Thinker (DC Comics)

The Thinker is the name of five supervillains appearing in American comic books published by DC Comics.

The first incarnation, Clifford DeVoe, is an enemy of Jay Garrick. The second, Clifford Carmichael, is an enemy of Firestorm. The third, Desmond Carter, is an enemy of Batman. The fourth, an A.I. version of the Thinker, is an enemy of the Justice Society of America. An unidentified incarnation of Thinker, introduced in the New 52, is an enemy of the Suicide Squad.

The character has been adapted from the comics into various forms of media, including television series and feature films. DeVoe made his live-action debut in The Flash, portrayed primarily by Neil Sandilands. In the DCEU, Peter Capaldi portrayed Gaius Grieves, an original variation of the Thinker in The Suicide Squad (2021)

The Clifford DeVoe incarnation of Thinker first appeared in All-Flash #12 (Fall 1943) and was created by Gardner Fox and Everett E. Hibbard.

In October 1947, the Thinker was one of the six original members of the Injustice Society, who began battling the Justice Society of America in All Star Comics #37 (Oct 1947).

The Cliff Carmichael incarnation of Thinker first appeared in Firestorm #1 (1978) and was created by Gerry Conway and Al Milgrom.

Conway recounted, "My original notion on Firestorm was to do a book that would be DC's complement to Spider-Man, in a sense. We would have a young adolescent male who gets superpowers and doesn't know quite what to do with them. My flip on it was that rather than being the science geek who was being picked upon by the jock, my hero would actually be the jock who was picked on by the geek, and that was going to be Cliff Carmichael's role."

In The Fury of Firestorm the Nuclear Man #50, the strap on Ronnie Raymond's football helmet is cut, and in the following issues Carmichael is suspected of the crime. Though Conway later said that he must have intended to ultimately reveal someone else as the culprit, John Ostrander took over as the series' writer and had Carmichael confess to cutting the strap. In Firestorm #99, Carmichael became the Thinker as part of a genre-wide trend in which civilian cast members were almost eliminated from superhero comics.