Typical day for your average time-travelling adventurer.
Rip Hunter is a Time Travel-themed superhero from DC Comics. Created in 1959 for the anthology series Showcase, he appeared for a few issues before getting his own title Rip Hunter...Time Master which lasted from 1961 to 1965. Since then he has continued to appear as a supporting character in various books and storylines, including Booster Gold, starring the eponymous fellow time traveller.
Outside of comics, Rip has appeared in Batman: The Brave and the Bold and Legends of Tomorrow. He is played by Arthur Darvill in the latter.
Tropes applying to Rip Hunter include:
- Alternate Self: After DC rebooted its Multiverse for the first time with Crisis on Infinite Earths, the original Rip continued to exist alongside a new version from the new Earth.
- Badass Normal: Has no superpowers.
- Civvie Spandex: In Booster Gold, Rip swaps out space suits for more modern clothing.
- C-List Fodder: Zig-zagged, as he's surprisingly resilient given how often DC does reality-altering Crisis Crossovers. His original Pre-Crisis self survived the original Crisis and Zero Hour: Crisis in Time!, but might have been killed off during a Superman storyline in the 2000s, while his Post-Crisis self survived until the Time Crash of Flashpoint. Then he was revealed to be alive for Convergence, which ended with all DC timelines and realities restored, so at least two of him are out there somewhere.
- Crisis Crossover: Tends to have a role in these, since the timeline is often at stake.
- Darker and Edgier: His modern portrayal compared to Pre-Crisis leans toward this, being more manipulative.
- Future Spandex: Pre-Crisis and sometimes Post-Crisis.
- Good is Not Nice: Post-Crisis Rip is out to protect the timeline, but he has no problem lying to or manipulating people to do that.
- Kaleidoscope Eyes: Rip's eye colour tends to change a lot.
- Kaleidoscope Hair: Same with his hair. Is it brown, ginger, strawberry blond, regular blond? Yes.
- The Lost Lenore: Bonnie Baxter, as of Booster Gold vol 2, apparently having been erased from existence in some way Rip can't undo. Taunting him about this is inadvisable.
- Luke, You Are My Father: Booster Gold vol 2 revealed him to be the son of Booster Gold.
- Mysterious Past: A lot about post-Crisis Rip is kept hidden by Rip himself, to stop his enemies going after him or his family to kill them.
- Not Wearing Tights: Sometimes, Post-Crisis.
- Pet the Dog: After much time spent lecturing Booster on how he cannot change time, Rip does make a little cheat to rescue Booster's sister from her own death.
- Plot Hole: For someone who goes out of his way to stop people from messing up time for their own ends, he does absolutely nothing to undo the Reverse Flash's murder of Nora Allen.
- Science Hero: Invented his own time travel devices.
- Set Right What Once Went Wrong: Often he's involved in such plots.
- Time Police: As one of the Linear Men. Later on, he locked the Linear Men away (and they were pretty unhappy about that fact).
- Time Travel: His whole thing.
