became a gun-for-hire, though he sometimes branches out into super-terrorism or other villainous goals too. He's actually the prototype of Marvel's Deadpool, who was created as a parody of the guy. Most remembered for his appearance in the 2003 Teen Titans cartoon, and yes, he was actually the team's archenemy for a while in the comics too.

Reverse-Flash

In the far, far flung future, there was a guy who looked up to and admired the Flash. He was such a fanboy he came up with a way to duplicate the Flash's powers, just so he could travel back in time to become the Flash's sidekick. Talk about a nerd. But things went horribly wrong and he came to despise the man he had once admired above all others, and now he has become the Reverse-Flash. As stupid as the name is, he's a twisted son of a bitch who uses his Flash-tier super speed and status as a living temporal paradox to travel freely through space, time and dimensions to achieve his goal of making the Flash's life utterly miserable. "It was me, Barry!"

Brainiac

An alien artificial intelligence determined to become the ultimate intelligence, usually through some apocalyptic method or another - stealing cities by putting them in bottles or blowing up whole worlds after copying all their data are old favorites. Actually was entirely separate from Superman originally, they just fought each other, but the DCAU in the 90s came up with the idea of making him a Kryptonian invention and it's popped up here and there in pop culture.

General Zod

The idea of an "Evil Superman" is something that DC has experimented with several times. One of the subtler and older efforts is General Zod, a Kryptonian general turned war criminal who had the good fortune to not only get his ass yeeted into the Phantom Zone before Krypton blew up, but also to have the blueprints for the device that could undo said yeeting be included in Kal-El's digital library of Kryptonian knowledge aboard his rocket-powered lifepod. Cue a younger, more foolish Superman messing with said device and freeing Zod back into this dimension again. He's basically a weaker but nastier Superman, and has sometimes teetered on anti-villain technology.

Sinestro

Once a champion of the Green Lanterns, Sinestro became their greatest failure when he argued the Green Lanterns should bring peace to the universe by enforcing draconian law and tyrannical order with violence and intimidation instead of being just super-cops. Expelled from their order, he literally went "screw you guys, I'll invent my own Lantern Corps, with blackjack and hookers!" and created the Yellow Power Rings, which actually draw their power from fear and harness it in yellow light, similarly to how the Green Power Rings harness willpower. It started out with just the one, but eventually he created his own Yellow Lantern Corps made up of terrorists, would-be dictators and sadists, all united by their belief that fear was power.

Black Adam

The Anti-Captain Marvel (or "Anti-Shazam" since the 2010s), an ancient empowered mortal who is basically Captain Marvel, but empowered by the Egyptian gods and with a Bronze Age definition of heroism. He's usually depicted as kind of like Marvel's Doctor Doom; initially he was just seen as the evils of a man obsessed with power, but shifting cultural outlooks seen him only caring about is ruling his stomping grounds from when he was a god-king the first time around, he'll ignore the rest of the world so long as they don't attack his nation.

Darkseid

The ultimate big bad of the DC universe, the literal god-like embodiment of tyranny and suffering who rules the appropriately-named Apokalips. Wants to find an "Anti-Life Equation" that will disprove the concept of free will and thusly enslave the entire universe to his will, allowing him to force them to suffer just because he's a dick that way.

Vandal Savage

A Caveman who became immortal due to a meteorite. He proceeded to wage wars of conquests and build empires or advise them at various points in human history, and he claims to have been several historical figures, such as Julius Caesar and Genghis motherfucking Khan. Though some of those claims are probably fake and he's just taking credit.

Got his big bump in relevance with a major arc in the 2004 Justice League show where he traveled back in time, shoved Hitler into a cryochamber so he could rule the Third Reich and conquered both World War II and the rest of the planet with advanced tech.

Suicide Squad

A government-sanctioned organization that forcibly recruits supervillains into performing jobs that can't be traced back to them. Each member is implanted with some sort of explosive in order to ensure their obedience, but since the roster is constantly rotating it's uncertain just how effective these are.

Amanda Waller

The unfortunate government official whose job it is to corral the extremely dangerous criminals into the Suicide Squad. As such, she's not keen on taking any shit from anybody. That said, she's one of the more "depending on the writer" characters in DC. She's always a tough-as-nails, take-no-shit bitch, but given her definining character traits are amorality, her devotion to the United States government as a concept, and her belief in hard men (and women) making hard decisions, she can vary from a tough-but-fair leader who has a legitimate point to a dirty-as-sin scheming snake who uses the Suicide Squad as her own personal hitsquad to a "America Fuck Yeah" jingoistic loony.

/tg/ Relevance

There have been a number of roleplaying games tied into the DC universe released for players.

One of them was a reskin of 3rd Edition Mutants and Masterminds with no mechanical changes, just the examples changed to use DC characters.

A better-regarded example was DC Heroes, one of a handful of games to use the Mayfair Exponential Gaming System. Essentially, each point of stat is an exponential increase over the one before it, which helps explain, say, how Batman could last for more than a microsecond in a physical contest with Superman. Thanks to the nature of 90's game design, there are way too many granular powers (each random element has got an associated blast as well as energy blast), and if you don't know what you're doing the combat is an incoherent mass of charts. That said, if you do know what you're doing (or if there's someone around to provide training wheels on the experience), it's a great time and does a better job of keeping to the feeling of a comic book than many games of its ilk.