Bloodlines is a 1993 crossover event by DC Comics, running through the Annuals of various titles within the year.
The crossover involved alien parasites invading Earth to kill people and drain their spinal fluids. Some of the victims not only survived, but gained superpowers as a result.
The series introduced various new characters, including Ballistic, Cardinal Sin, Geist, Joe Public, and Razorsharp. Of all of them though, the only character with any staying power was Tommy Monaghan, aka Hitman.
Titles involved:
- Phase 1: Outbreak (May-June)
- May 4: Lobo Annual #1, featuring Layla
- May 11: Superman: The Man of Steel Annual #2, featuring Edge
- May 18: Batman: Shadow of the Bat Annual #1, featuring Joe Public
- May 25: The Flash Annual #6, featuring Argus
- June 1: New Titans Annual #9, featuring Anima
- June 8: Superman Annual #5, featuring Myriad
- June 15: Green Lantern Annual #2, featuring Nightblade
- June 22: Batman Annual #17, featuring Ballistic
- June 29: Justice League International Annual #4, featuring Lionheart
- Phase 2: Earthplague (July-August)
- July 6: Robin Annual #2, featuring Razorsharp
- July 13: Action Comics Annual #5, featuring Loose Cannon
- July 20: Legion of Super-Heroes Annual #4, featuring Jamm
- July 27: Green Arrow Annual #6, featuring Hook
- August 3: Detective Comics Annual #6, featuring Geist
- August 10: Justice League of America Annual #7, featuring Terrorsmith
- August 17: Adventures of Superman Annual #5, featuring Sparx
- August 24: Hawkman Annual #1, featuring Mongrel
- Phase 3: Deathstorm (September-October)
- August 31: Deathstroke, the Terminator Annual #2, featuring Gunfire
- September 7: Eclipso Annual #1, featuring Prism
- September 14: The Demon Annual #2, featuring Hitman
- September 21: Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight Annual #4, featuring Cardinal Sin (and, to a much lesser extent, Samaritan)
- September 28: Team Titans Annual #1, featuring Chimera
- October 5: L.E.G.I.O.N. '93 Annual #4, featuring Pax
- Finale: Bloodbath
- October 12: Bloodbath #1 of 2
- October 19: Bloodbath #2 of 2
Bloodlines provides examples of...
- And This Is for...: Featured in the portion of the storyline told in the 17th annual issue of Batman. After Ballistic has succeeded in killing the alien who murdered his fellow Gotham City cops, he states that what he did was for eight good men...and McCain.
- Bigot with a Badge: The Batman Annual tie-in features a racist Gotham City cop named McCain who isn't portrayed sympathetically and taunts fellow officer Kelvin Mao by invoking various Asian stereotypes.
- Blade Below the Shoulder: Razorsharp was a Playful Hacker (with Cracker tendencies) whose superpower was that her arms could morph into swords. In Psyba-Rats she mainly used them to climb walls and break into buildings (in a good cause, usually); in Blood Pack she was reluctantly put in a position where she'd have to use them in combat.
- Breakout Character: Tommy Monaghan, who went on to star a successful comic series.
- C-List Fodder: Most of the heroes created during the event ended up quickly falling into obscurity, only to be brought out of limbo in order to be used as cannon fodder in events such as Infinite Crisis and Faces of Evil. The high mortality rate of the Bloodlines heroes was referenced in-universe several times, with the Flash chalking this up to a general lack of competence on their part. In addition, certain writers (Jamal Igle being most vocal) have gone on record stating that these characters' deaths were due to the fact that they (the writers) personally didn't like them and found them to be one of the worst parts of '90s DC canon.
- Crisis Crossover: Whether you like this or not all depends on if you're a fan of the Dark Age. Bloodlines left no real impact on the DC Universe and the new heroes were eventually reduced to cannon fodder for Infinite Crisis, or else ending up in Comic-Book Limbo. The only notable result from this crossover being Garth Ennis' Hitman. Aside from that, it's probably best remembered for crossing over with two far-better known DC stories from the same time period: The Death of Superman and Knightfall, due to featuring the four replacement Supermen and the Azrael-Batman for most of the crossover.
- Dark Age of Supernames:
- The event produced a whole slew of these: Ballistic, Cardinal Sin, Edge, Gunfire, Hook, Jamm, Krag, Loose Cannon, Mongrel (
an African-American/Vietnamese superhero), Nightblade, Razorsharp, Terrorsmith... it goes on and on. There was also Hitman, who was exactly that, but his comic ran with it, in a Black Comedy sort of way. - In the Hitman Annual, it was mentioned that all of the Bloodlines-created supers except Hitman had been killed in less than two years. (As The Flash put it, "There's more to this business than putting on a costume and going out to 'be super'.")
- The whole business was mocked in another Hitman issue.McAllister: Well, anyway, the result was a completely new generation of superpowered human beings...
Monaghan: You mean like whatsizname? An' that other guy?
McAllister: That's them. - Even Rob Liefeld felt DC was ripping off his title Youngblood (Image Comics) with Bloodlines.
- The event produced a whole slew of these: Ballistic, Cardinal Sin, Edge, Gunfire, Hook, Jamm, Krag, Loose Cannon, Mongrel (
- Decomposite Character: Eddie Walker/Loose Cannon, who was basically a blue Hulk, was one of the main characters created in the crossover. In the New 52 universe, a version of Loose Cannon appeared in Teen Titans as a random villain, but his real name was unrevealed. A few years later, a version of Eddie Walker was a major character in the New 52 Bloodlines miniseries, which didn't use codenames. Since Eddie only gained his hulking blue form during the miniseries, they can't be the same guy, and in fact the Titans Loose Cannon has slightly different powers.
- Faith–Heel Turn: A priest was attacked by one of the alien parasites. He awoke afterwards with a crisis of faith and decay powers, leading to him embracing evil and calling himself Cardinal Sin. Likewise, the man who held a shotgun on the priest was attacked and discovered he now had healing abilities and actually saved the priest before he died, now calling himself Samaritan. Samaritan ended up dying as he managed to cancel out Cardinal Sin's death touch.
- HULK MASH!-Up: Loose Cannon is a strong Ersatz for the Hulk, in that his power is connected directly to his anger, he's incredibly bulky and brawny, and lacks a certain intelligence. Loose Cannon's only original hook is that he has different stages of power, and his skin color changes as he climbs his little rage ladder.
- Meta Origin: Multiple Metahumans having a specialized reaction that allowed them to survive when aliens with a taste for spinal fluid fed on them.
- Poorly Disguised Pilot: The event is basically one massive series of stories intended as starting points for potential new series. Although a few of these "New Blood" characters were later featured in mini-series or ongoing series, the only one that managed any kind of success was Garth Ennis's Hitman, which spun out of The Demon.
- Sinister Minister: One of the characters created during the Crisis Crossover event in The DCU was Cardinal Sin; a disillusioned priest who gained superpowers and became a villain after being bitten by an alien space parasite. He has not reappeared since the original event. (Presumably he is not to be confused with the real-life Cardinal Jaime Sin of Manila.)
- Superhero Packing Heat: Ballistic, one of the "New Bloods". Another one, Gunfire, had the power to turn any handheld object into a gun.
- Take That!: A common running joke over at DC has been to mock the EEEEEXTREMEEE heroes who spun out of the event. This happened as early as the months after the storyline ended. During the Knightfall storyline, Jean-Paul Valley encounters two of them in the main titles. He tells one of them to get out of Gotham or he's going to get killed and the other quickly leaves town after his adventure with them is over. In a later instance, the JLA/Hitman crossover had The Flash claim that the Bloodlines heroes were a bunch of buffoons who nobody else in the superhero community wanted to team-up with. He then chalked up their infamously high mortality rate to a general lack of competence on their part. Many of them end up getting killed by Superboy-Prime later on down the line.
- Take That, Scrappy!:
- Almost all the titles spun off from the event flopped after less than a year, with the lead characters being relegated to Comic-Book Limbo. This was brought up in-universe in JLA/Hitman, where Green Lantern and The Flash mockingly claimed that the Bloodline heroes were a bunch of incompetent losers that everyone else in the superhero community looked down upon (this had extra self-congratulatory subtext from Garth Ennis who created Hitman).
- Earlier, Ennis had gotten in a similar jab by introducing the DC One Million version of the Bloodlines hero Gunfire, only to have the character accidentally kill himself in an utterly humiliating manner.Gunfire One Million: Oh my god, I turned my ass into a hand-grenade--
- Years later, the mainline Gunfire got dispatched by Prometheus almost comically easily, and had his hands cut off for good measure. The same fight saw his fellow Bloodpack member Anima accidentally get cut in half while trying to pursue Prometheus through a portal. Prometheus then proceeded to chuck her lifeless torso into the Void Between the Worlds outside his lair, which he explicitly likened to putting the trash out on the curb. Ouch. Ironically, this was in an issue that was dedicated to putting Prometheus through his own
Rescued from the Scrappy Heap arc. - And a number of them (specifically Mongrel, Geist, Ballistic, Nightblade and Razorsharp) were killed off by a casual glance (a heat vision glance, that is) from Superboy-Prime during Infinite Crisis.
