Waverider (comics)

Waverider
The Matthew Ryder version of the character
Publication information
Publisher	DC Comics
First appearance	Armageddon 2001 #1 (May 1991)
Created by	Archie Goodwin (writer) Dan Jurgens (artist)
In-story information
Alter ego	Matthew Ryder
Team affiliations	Linear Men
Abilities	Ability to time travel at any time Can access a person's aura and see their future Quantum energy blasts Lightspeed flight

Waverider is a fictional superhero in the DC Comics universe, a time traveler who was merged with the time stream. Waverider was created by Archie Goodwin and Dan Jurgens. The first version of the character, Matthew Ryder, first appeared in Armageddon 2001 #1 (May 1991).

A second version of the character first appeared in Convergence: Booster Gold #2 (July 2015) as a reborn version of the pre-Flashpoint Booster Gold. After his transformation, he is instrumental to saving the multiverse in Convergence #8. His powers are the same as the original Waverider but with the knowledge and history of Booster Gold.

In the year 2030, the world had been ruled by a villain named Monarch, who destroyed all of the Earth's superheroes. Matthew Ryder, a scientist, who remembered the time he was a child and was saved by a superhero from a collapsing building, decided to fight back at Monarch's dictatorship. Matthew discovered that Monarch may have been a former hero, so Matthew built a time machine to travel back to the past to find out which hero would become Monarch. Unlike previous test subjects who had died when they tried the time machine, Matthew survived. However, he was merged with the time stream and was given numerous powers, two of them being to travel through time at his own free will and to predict a person's future. With his new powers and appearance, Matthew took up the superhero name, Waverider.

Making his way into the year 1991, Waverider predicted the futures of numerous heroes, however none of them turned out to be Monarch. When Waverider accidentally came into contact with Captain Atom, the interaction of their powers resulted in a massive amount of temporal energy being unleashed. This created an opening in the quantum field which allowed Monarch, who had been monitoring Waverider's actions the whole time, to travel back in time to ensure his own existence. When Monarch later killed Dove, her partner Hawk became enraged and beat Monarch and unmasked him, only to see that Monarch was Hawk himself.