Rip Hunter, Time Master
Rip Hunter, Time Master (German: Rip Hunter, ruler of time , analogously: Rip Hunter, conqueror of time and space ) is the title of a series of comic publications that the American publisher DC-Comics has been publishing since 1959.
The stories about Rip Hunter, which can be assigned to the science fiction and adventure genre, go back to the author Jack Miller and the cartoonist Ruben Moreira, who developed the character and the plot underlying their adventures and designed the early comics in the series.
Release dates
DC Comics brought the first "Rip Hunter" stories onto the market in 1959 as part of the showcase anthology series, which changed from issue to issue . The first Rip Hunter story - from the pen of the author Jack Miller and his illustrator Ruben Moreira - appeared in issue # 20 of the series, which appeared in May – June 1959. After this booklet and a few other issues of the following year filled with "Rip Hunter" stories had sold satisfactorily, DC began in 1961 with the publication of an independent Rip Hunter series, which was called Rip Hunter. Time Master and the first issue appeared in March – April 1961.
From then on, the series appeared every two months and ran until November – December 1965 when it was discontinued with issue # 29 due to dwindling sales. In addition to Miller and Moreira, the illustrator Bill Ely worked on the series.
In the early 1980s, more Rip Hunter Stories followed, which DC published as a so-called "Back-Up-Feature" in the back of the booklets of the DC Comics Presents series, the main stories of which were about the adventures of the hero Superman . Between 1987 and 1989 some concepts from the "Rip Hunter" stories played a leading role in the serene journey through time series Booster Gold by Dan Jurgens .
In 1990, an eight-part miniseries called Time Masters by the authors Bob Wayne and Lewis Shiner followed , which deepened and modernized Rip Hunter's background story. Since then, the character Rip Hunter and the concepts that revolve around him have mainly been used as a supporting character and instrumental set pieces in other series such as Superman , JSA or the mini-series Zero Hour and The Kingdom . Rip Hunter currently appears as a regular supporting character in the new, second Booster Gold series.
action
Rip Hunter describes the adventures of a scientist and adventurer of the same name who travels through space and time with the help of a technical device he has made himself, the so-called "Time Sphere", in order to research the past and the future. On these journeys, on which Hunter was accompanied in his early adventures in the 1950s and 1960s by his assistant Jeff Smith , his girlfriend Bonnie Baxter and her little brother Corky , he usually has to face all kinds of "commercial" challenges from the hazard repertoire of the science fiction genre - such as dinosaurs, aliens, monsters and talking monkeys.
The modern Rip Hunter stories from 1990 depict his struggle against the mysterious Illuminati, while his guest appearances in series such as Superman or JSA deal with his membership in the Linear Men , a kind of police force to protect the flow of time. The Linear Men also equip Hunter - who is now gray - with an optical implant that covers his right eye and part of his field of vision. In the miniseries The Kingdom , Hunter helps Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman fight the arch-villain Gog, who is traveling through time and dimensions, and falls out with the Linear Men because he violates their iron principles of maintaining the integrity of the timestream. In the Superman saga Our World's At War , Hunter and the rest of the Linear Men are killed, but paradoxically they survive because their "essence" remains, which enables them to telepsychoplastically form new material bodies from non-matter to be able to. Later, however, the essence of the Linear Men is scattered by the divine beings of the quintessence, so that they die. In the place of the "old hunter", who comes from the "old universe" and who now - after being one of only a handful of characters the end of his actual universe [Pre Crisis DC-Universe] in the epic storyline " Crisis on Infinite Earths "from 1986 had miraculously survived until the DC Comics stories of 2005 - after a long" delay "but died, another Hunter takes his place: his counterpart (Rip Hunter II) from the new one , after the 1986 "Crisis" storyline launched, Universum (Post Crisis DC-Universe), which now belatedly takes up his role as "Rip Hunter of the New Universe", which had previously been occupied by the remaining "old Hunter" .
In the second "Booster Gold" series, which has been running since 2007, Hunter - who is now young and "flawless" and no longer white-haired and equipped with cybernetic prostheses - now lives in a bunker below Arizona, where he does all sorts of things Amassed time travel trophies and devotional items, the title hero of the series and his robot friend Skeets by giving them advice and providing them with technological assistance.
In the series Infinite Crisis and 52 , Hunter plays a major role by revealing the "true nature" of the universe as a sequence of "parallel earths" separated by various energetic vibrations, which together form what is known as Hypertime, and thus decisive for the victory of the Heroes of the series (Superman and others) contributes and reveals the existence of the multiverse .
In other media
In the television series Legends of Tomorrow , the character of Rip Hunter was one of the main characters. He is portrayed here by Arthur Darvill .