I missed his Seven Soldiers appearance, but it sounds to me as if Morrison was on the right track.

I missed his Seven Soldier's appearance, but it sounds to me as if Morrison was on the right track.

What if Dr. Thirteen faced the Spectre, and just pulled his hood off and said to everyone (ala Scooby-Doo) - "see? He's just this former cop who was pretending to be dead all this time". And suddenly, because of the power of complete skepticism, that's all the Spectre really is and ever has been. In a way, this would make Thirteen the most powerful character in the DCU! Well, I think that would be cool, anyway...

Some people have thought for a long time that Terry must be slightly delusional in order to be a skeptic given the world he inhabits; the creators of the VV one-shot picked up this idea and ran with it. But the idea was always a mistake. It's prefectly reasonable to be a skeptic in the DCU; indeed, in some ways, the DCU needs skeptics even more than we do. Consider matters extraterrestrial rather than supernatural. The fact that the Khunds invaded Australia doesn't mean that your cousin is telling the truth about having been abducted and probed. In fact, the publicly-acknowledged existence of some extraterrestrial life would only make it more tempting for some people to try to get attention with their own stories about aliens. They'd be more likely to be believed in the DCU than they are here. So one would be wise, in the DCU, to be skeptical about most stories about aliens one hears. There was an exchange between Bolt and Chase in an early issue of Chase that I thought got the tone just right. Chase comments that everyone knows the ship that crashed at Rosewll in 1947 was a Dominator scoutship. Bolt is utterly certain that that's just a cover story, and that the truth is far more sinister. It's just as reasonable to be a DCU skeptic about Bolt's theories as it is to be a skeptic in our world about extant Area 51 theories. The fact that there are some aliens doesn't make every story about them true, and probably invites even more false stories than we're confronted with in the real world.

If we return now to magic: an issue of James Robinson's Starman showed a Ted Knight who worked alongside Alan Scott, Dr. Fate, and the Spectre, and yet saw no need to believe in magic. After all, he had shown that great powers could be generated using science and engineering; why should he believe that his fellower JSAers' powers needed to be explained mystically? His encounter with Etrigan shook his certainty, but his initial set of beliefs wasn't absurd.

In the contemporary DCU, in which alien and metagenetic and engineered powers run rampant, it's all the more reasonable to think that "magic" is an unnecessary concept to explaining anything. If Terry were being written well, then he could plausibly think that a) most purported supernatural episodes are frauds, and b) those that aren't frauds can be rationally explained as being the result of powers that are themselves explicable through science, such as alien or metagenetic powers. In a world in which the DMN drug is scientifically well-understood to produce extreme physical and psychological changes to create apparent "demons," why should he believe that the next purported "demon" to come along is anything of the sort? In a world with a Superman and multiple Hawkmen and Hawkwomen, why shouldn't he believe that the famous Justice Leaguer Zauriel is just another alien? And in a world in which he has demonstrated, time and time again, that magic is often invoked as part of a deliberate fraud, why shouldn't he believe that the next instance of it that comes up is also likely to be a fraud, especially given that the residents of the DCU are even more likely than are residents of our world to believe such frauds?

Pairing Dr. 13 with the Stranger so often may have done the former a disservice, because, of course, in modern Stranger stories there is real magic and so Terry is always wrong. But Dr. 13 makes a living as a ghostbreaker because he's so often right; in the 95% of his life that doesn't involve the Phantom Stranger (but that mostlty happens off-panel) he successfully protects people from deception. He begins to look delusional only if we think that all his life is like his interactions with the Stranger and the Spectre.

At least not for a character like Doctor Thirteen who has no real good reason for co-existing with the rest of the DC Universe except, "That's just how it is done."

Part of the difficulty with using the character effectively is his constant protestations that ghosts, etc. DON'T EXIST, full stop, rather than any more nuanced view (he's sure they don't exist but could be persuaded with sufficiently compelling evidence, he concerns himself with revealing frauds and leaves the "real" supernatural to others, etc.).

If you put him in a world with any supernatural at all, you have the same credibility problem, just to a greater or lesser degree. If he's in a world with no supernatural at all (and that has to be maintained consistently throughout or you find yourself in situation #1 instead), as long as you keep the ghostbreaking activities at the forefront, it changes from "Will he find the paranormal?" to "How will he reveal that it's not paranormal?" This could work, in theory, but runs the risk of becoming repetitive or a gimmick-of-the-week series; even Scooby-Doo eventually abandoned this approach, and Mystery Inc. was never as doctrinaire as Dr. Thirteen about the possibility of the supernatural.

One approach to correct the innate imbalance would be to partner him, not with someone like the Stranger, but a Luna Lovegood type who readily believes the most improbable things, and to have the truth lie somewhere in the middle. (The X-Files sort of did this, but in the broad sense of paranormal vs. mundane Mulder was right a lot more often than Scully was.) This would also have the advantage of giving more options for keeping the reader guessing, rather than having it always be one or the other.

The "Big 3" concept, while in many ways a good thing, has some awkward implications for Wonder Woman, partly in the implicit requirement that she be roughly on a par with Superman in terms of power level.

For example, if you can take a punch from a Kryptonian, doesn't that make "bullets and bracelets" more like a parlor trick than an actual self-defense technique? (Explanations that make distinctions between the type of damage caused by a super-speed punch and a .45 slug are shaky even in "comic-book science" terms.)

And her Golden Age characterization, even setting aside the weird bondage stuff that *should* be set aside, was pretty idiosyncratic, and a lot of that idiosyncracy sadly goes by the wayside, like (as Scipio noted in the Absorbascon recently) Wonder Woman's identity as a girl in a majorette's uniform who really, [i]really[/i] likes marching! I'm kinda hoping Gail Simone brings that aspect back, somehow....

There are a lot of ways to write about a character who is skeptical about magic, but the problem is that the shared universe forces you to write about them in more or less the same way. For one thing, the shared universe forces you to acknowledge the existing system of magic. You can't change what Zatanna does, so if your character lives in the same world as Zatanna, then you as the writer have to work around what her creators have declared magic to be.

Captain Marvel is a perfect example of this. He is a similar enough character to Superman that writers have trouble finding ways to use him when they are sharing the same universe, but when they were completely separate, there was no such problem.

That was my original impression of Dr. Thirteen anyway. When he was in those old Phantom Stranger comics. He debunked all kinds of hoaxes but also missed realizing that some things (like the Stranger) were the real thing. And that does say some useful/interesting things about what being open-minded and using critical thinking really means.

I'm not saying whether he should or shouldn't be part of the DCU proper but the idea that he couldn't function as a "real world" character and have his book still be interesting...Honestly, it's a stronger premise than Monk before you write page one and Monk has how many Emmys? And pretty good ratings.

I'd prefer a sort of anti-John Constantine characterization in the DCU proper though, the kind of guy who could stand right next to Swamp Thing and insist it's just a trick of the light caused by swamp GAS. Still have him be right about whatever cases he's trying to debunk but otherwise acting absolutely pigheaded about the wonders around him. I think that could still be a good working model, and pretty funny, too.

"Last Son of Krypton my ass! Look at me, I'm Superman! Phone home! Klaatu barada nikto! Booga booga fuck off!"

Anyways, if you have a Mr. Terrific who embodies all of the things you’d want in a Dr. 13, then why even have the aforementioned Doc exist in the DCU?

Because Mr. Terrific doesn't embody everything I'd want in Dr. Thirteen. Mr. Terrific is unabashedly a superhero. He wears a costume, has super-gadgets, hangs out with other superheroes, and is supposedly the third smartest man in the world.

Dr. Thirteen isn't that. He is simply a detective. He's not a genius, he has no fantastic gadgetry, and although he may live in a world with superheroes, but he doesn't interact with them. He doesn't fight villains; he exposes frauds and cons and tries to bring some skeptical enlightenment to people who live in a society that's willing to believe any paranormal claim at the drop of a hat.

there is still a lot left in the concept of "skeptic in the real world." Hell, it’s a high concept that led to the X-Files lasting so damned long,

But the world of the X-Files was one where the paranormal WAS real. It never was set in the real world. Solid proof tended to be elusive, but most of the time it was Mulder's beliefs that were justified, not Scully's skepticism.

A comic about a skeptic who was truly in the real world would amount to something like "The Adventures of the Amazing Randi." And as much as I love Randi, a comic book about his debunking wouldn't be as interesting as one about Dr. Thirteen in the DCU.

Anyways, if you have a Mr. Terrific who embodies all of the things you'd want in a Dr. 13, then why even have the aforementioned Doc exist in the DCU? It just goes back to the original point of DC having to cram everything into its multiverse marketing scheme.

I'd prefer Dr. 13 to be in Vertigo, if nothing else.

You just need writers creative enough to make it work. Period.

I'd point at Seven Soldiers.