Welcome back for another monthly edition of our Q&A column here on DC.com. I’m Alex Jaffe, better known to the DC Community as HubCityQuestion, where over Discord and other social media channels, I help people find their way through the vast cosmos of the DC Universe with crucial answers, context and missing pieces to the puzzles of continuity. Below are just a few of the questions I’ve received this month in our official Discord server that I thought might be of particular interest you. Let’s learn something new.
 

Jason Linag asks:

I was doing some digging on the Manhunters because of the Lanterns TV series, and I keep seeing websites claiming that the Guardians of the Universe based the Manhunter androids on the Martians’ Manhunter program. But as I remember, the Manhunter androids predate the Martian race by a long time. Where exactly was this retcon from? Or is this just some misinformation spread by accident?

Your suspicion that this popular connection is the result of a faulty game of a telephone is correct, Jason. There is no real connection between the Guardians of the Universe’s Manhunters and Martian Manhunters. The tenuous connection can most likely be traced back to a misreading of a scene referenced in 2000’s Martian Manhunter #21, where the Guardians appeal to the Martians to accept their protection after their prior Manhunter experiment had failed—and claimed that their new program, the Green Lantern Corps, drew inspiration from the Martians’ peacekeeping system. Even there, no connection is directly made between Martian peacekeeping forces and the Guardians’ failed Manhunters.

The truth is simply this: the only connection between the Guardians’ Manhunters, introduced in Justice League of America as a Bronze Age reinvention of the human Manhunter characters that appeared in issues of Adventure Comics in the 1940s and “John Jones, Manhunter from Mars,” as he was referred to in the 1950s Detective Comics features in which he originally appeared, is simply linguistic drift. In the mid-twentieth century, “Manhunter” was simply a word used to describe law enforcement and investigators who specialized in tracking down and capturing criminals. It’s much less commonly used today, but the context at the time was just as a dramatic synonym for “Detective.”
 

Maximervis Mind asks:

When was the first time Captain Marvel used the "Shazam!" lightning offensively (ala the fight against Superman in Kingdom Come)?

The Captain’s apocalyptic battle with Superman in Kingdom Come was the first time we ever saw him call down his lightning as an attack. However, that isn’t to say it was the first time it was presented as a possibility. The first character we see use the power of Shazam in that capacity was Black Adam for his second bout against the Marvel Family in 1977’s Shazam! #28. Just a year later, in Gerry Conway and Rich Buckler’s 1978 Superman vs. Shazam! special, a magically enraged Billy Batson considers using his own lightning in the same way in a battle against Superman, but the wizard Shazam convinces him otherwise. With 1996’s Kingdom Come, the Captain receives no such counsel, and there we see Billy call down the lightning as an offensive strike for the first time.
 

Sophies kamen rider best friend asks:

What’s the deal with Dinah Lance and her scream? I feel like she rarely, if ever, uses the scream. Did anything cause her to not like using it or is it just a personal choice?

You can credit Dinah Lance’s screamless years to Mike Grell, who brought her into his Green Arrow run as a supporting character starting with his 1987 Green Arrow: The Longbow Hunters miniseries. With the intention of writing a more grounded series without superpowers to contend with, Black Canary is beaten, captured and tortured to the brink of death investigating a gang of cocaine dealers. While she ultimately survives, her sustained injuries leave her without access to her powers for the duration of Mike Grell’s run, and for quite some time to follow.

Like her mother back in the Golden Age, Dinah would remain a purely martial arts-based character until 1999, when her partnership with Oracle in the Birds of Prey would allow her to compensate for her lost powers with access to a cache of sonic grenades. This stopgap would provide her with sonic abilities once more until 2001’s Birds of Prey #35, where exposure to a Lazarus Pit restored her access to her powers. So, if you’re reading any of Black Canary’s appearances between 1987 and 2001 and wondering why Dinah isn’t using her scream to take out some enemies at long distance, that’s what’s going on.
 

Rod, Lord of the Dance asks:

So, is Duela Dent/Joker’s Daughter actually Two-Face’s daughter? Is she also Gilda’s, or is her mother a prior relationship of Harvey’s? And have Gilda and Duela ever actually interacted?

No, Gilda and Duela have never interacted. The true parentage of Bat-Family antagonist turned temporary Bronze Age Teen Titan Duela Dent, aka Joker’s Daughter, aka Harlequin and many other Gotham villain-based junior sobriquets, was always a mystery maintained through Crisis on Infinite Earths and beyond. Since then, she’s perhaps fittingly been provided with two credible origin stories. The first was in the 2007 series Countdown, where we learned that Duela was actually a displaced survivor of the morality-flipped Earth-3, where her true parents were the Jokester, that world’s heroic Joker equivalent, and Evelyn Dent, a hero who called herself Three-Face—an origin which made her, in a way, both a Dent and Joker’s Daughter.

Her second origin was presented in the New 52’s Batman: The Dark Knight #23.4: The Joker’s Daughter, where she bears no true relation to any Gotham villains and just appears to be a disturbed child with normal parents who finds the Joker’s discarded face and wears it over her own. Like her namesake father in spirit, we suppose that if she must have a past, it might as well be multiple choice.
 

Matthew asks:

How did Jason Todd come back as Red Hood? At the end of Under the Red Hood, he’s pierced with a batarang to the neck—which is a severe wound, I would imagine, given the face he made on impact—and then exploded. That was a given fate I thought. Was it retconned to where he never died at the end?

This is a fairly frequent question I get from new readers of Under the Red Hood, so I thought I’d take some time to address it here. While the reaction to the batarang attack was illustrated as strikingly severe, I do not believe it was ever Judd Winick’s intention that Batman was trying to kill his own son in this scene.

First and foremost, consider the context. Given the entire moral dilemma of the story was about whether or not Batman was capable of taking a life,  it simply wouldn’t make any sense for Batman to kill Jason in order to protect the Joker. A second clue to what’s going on here is that, throughout the story, Jason repeatedly shares an anecdote about how shoulder wounds always look a lot more fatal than they actually are. That’s a hint to the nature of this moment in the climax—striking the flesh right between Jason’s neck and shoulder, the viewer sees what might look like a fatal wound to someone who didn’t know better, but which, in Jason’s own words, was quite simple to patch up.

Lastly, there’s the matter of the explosion… To that, all I can say is Jason has quite notably been through explosions before. The rule of comics has always been “no body, no death.” An exploding building is never fatal until someone is seen on the page carrying the body out. After all, we’re talking about a kid who was trained by the master of the disappearing act.
 

That’s the end of our time here in the column, but I personally can always make time for someone curious about comics. Stop by #ask-the-question in the DC Discord server whenever you like, and you’ll find me there to help you through the woods of our vast media library. All you have to do is ASK…THE QUESTION.
 

Alex Jaffe is the author of our monthly "Ask the Question" column and writes about TV, movies, comics and superhero history for DC.com. Follow him on Bluesky at @AlexJaffe and find him in the DC Official Discord server as HubCityQuestion.

NOTE: The views and opinions expressed in this feature are solely those of Alex Jaffe and do not necessarily reflect those of DC or Warner Bros. Discovery, nor should they be read as confirmation or denial of future DC plans.