This is "Looks Like I'm Moving," a feature that spotlights instances of comic book supporting cast members that migrate from one title to another one.

Today, we look at Captain Boomerang's transition from being a Flash Rogue to being a mainstay member of the Suicide Squad.

Roughly a year into Barry Allen's stint as the star of the Flash ongoing series, Captain Boomerang first showed up in Flash #117 (by John Broome, Carmine Infantino and Murphy Anderson), with one of the goofier origins for a supervillain (but with an awesome costume)...

While a villain who used a bunch of specialized boomerangs as his main weapon of choice was the hook of the character (comic book people love boomerangs. Marvel also had a supervillain who is boomerang-themed. It makes you wonder, though, why the boomerang is such a villainous deal when the most famous use of the boomerang in comics is Batman's batarang), Captain Boomerang was also noted by how many outlandish death traps that he would put together against the Flash that would involve giant boomerangs of some kind. Really, the good Captain likely spent most of his spare time building giant boomerangs to try to kill the Flash. He barely had time to rob banks as he was far too busy building giant boomerangs.

I once did an article about the "team effect," which is the effect when villains who were once able to take on a hero or a heroic team by themselves suddenly stop being viable solo villains when they join a supervillain team. It happens all the time in comics and Captain Boomerang was a notable example of this effect when he and a few of Flash's other mid-level villains got together and formed the loosely affiliated supervillain team known as The Rogues...

This was a tough situation for Boomerang, because on the one hand, the Rogues were awesome. They were great. They would appear frequently as Flash villains. On the other hand, once you are seen as a "team" villain, it is a lot harder for anyone to take you seriously as a solo villain again. Thus, Captain Boomerang made relatively few appearances as a solo villain once he joined the Rogues, although he did have a notable appearance as a Batman villain.

Okay, so Crisis on Infinite Earths happened and suddenly, Barry Allen is dead. Wally West takes over as the new Flash. For whatever reason, the newly relaunched Flash series spotlighting Wally West had little interest in the Rogues. I still don't get the exact reasoning, but for whatever reason, the Rogues were considered passe. I once wrote about how DC seemed to go out of their way in the late 1980s to make their Silver Age villains look like a bunch of dopes. That was too bad in general, but it worked wonders for Captain Boomerang.

Page 2: [valnet-url-page page=2 paginated=0 text='Exit the Rogues and enter the Squad!']

John Ostrander was set to relaunch Suicide Squad following DC's 1987 crossover, Legends, which would also launch a few other new DC Comics titles. His new take on the Suicide Squad would be that it would essentially be the Dirty Dozen with supervillains. Supervillains would go on missions for the government and if they survived, they would receive time off on their sentences.

Ostrander later recalled, "George “Digger” Harkness, aka Captain Boomerang. Boomerbutt, as he became known in the Squad, was not originally one of my picks for the team; editor Robert Greenberger urged him on me. I thought Boomerang was pretty silly looking with an even sillier gimmick, but he was a prime member of the Flash’s Rogues’ Gallery. The Flash group wasn’t using the Rogues at that point so he became available to us.

I decided to model Boomerang after George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman character in his series of historical novels. Flashman remains a cad, a liar, a coward throughout the series but he’s an entertaining bounder and I thought I would go there with Boomerang. No matter how far he sunk, Boomerang could always find another level to sink to. He became a trickster character; always up to something but never quite as clever as he thought he was. I quickly became very fond of this version of Boomerang and so did the readers."

Boomerang essentially was the sleazy jerk who you knew you could never trust, but at the same time, you also knew he could handle himself in a fight if it came to that, so he was decent cannon fodder at the very least.

Early on (in Suicide Squad #9 by Ostrander, Luke McDonnell and Bob Lewis), he had a great bit where he convinced fellow Squad member, Slipknot, that the bosses were bluffing with the explosive devices that they put on the villains to keep them in place. They were not bluffing...

One of his other major plotlines was when he dressed as his old dead fellow Rogue, Mirror Master, to commit crimes while under house arrest as Captain Boomerang...

There was also a plotline involving people getting hit with pies, but that's neither here nor there (maybe I'll write about that in the future).

Captain Boomerang became, along with Deadshot, one of the only true recurring members of the Suicide Squad and they have stuck with the team through reboots...

and live action films...

Thanks, Bob Greenberger!

Okay, folks, make suggestions for future installments of Looks Like I'm Moving by emailing me at brianc@cbr.com!