6 Comic Book Characters with Time-Travel Powers

What is a comic book blogger supposed to do when there have already been several Ant-Man films and I’ve already used up all the best List of Six ideas for those? I’ve done bug superheroes. I’ve done shrinking superheroes. I’ve done growing superheroes. I’ve done armored bug superheroes. I’ve got nothing left! I’m all tapped out on exploiting Ant-Man and the Wasp for list ideas!

So how about we do Kang the Conqueror?

He looks comfy

The next big bad of the Marvel Cinematic Universe will be Kang the Conqueror, and he’s making his big screen debut this week in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. I’m excited! I can’t wait to see this film and I hope it lives up to all my excitement. Ant-Man is my favorite Avenger and I’m excited to see how Kang kicks butt and makes an impact. And to celebrate his awesomeness, let’s take a look at other time traveling superheroes. Kang the Conqueror is a master of time, bending it to his will. And he’s not the only one capable of such feats in the funny pages.

I’m not talking about characters who have time traveled, like Bishop or Booster Gold. I’m talking about comic book heroes and villains who can manipulate time itself! Join me after the jump to see who I found.


6. Waverider


Does time come in waves?

Waverider was a new superhero introduced for the Armageddon event at DC Comics. That event is best known as the time fans guessed that Captain Atom would be the revealed as the big bad, so DC editors and writers changed gears mid-story to reveal the villain was Hawk instead. Because that made so little less sense. Waverider was a normal dude who was sent back in time to discover the secret identity of the villainous Monarch before he conquered the world, and this merged our hero with the time stream. He could time travel at will and predict a person’s possible future. And he looked very 90s.


5. Trevor Fitzroy


Fashion icon

I said this list wasn’t going to be about characters who have traveled through time, but the question remains, how did that happen in the first place? How did Bishop wind up in the past to join the X-Men? Because he has an enemy in the future, Trevor Fitzroy, whose mutant power is to absorb energy from people and use it to open time portals that only go one-way. Fitzroy is an all-around bad dude and nobody really likes him. He’s probably most famous for randomly having green hair, which he accessorizes with green clothing. Style points to him, at least.


4. Timeslip


What does her costume even mean?

Hold on to your butts because we’re only getting started with mutants with some kind of time manipulation powers. Here comes Timeslip, a mutant who joined the New Warriors in the mid-90s with the power to exchange her consciousness with either her past or future self. She also eventually developed the power to manipulate time around herself so that it looked like she had super speed. That’s always fun. Her powers were used for some stories about prophecies and whatnot before she disappeared into relative obscurity when the New Warriors comic came to an end. She pops up in small bit roles every now and then, never doing anything major.


3. Tempo


Weird, meaningless costumes are apparently going to be a trend on this list

Another entry on this list, another mutant with the power to manipulate time. Tempo has really come to prominence in recent years, even joining some X-Men teams. But she mostly spent her time being wasted as a member of the Mutant Liberation Front, one of those bad guy mutant teams that never really amounted to much. Heather Tucker has the power to speed up or slow down other people, things and even herself. And that power set is being pushed in all sorts of new directions now that she’s gaining new prominence. I’m all for her increased exposure, because she seems fun.


2. Tempus


Mini-skirts are serious business

Seriously, I didn’t expect this list to be all mutants! But I didn’t want to make this list just a bunch of uber-powerful cosmic beings who can manipulate everything, including time. I wanted some ordinary, rando characters who wound up with a pretty impressive super power. And here comes Eva Bell, a newer addition to the X-Men franchise who has been sidelined in the Krakoa Era, even as she’s considered one of the most important mutants on the island. Eva is an Australian mutant with the power to create time bubbles, where time can either be slowed or sped up within the bubble. She can also manipulate these bubbles to travel backwards or forwards in time.


1. Chronos


Drink him in

Of course I saved the best goober for last. Chronos is one of those classic comic book weirdos created in the Golden Age of comics who only exists to be part of the funny books. He was just an ordinary dude who spent his time in jail getting himself in tune with the ticking of a clock. When he got out, he designed a clock-based costume and started committing clock-based crimes, eventually becoming arch nemesis of The Atom. Seriously, the Atom. Anyway, this life of clock and time-based crimes eventually earned Chronos real time travel powers, and earned him a bunch of weird time travel stories. But c’mon, look at that dude. That was his super villain costume. Apparently he never went to the future to learn any fashion sense.

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About Sean Ian Mills

Hello, this is Sean, the Henchman-4-Hire! By day I am a mild-mannered newspaper reporter in Central New York, and by the rest of the day I'm a pretty big geek when it comes to video games, comic books, movies, cartoons and more.

Posted on February 15, 2023, in Comics, Lists of Six!. Bookmark the permalink. Leave a comment.

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