The Flash: How a Suicide Squad Star Morphed Into ANOTHER Rogue - CBR

While Captain Boomerang is the name most comic book fans will know, in the 1987 run of Suicide Squad by John Ostrander, Luke McDonnell and Bob Lewis, the Captain briefly took on a different criminal moniker. Mirror Master is a popular member of The Flash's rogues gallery that has had a few different faces under the mask, and George "Digger" Harkness also got his time to shine in the orange tights.

The original Mirror Master, Sam Scudder, was a master thief who's main advantage came from his Mirror Gun, a weapon that could create portals in reflective surfaces, create duplicates of himself, or even turn others into shards of glass. He and Boomerang had worked together a few times, either one-on-one or with The Rogues, before Scudder was killed by an explosion in 1985's Crisis on Infinite Earths by Marv Wolfman, George Perez and Dick Giordano.

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Harkness decided to take up the role of Mirror Master in Suicide Squad #8. At this point, he was working for the Squad voluntarily, living in an apartment near the prison of Belle Reve in Louisiana. He figured he could continue to commit crimes by pretending to be the dead super-villain and work for the government going on missions at the same time, with his boss Amanda Waller being none the wiser.

It works, for a short while at least, with him managing to rob jewelry stores and evade the authorities with relative success. It begins falling apart in Suicide Squad #20, however, when during a botched robbery he is apprehended by the hero Manhunter and taken directly to Waller. To his surprise, she doesn't recognize him in Mirror Masters' outfit and offers him the chance to walk free if he helps the Squad on its next mission -- to put a stop to a gang in New Orleans called The Loa that are dabbling in Voodoo magic. He quickly agrees, and she puts an explosive bracelet on his wrist to ensure he doesn't try to escape.

Things get even worse when Waller calls for Captain Boomerang to join the mission as well, and he runs through the prison trying to find a change of clothes. He wraps his arm up in bandages to cover up the bomb and attempts to convince Waller he is unfit for the mission to no avail. The Squad is sent to a graveyard to investigate the voodoo gang, and to complicate things even more, she splits them into two teams, with Mirror Master on one and Boomerang on the other. Digger's solution is to hide the two costumes behind a tomb and switch between them, hoping the others don't notice.

This creates a major gap in the Squads structure and both teams are ambushed by the undead, who are being led by a masked man calling himself Bocor. One by one the team is hypnotized until only Harkness remains, wearing his orange Mirror Master trousers and blue Captain Boomerang shirt and curled up on the floor begging for mercy. Above him, he hears a voice say to him, "Down Under, you are in deep doo-doo." He looks up and sees the face of Amanda Waller.

She'd faked the whole thing, knowing it was Harkness as soon as she saw him in the Mirror Master costume. The rest of the Squad were all in on it and she had other prison staff pretend to be zombies, apparently having to turn away people because there were so many volunteers. She takes away his apartment and says she can either live at the prison as a full-time member of the team or incarcerated as an inmate.

Even though his stint as the reflective rogue was brief -- and the name was taken up more permanently by Scotsman Evan McCulloch -- there was a time when Digger Harkness was both Captain Boomerang and Mirror Master.

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William Howie (6 Articles Published)

William Howie is a relatively new writer and an avid comic book, manga and classical literature reader based in Cambridge, United Kingdom. After working in pubs, nightclubs and restaurants, he now works as a Comic Feature writer for CBR.com. A Film Production graduate from the University of Derby, Howie takes his critical writing about fiction very seriously.

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The Flash: How a Suicide Squad Star Morphed Into ANOTHER Rogue - CBR

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