Five Unexpected Rogues That Could Appear on THE FLASH

The Rogues are coming to Central City, but some of them could potentially be ones you don't expect.

Later this fall, the much-anticipated DC Comics series The Flash is scheduled to begin airing on The CW and we already know some of Barry Allen's Rogues Gallery of supervillains are in the works for the first season.  Clyde Mardon, brother of Mark Mardon (The Weather Wizard) is the first villain The Flash faces off against in the pilot episode, while two more -- The Reverse-Flash and one other -- are reportedly hinted strongly at as well.  In addition, Captain Cold (one of executive producer Geoff Johns' favorites) has been teased recently by Johns on his Twitter account.

That's an impressive roster so far, but certainly isn't enough to fill a full 22-episode season to satisfy comic fans used to seeing numerous DC supervillains on Arrow.  And while the other big Rogues such as the Mirror Master, the Trickster, Heat Wave, Captain Boomerang and the Pied Piper will probably turn up sooner or later, I can think of five more villains Johns seemed to enjoy writing during his 2000-05 run on The Flash that could turn up one week to plague the Fastest Man Alive.

The Thinker -- Although originally created in the 1940s as an enemy of the original Flash, Jay Garrick, The Thinker was reworked as a member of Johnny Sorrow's modern Injustice Society in 2000's JSA #9 while Johns wrote the series.  He then brought the artificial intelligence system with a holographic body to battle the third Flash, Wally West, in Keystone City. 

With the Thinker's to integrate and control computer systems, it wouldn't take much to have him be a S.T.A.R. Labs creation out of control on the new Flash television series.

Blacksmith -- First appearing in Johns' The Flash: Iron Heights one-shot in 2001, Blacksmith operated an underground black market called The Network in Central and Keystone until she took an elixir from her ex-husband Goldface and gained the ability to reshape metal and merge it with flesh. 

As the founder of a new team of Rogues, Blacksmith could be introduced on the TV series as a simple black marketeer under investigation by the Central City Police Department before she acquires superpowers at some point.

Girder -- Another Rogue that debuted in The Flash: Iron Heights, Girder is a steelworker named Tony Woodward that causes a riot at the plant after assaulting a female co-worker and ends up thrown into a vat of molten metal that contains scraps from various S.T.A.R. Labs experiments.  His body is changed into living iron and he gains superhuman strength in the process.

The S.T.A.R. Labs component of Girder's origin practically writes itself for an episode, while his connection to Blacksmith as one of her Rogues in the comics could set up a potential Rogue War down the road should the series remain on the air long enough.

Magenta -- Created by Marv Wolfman and George Pérez in the pages of 1982's The New Teen Titans #17, Frances "Frankie" Kane was conceived as a girlfriend for Wally West who started manifesting powerful magnetic abilities in her late teens.  She eventually became a superheroine named Magenta, until Johns reworked the character as suffering from a form of dissociative identity disorder that turned her into a supervillain out for revenge against Wally.

If Wally ends up being introduced in the series similar to Roy Harper on Arrow, Magenta could be depicted as Wally's psychotic girlfriend with magnetic powers.  Or she could simply be streamlined to be a temporary love interest for Barry Allen that becomes severely problematic for both him and Iris West.

Cicada -- This mostly-forgotten villain first appeared in The Flash (vol.2) #171 in 2001.  Cicada was David Hersch, a man who murdered his wife during a thunderstorm and is struck by lightning.  The event gives him a vision of being chosen to live forever and resurrecting his wife.  Calling himself Cicada and transferring the life force of others to keep himself alive, he acquires a bunch of cult-like followers and in order to bring about his wife's resurrection, he instructs his followers to go out and kill people The Flash has saved with daggers that absorb their life energy.

Cicada would give the television series a bizarre serial killing spree to investigate, perhaps as a potential running subplot over the course of a few episodes.  And with Magenta as one of his followers in the comics, her involvement with Cicada could bring even more story potential to the table.

The Flash will premiere on The CW on Tuesday, October 7th at 8 p.m. EST.