Ted Kord

* Ted Kord
* Blue Beetle
* DCIU Concept Art

Ted is the only child of Thomas Kord (at one time the richest man in America) and his ex-wife, Delores Winters (yes, the famed Hollywood actress). Ted was not yet born when his parents divorced. Ted's father used insanely high-priced lawyers to guarantee he would win sole custody of his son. Still, considering his parents, Ted was a born celebrity and as he grew older, he would only become more interesting.

At age three, Kord family doctors noted that Ted's mental development was beyond remarkable and thus Thomas provided his son with the best mentors and experts. After a few years of this, Ted had little interest in being mentored and would sabotage his mentor's lessons by pulling elaborate pranks. Deciding that his son needed a friend, Thomas Kord had his chief of security, Jonah Carter, bring his son to the mentoring sessions and scheduled playdates. Though he had objections to having a "bought" friend, Ted and Michael Jon Carter became the best friends and partners in their elaborate pranks, much to their fathers' dismay, still Thomas Kord allowed it to continue as at least Ted was managed. This arrangement lasted for a couple years.

When the boys' fathers died in a plane crash, Ted was thirteen. Due to his age, Ted’s entire inheritance, including Kord Omniversal was to be managed by a team of high-priced lawyers until Ted turned of legal age. It did not take Teddy long to discover how fast his inheritance was being squandered, so he went to court and had himself declared legally emancipated, thus earning the right to personally oversee his vast inheritance.

Though the gossip mags had a field day with his development, the finance section of newspapers across the country had less then favorable ideas about this. When news broke of Kord Omniversal being run by a teenage boy, the company almost didn't survive the stock freefall; but Ted had a few tricks up his sleeve. Upon taking charge, Ted requested the Scarab of Kha-Ef-Re, a Khandaqui medallion in his father’s European collection, be sent back to Coast City. Within days of its arrival, Ted had built a special device for housing the artifact and analyzing it. Extrapolating the data and determining the medallion to be of alien origin, as Ted had suspected, Ted was able to design a number of innovations. In two years' time, Kord Omniversal was seeing record profits, most of it coming out of Research and Development arm of the corporation: Kord-Tech, which Ted was personally overseeing… and Ted was only releasing the most boring of the tech he was designing. You see, this teenage mogul had big plans in store for the best cutting-edge tech he was designing… but for this plan to work, Ted was going to need a friend he could count on. Of course, he could only think of one person: his best friend, Michael Jon Carter.

On the heels of their time with the Titans and their short-lived adventures in Hub City, Ted turned to Coast City with Michael Jon Carter and reclaimed control of his company from his uncle, Jarvis Kord. With his company back under his control, Ted once again had access to his workshop and the alien device that he had used to base his and Booster's gadgetry on, and so he began to give their crime fighting gear a much needed upgrade. As Ted was busy with this, Booster Gold became obsessed with bolstering their "portfolio."

After being invited to join the Justice League, Ted had a short-lived romance with Tora Olafsdotter but got dumped in favor of Guy Gardner. Naturally, Ted took this rather hard and he may have retreated to his workshop for much of 2010. Supposedly, when Michael was finally able to convince Ted to come back to super heroics, he had gained some weight and couldn't fit back into his suit and required a month to get back into shape. I only know this because Booster likes to remind Ted of this, occasionally calling him "Blimpy Beetle."

Still carrying on his prankish ways, Ted often kills downtime during monitor duty planning elaborate pranks which he will later carry out with Booster. The League's more serious heroes tend to be their targets, though Ted Kord has a strict "no messing with Batman" policy, on account of his deep desire to have Batman's approval.

On one very well known instance, Ted and Michael found J'onn's Choco stashes in both the Hall of Justice and the Watchtower and made a concerted effort to not only empty out every box the martian's sandwich cookies, leaving the hollowed out cartons for J'onn to find; but then they also hid the contents of the boxes in the Bug and then proceeded to go to every one of J'onn's store within a three mile radius of the Hall of Justice and buy out their supply of Chocos. Needles to say, J'onn had a bit of a nearly nuclear-meltdown while Ted and Michael nearly peed themselves from laughter.

On a personal note, I am well-aware that Ted has developed a huge crush on me though I have been honest with Ted, he still seems to hope that Dick'll never come to his senses.