Boomerang (Fred Myers): the failed villain who became a cult icon of the Spider-Man universe

There is a whole category of villain in the Marvel universe that the comics long kept in the shadow of the iconic super-baddies. Not the evil geniuses with unfathomable IQs, not the powerhouse monsters who make skyscrapers tremble, not the psychopaths with the faces of angels. Just losers. Blokes who get up every morning in a ridiculous costume, with a themed gadget nobody could take seriously, and the unshakeable conviction that this time they will pull off the heist of their lives. Frederick 'Fred' Myers, alias Boomerang, is probably the purest representative of this brotherhood of second-rate villains. A former Australian baseball pitcher thrown out of Major League Baseball for taking bribes, reinvented as a mercenary in a purple and yellow costume, equipped with an arsenal of rigged boomerangs. On paper, it is all absurd. And yet, ever since his first appearance in Tales to Astonish in 1966, Boomerang has never left the Marvel universe. Better still: from 2013 onwards he became one of the best-loved and most tragicomic characters in the Spider-Man pantheon.

This paradox — the surprising longevity of a character everyone should have forgotten long ago — is worth dwelling on. Because behind the jokes about his boomerangs and his overdone Australian accent, Fred Myers says something very deep about the nature of evil in Marvel comics. Not the monumental evil of a Kingpin ruling over the New York underworld with the coolness of a CEO, nor the scientific sophistication of a Doctor Octopus able to reprogram his own brain. No: the mediocre, weary, almost likeable evil of the bloke who botches his robberies and has to talk his landlord into giving him another month to pay the rent every week.

Who is Fred Myers? The origin of an Australian turned boomerang thrower

Frederick Myers was born in the suburbs of Sydney, Australia. A physically gifted child, he developed a talent for precision throwing very early on: cricket balls, assorted projectiles and, of course, the traditional boomerang, which he handled with a dexterity his friends found unsettling. His parents emigrated to the United States when Fred was about ten, and that is when his path veered towards American baseball. Blessed with a prodigious arm and millimetre-perfect accuracy, young Myers climbed the minor-league ladder quickly before joining the Major League as a professional pitcher. For a few brilliant seasons, a glittering future was predicted for him. Then came the scandal that destroyed his career: Fred took money to fix games, was exposed by the league, banned for life from all professional sport and branded a public cheat.

It was in this disgrace that the criminals of the Marvel universe came looking for him. A criminal organisation working for the Secret Empire — one of those shadowy groups that populate Marvel — spotted Myers's wasted talent and offered him a new trade: mercenary. They funded the design of a themed costume, supplied him with an arsenal of boomerangs rigged by their engineers, and gave him a mission. That is how Frederick Myers became Boomerang. His first public appearance in that costume dates from Tales to Astonish #81 in 1966, written by Stan Lee — the same Stan Lee who co-created Spider-Man a few years earlier with Steve Ditko, the visual architect of the web-slinger. Originally, Boomerang was not even a Spider-Man enemy: he fought the Hulk, the Inhuman Triton and various other Marvel heroes before his path finally crossed that of the hero from Queens in the late 1970s.

What makes Fred Myers's origin fascinating is that it is utterly devoid of heroic tragedy. No traumatic death of a loved one, no scientific accident turning an innocent scholar into a monster, no noble quest for revenge that might have tipped the wrong way. Just a bloke who cheated at baseball, got sacked, and took the first criminal job he was offered. The triviality of his origin is precisely what makes him, decades later, so human.

The costume, the arsenal and the rigged boomerangs that define the villain

Visually, Boomerang is a textbook case of Silver Age Marvel design. A skin-tight dark purple costume with yellow accents, triangular wings fixed to his sides that let him glide short distances, and a full helmet that covers his whole face and leaves only his eyes visible. The overall effect suggests a 1960s comic-book character as much as an amateur cosplayer who has taken his hobby a little too seriously. That deliberately offbeat look is an integral part of the character: Boomerang never tried to be intimidating. He tried to have a theme.

His arsenal is built entirely around that thematic obsession. Fred Myers permanently carries around a dozen specialised boomerangs, each designed for a precise function. The 'razor boomerang' is bladed and can slice through metal. The 'shatter boomerang' explodes on impact like a small grenade. The 'smoke boomerang' releases an opaque cloud to cover his escape. The 'gas boomerang' disperses a nerve agent. The 'screamer boomerang' emits a disorienting sound wave. The 'atom boomerang' — the most dangerous of the lot — carries a miniaturised nuclear charge capable of levelling a whole neighbourhood, although Fred uses it extremely rarely, aware that killing too many civilians would draw the kind of attention he would rather avoid.

This kit recalls the arsenals of other gadget villains in the Spider-Man universe, starting with Shocker and his vibro-gauntlets or the themed weapons collected by Scorpion in his mechanical shell. The difference is that Boomerang has no superhuman power to compensate. He is not a colossus like Rhino, who can charge straight through a wall, he is not a master of illusion like Mysterio, who can convince a hero he is fighting a dragon, he does not control electricity like Electro, who can drain an entire transformer. Fred Myers is an ordinary man who throws things. And who, statistically, misses more often than he hits.

Boomerang and the Sinister Six: how a loser muscles in on the big league

One of the finest ironies of Fred Myers's career is his complicated relationship with the Sinister Six, the cult group founded by Doctor Octopus to defeat the New York web-slinger once and for all. For decades, Boomerang watched that elite criminal team from a distance, made up of the six most dangerous villains in the Spider-Man stable. Otto Octavius, Norman Osborn, Adrian Toomes, Maxwell Dillon, Flint Marko, Mysterio — the cream of the crop. Boomerang, meanwhile, belonged to New York's criminal 'B-team', the ones you call when the real professionals are unavailable or behind bars.

And yet, several times across the arcs, Fred Myers has managed to slip into alternative or expanded incarnations of the group. During Return of the Sinister Six, the explosive union of the web-slinger's most iconic enemies in the 1990s, Boomerang appears in the extended ranks of the Sinister Twelve, an XXL version of the team orchestrated by Norman Osborn. Later, during Sinister War, which broke Spider-Man, Fred takes part in several opposing factions and navigates the alliances with disarming opportunism.

This intermittent presence on the fringes of the Sinister Six says a great deal about Boomerang's status in the Marvel criminal hierarchy. He is never important enough to be a founding member, but he is reliable enough — or desperate enough — to be called back whenever the web-slinger's enemies need cannon fodder. That position of eternal substitute feeds a deep frustration in Fred Myers, a feeling of forever standing beside greatness without ever reaching it. And that feeling, paradoxically, makes him infinitely more endearing than the mega-villains he envies. Because everyone, at one time or another, has felt like Fred Myers: competent without being brilliant, present without being indispensable, determined without being gifted.

Superior Foes of Spider-Man: the tragicomic crowning of Fred Myers

Everything changes for Boomerang in 2013, when Marvel launches The Superior Foes of Spider-Man, a monthly series written by Nick Spencer and drawn by Steve Lieber. The concept is brilliant in its simplicity: follow a team of second-rate villains — Boomerang, Shocker, Speed Demon, Overdrive and Beetle (Janice Lincoln) — painfully trying to earn a living in the shadow of the big criminals. And it is Fred Myers who inherits the lead role, that of the lying, manipulative, charming, pathetic, hilarious narrator. The subject is covered in more detail in Speed Demon: the Grandmaster's failed speedster who became the unofficial legend of the Sinister Syndicate.

The series revolutionises how the character is seen. For the first time, we get inside Boomerang's head. We discover a man eaten up by debt, who owes a hundred thousand dollars to Hammerhead, the mobster with the reinforced skull, and who spends his time inventing twisted schemes to pay it back. We discover a man who chats up women while systematically lying about his identity, who betrays his own teammates for laughable sums, who dreams of writing his autobiography as though anyone would want to read it. Above all, we discover a man who lies to himself constantly, who sees himself as a misunderstood criminal genius while everyone around him knows he is just a likeable loser.

Fred Myers's voiceover narration becomes one of Marvel's most successful comic devices of the 2010s. When he describes his own exploits, it is with the heroic tone of a mythographer recounting Odysseus. When the reality is shown alongside it in the panels, it is invariably pathetic. That permanent gap between the image Fred has of himself and the reality of his existential misery is the raw material of the series' humour. And beyond the humour, it says something very true about the human condition: we are all, to some extent, the lying hero of our own inner narrative.

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Why Boomerang is the most human villain in the Spider-Man universe

Beyond the gag, Fred Myers carries a psychological dimension the more powerful villains of the stable never reach. When Vulture soars over the New York rooftops with the rage of an old man robbed of everything, we are watching a Shakespearean drama. When Doctor Octopus takes over Peter Parker's body in Dying Wish, we are in the boldest science fiction. But those characters, however well written they are, stay in the register of super-heroic tragedy. Boomerang, by contrast, operates in the register of ordinary tragedy — the kind we recognise in our own lives.

Fred Myers pays his rent late. Fred Myers drinks too much beer. Fred Myers argues with his girlfriend about things that do not matter. Fred Myers makes promises he does not keep. Fred Myers wakes up with a hangover and the conviction that this time, really, he is going to get his life back on track. And every time, twenty-four hours later, he falls back into the same self-sabotaging patterns that keep him mediocre. That resemblance to the everyday life of ordinary readers — who are neither criminal masterminds nor costumed heroes, just people trying to make ends meet — is what tips Boomerang from visual gag to profoundly human character.

He is not the only villain in the Spider-Man stable to embody this working-class dimension. Tombstone, the ruthless godfather of the New York underworld, comes from a deprived Harlem and knew the same precariousness before tipping into organised crime. The Rose, Kingpin's criminal heir, lives in the permanent shadow of a father whose stature he cannot match. All these characters tell of an evil that is not an elegant aesthetic choice but a consequence of failing social structures and a string of mediocre personal decisions. Banal evil, in short. The kind we pass in the street every day without recognising it.

The essential arcs where Boomerang shines (and makes a fool of himself)

For anyone who wants to explore Fred Myers's career beyond Superior Foes, several arcs are worth lingering over. His first appearance in Tales to Astonish #81 remains a Silver Age classic, mainly of interest for the graphic quality of its aerial fights. His first confrontations with the web-slinger, in the 1970s under Marv Wolfman's pen, lay the foundations of the character as we would come to know him: ridiculous but persistent, beaten but never discouraged.

The arc Spider-Man: Sinister Twelve by J. Michael Straczynski, in the early 2000s, deserves a special mention. Boomerang is used there as a founding member of this expanded version of the Sinister Six, and the scenes where he interacts with Norman Osborn and Doctor Octopus are particularly delicious: you can feel the full condescension of the evil geniuses towards this small-time gadget man they tolerate out of tactical necessity. That dynamic would be revisited and amplified in Dark Reign, the arc in which Norman Osborn runs America and persecutes the web-slinger, and where Boomerang serves as a minor enforcer for the Green Goblin at the height of his power.

But it is of course The Superior Foes of Spider-Man, his 2013-2014 solo series, that is his undisputed masterpiece. Seventeen issues of absolute black comedy, where every page pushes the limits of what a Marvel comic can do in terms of anti-heroic storytelling. The series ends on one of the most cynical cliffhangers in recent Marvel history, and even though Nick Spencer never had the chance to write the sequel, the work remains an unmatched high point of the genre. For English-language readers, Superior Foes is available as a complete collected edition under its original title, The Superior Foes of Spider-Man, and is probably the best way in to discovering Fred Myers in depth.

More recently, Boomerang resurfaced in Nick Spencer's run on The Amazing Spider-Man from 2018, where Fred temporarily becomes Peter Parker's flatmate in a Brooklyn apartment. That improbable cohabitation generates some of the best comic sequences of the Spencer era, as well as serving as a springboard for a wider arc around the Stacys and the troubling resurrection of certain characters. For fans who want to follow the web-slinger through all his odd living arrangements and New York arcs, the Brooklyn Bridge is the most iconic location in the Spider-Man myth and appears several times in these shared adventures.

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Boomerang against the other 'failed' villains: the brotherhood of also-rans

To fully understand the place Fred Myers occupies in the Marvel ecosystem, you have to put him back into the long tradition of 'B-list' villains who populate the web-slinger's universe. These characters form a coherent sociological category: they never have the cultural status of the Green Goblin, who haunts Peter Parker's nightmares, they never have the raw power that tips a story over, but they tirelessly populate the margins of the universe, acting as a Greek chorus of criminal mediocrity.

Shocker, alias Herman Schultz, shares with Boomerang that methodical-loser quality. A competent engineer without genius, Schultz designed his vibro-gauntlets to rob banks without having to hurt anyone — a modest goal that contrasts violently with the world-domination ambitions of the great villains. Speed Demon, alias James Sanders, is a former Squadron Sinister member recycled into a low-rent mercenary, able to run at superhuman speeds but incapable of planning a heist without botching it. Beetle, in her Janice Lincoln version (Tombstone's daughter), brings the Superior Foes team a touch of glamour that contrasts with the surrounding mediocrity.

What sets Fred Myers apart from his associates is his ability to embody criminal mediocrity with a certain flair. Boomerang does not have Shocker's almost touching innocence, nor Beetle's calculating cynicism. He has a unique blend of vanity, cowardice, good humour and self-delusion that makes him the ideal narrator for an urban black comedy. When you read Superior Foes, you quickly understand why it is him, and not another member of the team, who inherited the lead role: he is the only one who tells his own story with enough bad faith for the lie to become interesting.

Boomerang in the asylum, the hospital and Ravencroft: a loser's medical and penal road

One of the peculiarities of Fred Myers's career is his continuous relationship with the Marvel universe's institutions of confinement. Unlike the front-rank super-villains who systematically break out of any prison they are locked in, Boomerang spends a significant part of his life in cells. He has done time on Rikers Island several times, at Ryker's Bay, at the Vault — that federal penitentiary for super-criminals designed specifically to neutralise superhuman powers — and even, during a particularly dark arc, at the Ravencroft Institute, the cursed psychiatric asylum that houses the worst mentally unstable criminals.

These spells inside often serve as narrative pivots: it is in prison that Boomerang meets new accomplices, and it is on coming out of prison that he accepts the most desperate jobs to clear the debts piled up during his sentence. His relationship with psychiatry is particularly interesting: several arcs suggest that Fred suffers from a grandiose narcissistic disorder mixed with a compulsion to lie that verges on clinical mythomania. The conversations he might have had with Ashley Kafka, the Ravencroft psychologist who probed the most twisted minds in the universe, remain one of the great 'what ifs' we would have loved to see developed in a comic.

The New York press, for its part, has never taken much interest in Fred Myers. Too ridiculous for the front page, too secondary to deserve an investigative feature, Boomerang gets a mention only in the crime briefs. Norah Winters, the Daily Bugle journalist who nearly revealed the whole truth about the web-slinger, once interviewed him in prison for an in-depth piece on 'forgotten villains' and described the experience as one of the most depressing of her career. Ben Urich, the fearless Daily Bugle journalist facing the truth, never thought it worth devoting a single paragraph to him — a sign that Fred Myers, even in the press, remains a second-rank villain.

Verdict: why Fred Myers deserves his place in the Spider-Man pantheon

Boomerang will probably never appear in a big-budget film. No Hollywood studio is going to invest two hundred million dollars to tell the story of a washed-up Australian who throws boomerangs and drinks too much beer. He does not have Venom's visual power, nor the Green Goblin's tragic depth, nor Mysterio's philosophical complexity. And yet there is something in Fred Myers that those more famous characters will never reach: a raw, mediocre, recognisable humanity that speaks directly to any reader who has ever felt beside greatness without ever reaching it.

The strength of a narrative universe like Marvel's is precisely its ability to house characters of every level of importance and every emotional register. Without the seven most powerful enemies of the web-slinger who structure the main story, the universe would lack its central drama. But without the Boomerangs, the Shockers, the Speed Demons who populate the margins, the universe would lack its texture, its social density, its peripheral humanity. The great villains are the pillars of the story. The small villains are its hunting ground, its connective tissue, its comic shadow.

There is also a generational dimension to Boomerang's persistence. The character has existed for nearly sixty years. He has lived through the Golden Age of comics, the Bronze Age, the Modern Age, the grim and gritty era of the 1990s, the Quesada revival of the 2000s and the contemporary era. In every generation, writers have found Fred Myers again in the Marvel archives, dusted him off, and decided he still deserved to exist. That continuity is no accident: it proves the character answers a structural narrative need. The Spider-Man universe needs its official loser, its eternal also-ran, its charming failure. And since 1966, Frederick Myers has held that post.

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For fans who want to extend their exploration of the New York web-slinger's complex universe, the complete page on Peter Parker covers every facet of the central character and his circle across decades of comics. The collector figures make it possible to physically embody the saga's most iconic heroes and antagonists, including second-rank villains like Boomerang who deserve their place in serious collectors' display cabinets. And the Spider-Man cosplays include every costume variant of the heroes and villains, because playing Fred Myers for the length of a geek event takes at least as much courage as playing the heroes at the top of the bill. Boomerang will never be centre stage. But it is precisely that position of eternal also-ran that makes him, in his mediocre and magnificent way, irreplaceable.