This character is connected to my Black Scarab/Ebony Beetle character. One day I was just randomly thinking of how I would like to see DC Comics’ Blue Beetle (the Ted Kord version) teamed up with Booster Gold in a live action movie called BLUE AND GOLD. It would be like one of those action/comedy buddy-cop films, ala Lethal Weapon and Bad Boys. As I starting thinking more about what kind of story I’d tell, I thought about maybe using the idea myself with some public domain characters. I thought instead I could use the original public domain Blue Beetle and team him up with The Black Terror, and instead of Blue and Gold they’d be BLACK AND BLUE.

The Black Terror was created by Richard E. Hughes and Don Gabrielson in 1941 as Bob Benton, a pharmacist who developed his own special potion that gave him super strength and invulnerability (except for his head, as it was said that a strong blow to the head could incapacitate him), and was relatively popular and regularly published for the next 8 years. But his original publisher, Nedor Comics went out of business and The Black Terror, like many superheroes of the time, eventually fell into the public domain. Nevertheless the character has turned out to be one of the more popular PD superheroes, ever since knowledge of PD become more common. Since the 1980’s Black Terror has been revived and used by multiple publishers in different capacities, in recent years he’s been most extensively used by Dynamite Entertainment, who have had him as a supporting character in several miniseries as well having published the character in his own solo titles.

It’s the character’s ongoing popularity that made me a bit wary of using him, just because so many other creators have. So I thought one way to revamp him and make my version unique was to switch the colors between the two heroes, with the Blue Beetle becoming the Black Beetle and the Black Terror becoming The Blue Terror! As CODY CONYERS was offering a very cheap deal for full-color commissions at the time, I contacted him and had him draw both characters.

I don’t have as much backstory for him worked out as I came up with for The Black Beetle. I wasn’t originally going for the “meta” aspect with either character, but now that I am I figure in this world The Black Terror was also a popular mainstream comic-book superhero that was continuously published since the 1940’s and has been adapted into other media over the decades, ala a Batman or Spider-Man. And this man is a friend of Gary Daniels, maybe his best friend since childhood, and while Gary’s favorite character was The Blue Beetle, his was The Black Terror. And after Gary starts acting as a real-life vigilante in his Black Beetle costume, this man decides to join him and creates a Blue Terror costume for himself. And that’s how BLACK AND BLUE get started!