The Blue Beetle Fan Club

The Blue Beetle is a comic book hero who has been appearing in different comic book publishers since 1939

The original Blue Beetle, Dan Garrett, first appeared in Fox Comics' Mystery Men Comics #1 (Aug. 1939), with art by Charles Nicholas Wojtkowski (as Charles Nicholas) (though the Grand Comics Database tentatively credits Will Eisner as the scripter. Wojtkowski's family has supplied the online comics encyclopedia The Lambiek Comiclopedia with documentation to support the overall Wojtkowski credit. Another artist, Charles Nicholas Cuidera, also drew Blue Beetle stories later, and has claimed to have been the creator, but comics historian credit Wojtkowski.*) A rookie police officer, he used special equipment, a bulletproof costume (sometimes) and a superstrength-inducing "vitamin", and the assistance of a neighborhood pharmacist to fight crime. He starred in a comic book series, comic strip and radio serial but, like most Golden Age superheroes, he fell into obscurity in the 1950s. The comic book series saw a number of anomalies in publication: 19 issues, #12 through #30, were published through Holyoke Publishing; no issue #43 was published; publication frequency varied through the run; and there were gaps where issues were not published, with large ones occurring in early 1947 and between mid-1948 and early 1950.

This Blue Beetle had a short career on the radio, between May and September 1940. Motion picture and radio actor Frank Lovejoy was the Blue Beetle for the first 13 episodes, while for the rest of the shows, the voice was provided by a different, uncredited actor.

In the mid-1950s, Fox Comics went defunct and sold rights to the Blue Beetle to Charlton Comics. That company published a few sporadic adventures of the Golden Age character before revamping the hero in 1966. In Dan Garrett's revised origin, he was an archeologist who found a magical Egyptian artifact, resembling a scarab, which he used to fight crime. Charlton tried three times to use the character to carry a self titled series. Two of the attempts retained the numbering of a previous title. These also were eventually replaced with new titles that carried on the numbering.

The new series was short-lived, and in 1967, Charlton introduced Ted Kord, a student of Dan Garrett's who took on the role when Garrett died. Unable to use the scarab, Kord became an inventor hero, using a variety of gadgets along with his highly skilled athleticism.

With the rest of the Charlton line-up, independent publisher Americomics briefly controlled the rights to the Blue Beetle. In 1983 they published Americomics #3, in which Dan Garrett returned from the dead to reunite with his successor. This story revealed that the golden age policeman Dan Garrett, and the silver age archeologist Dan Garrett, were one and the same. At the end of the story, Dan Garrett is alive.

The rights to the Charlton line up were sold to DC Comics in 1983 with Kord being the current Blue Beetle and Dan Garrett's resurrection being retconned. Ted Kord appeared with several superhero groups, including the Justice League and is usually teamed up with fellow Justice Leaguer Booster Gold. Kord discovered a renewed Checkmate organization led by Maxwell Lord, former bankroller of the JLA. Kord covertly entered Checkmate headquarters, where he found a database containing information on every metahuman on Earth. However, he was captured before he could return to the JLA with the information, and while in Lord's clutches, he given a chance to join Lord, which he turned down by saying "Rot In Hell, Max" and was executed with a single gunshot to the head.

In 2006, DC introduced a new Blue Beetle, teenager Jaime Reyes whose powers are derived from the scarab, now revealed as a piece of advanced alien technology.

This video made by Linkara from That Guy With The Glasses.Com that also hosts the Nostalgia Critic explains the history of the Blue Beetle quite nicely: