#temoti

Not canonically, but the Silver Age Rogues do in fact have semi-canonical birthdays! The reason it's only the Silver Age Rogues is because the dates are from the 1976 DC calendar, in which the nerds at DC gave all sorts of birthdays, anniversaries, and relevant dates to various DC characters. Somebody has helpfully listed them all here.

Specifically the Rogues and other Flash villains:

Jan 13: Birthday of Grodd, the super-gorilla 22: Birthday of Roscoe Dillon (The Top)

Feb 18: Birthday of Eobard Thawne, Prof. Zoom (The Reverse Flash)

March 13: Birthday of Mick Rory (Heat Wave) 23: Birthday of James Jesse (Trickster)

April 19: Birthday of Samuel Scudder (Mirror Master)

May 19: Birthday of George "Digger" Harkness (Captain Boomerang)

June 4: Birthday of Mark Mardon (Weather Wizard) 22: Birthday of Hartley Rathaway, alias Thomas Peterson and Henry Darrow (Pied Piper)

July 20: Birthday of Al Desmond (formerly Mr. Element and Dr. Alchemy)

November 22: Birthday of Abra Kadabra

December 11: Birthday of Len Snart (Captain Cold)

The reason I say it's "semi-canon" is because DC's probably forgotten about this (it's from 50 years ago, lol), and on occasion they've contradicted birthdays and dates from the calendar (Barry Allen has notably had his birthday changed from March 19th in the calendar to May 13th). Any date stated in the comics would definitely take canonicity over this.

Lisa debuted in 1977, so she wasn't included in the calendar, but the Injustice 2 game gave her a birthday of February 5th, so I include that with my Rogue birthday posts. It's also only semi-canonical because it's from a video game.

It's been a while, yeah. DC really likes sticking with a few core Flash villains and the others seem to be mostly out of luck...but hopefully somebody will show him some love 🤞

Oh that's awesome, I'm glad to hear it!! :D And thanks for asking!

So there are a bunch of reasons, some of which are personal and some are "I just think he's neat".

-I absolutely fell in love with his ridiculous Silver Age backstory when I first heard it (he taught himself to spin and it made him smarter). It's so stupid but it's SO FUN. His gimmicked tops and tech are fun too, and it's sad that DC has pretty much ditched that aspect of him.

-I really like his relationship with Lisa, as they're cute together and complement each other well. Both were far more stable and happy together than they were separately, and what we saw of their relationship was loving and healthy.

-before his death, he was generally mild-mannered, amiable and really dorky. That changed after he died, but…

-even though he became a worse person after death, it makes for a very tragic and interesting story and I admire his determination to not let death or Hell stop him. All the other Rogues who returned to life before Flashpoint did so due to the intervention of a divine/powerful being (Neron and the White Lantern entity), but he did it through his own hard work to escape Hell repeatedly and find himself new bodies to live again. He's very independent and extremely strong-willed, and I appreciate those qualities…though they're the main reasons he doesn't get along with the other Rogues very well.

-also, I find his status quo as a ghost living in borrowed bodies neat and interesting. DC hasn't done much with it over the past 25 years, but it's fun to think about and especially to write about.

-he is desperate for you to NOT think this, but he's got a distinctive wet cat quality that I enjoy in supervillains.

-and people kinda forget this, but a fair bit of post-Flashpoint Rogues continuity was obviously taken from his history (James' pressuring parents + spending years in solitary at Iron Heights + an obsession to win and beat everyone, Lisa getting separated from her boyfriend by a tragedy and essentially becoming a ghost). He was the first of the Rogues to die and the first to explicitly have powers.

On a personal level, he reads strongly as autistic and that's appealing to me as an autistic person. Funny thing is, I wasn't immediately aware of it and it took me a couple of years to realize, but I was probably subconsciously drawn to him for that reason.

I've often been drawn to unpopular characters and to villains, and he's just about the epitome of unpopular villains :] It took me a long time to understand why that is, but at risk of rambling too much about personal problems, I realized a few years ago that I grew up as the scapegoat in my family and gravitate to unpopular villains because that's the role I was cast in.

Yeah, I'm with you on the New 52 😅

As for the best, it probably depends on what you like about the Rogues, or how you want them portrayed. There's no question that Geoff Johns was the first writer to make some of them well-rounded characters, and he was the writer who established many of the characterizations and tropes we now take for granted, such as the Rogue Rules and making Captain Cold the wise badass leader. That said, a lot of people have justifiable complaints about his Rogues (making them edgier and meaner, for instance, and his great love of pointless retcons), so his Rogues are far from perfect.

Pre-Crisis Rogues are tons of silly fun, and that's how some people like them to be portrayed, but there's no denying that the writing in those days was pretty shallow and none of the Rogues are well-developed. It's completely valid to like and prefer that portrayal, but again, the stories and the characters aren't especially deep.

Mark Waid wrote a great Trickster and Abra Kadabra, and his Pied Piper (by then reformed, so he wasn't a Rogue) was generally good, but overall he didn't handle the other Rogues particularly well. So it's easy to love Waid's James and Kadabra and they are pretty cool, but the others tend to not do so well under his pen.

William Messner-Loebs had a fun run on the Flash, and he was the writer to reform Piper, so that's a popular run too. He did fun stuff with a handful of other Rogues, but TBH some of them were kind of goofy and a bit out of character. They were very much in the spirit of the pre-Crisis Rogues, but Messner-Loebs' run was after Crisis (when DC was trying to be more mature) so they do stand out a bit.

And there's lots of other writers, of course, but a fair number of them either barely used the Rogues or did questionable things with them. Joshua Williamson rebuilt the Flash book after the New 52 and deserves credit for that, but he handled a lot of Rogues poorly or just adequately (his Eobard is great, however).

So in the end, it all comes down to what interpretation(s) you like best, and going from there. And in comics you always have to take the good with the bad, so maybe you love some aspects of one writer's Rogues but need to accept that perhaps other parts aren't so great.

Sure thing! You didn't specify an era so I chose a bunch (and the last three are AUs).

Favorite rogue??

They can be father-son, trust me vision