Roulette (DC Comics)

Roulette
Publication information
Publisher	DC Comics
First appearance	JSA Secret Files #2 (September 2001)
In-story information
Alter ego	Veronica Sinclair
Abilities	Martial Artist

Roulette is a fictional character, a supervillainess in the DC Comics universe.

Fictional character biography

Roulette's grandmother was a Golden Age villain of the same name, who ran a conventional casino and fought Mister Terrific, as well as having a relationship with his brother, Ned. Both Ned and Roulette have been retconned into Mr. Terrific's history, and do not appear in the original stories. The current Roulette believes Terry Sloane to be her grandfather, rather than great-uncle, and sees the current Mister Terrific as an unworthy successor. Her casino ("The House") is a superhuman gladiatorial arena, capturing heroes with teleporter technology similar to Holt's T-Spheres, and pitting them against each other, while various supervillains bet on the outcome.

In her debut, she captured most of the current Justice Society and forced them to fight each other; Mr. Terrific and Dr. Mid-Nite were forced to play a chess game where the loser would be electrocuted, Sand and Hawkman had to reach Hawkgirl while infected with a fast-acting lethal virus (of which Kendra had enough of the cure for one) while Black Adam clashed with Atom Smasher.

However, all managed to escape their traps; Black Adam and Atom Smasher's fight lasted so long that the mind-controlling drugs used on them to heighten their hostility towards each other wore off, Sand remained in his earth form to slow the spread of the virus until another cure could be found by Dr. Mid-Nite, and Mr. Terrific and Dr. Mid-Nite managed to draw in their chess game and destroy it while the game re-set itself. Roulette teleported them away before they could capture her, however.

A wall of fallen heroes was the only indication of the many DC Comics heroes who had been killed in battle in "The House." The names include Impala, Maxi-Man, and Ram of the New Guardians.

Roulette and the House reappear in Formerly Known As The Justice League, in which she captures the Super Buddies. The subliminal programming which prevented heroes escaping fails to work on Fire because her native language is Portuguese, and she releases the others. When this is followed by Mary Marvel shorting out her aggressor chip due to extreme stress, Roulette decides they have won and orders them teleported away.

Post Infinite Crisis/One Year Later

Most recently she has appeared in JSA Classified (#19, Jan 2007). Dr. Mid-Nite had infiltrated her current fight club location in search of information regarding purported organ-napping. She agreed to give him information only if he beat her bodyguard in a game of arm wrestling. He did so, using his knowledge of nerves and their debilitation, and though she felt he had "cheated" she gave him the name of a model who had surgically implanted wings. After Dr. Mid-Nite left, she called the owner of the surgical clinic, who later proved to be Delores Winters, and told her of the hero's investigation into the implants and operations.

Roulette also appears in The Brave and the Bold #1 (2007), where a space-villain with Firebug's gauntlets steals the fabled Book of Destiny from her.

Other media

In Justice League Unlimited, Roulette debuted in the season four episode The Cat and the Canary, where she had added Wildcat to her costumed fighter vs. costumed fighter no-holds-barred tournament, Meta-Brawl. The fight ring highlighted the distrust of metahumans by civilians, as evidenced by the many paying spectators who cheered non-metas like Wildcat on and execrated the metahumans.

Green Arrow and Black Canary directly confronted Roulette's Meta-Brawl (hooking up in the process). They were forced to battle other participants of Meta-Brawl, including Sportsmaster, Bloodsport, Electrocutioner, Atomic Skull, Hellgrammite, Tracer, Evil Star, and Amygdala.

In season five, Roulette upgraded the premise of Meta-Brawl in the face of falling profits. She utilized Lex Luthor's Secret Society mind-control technology to brainwash female Leaguers — including Vixen, Fire, Wonder Woman, and Black Canary to create a re-imagined "Glamour Slam". This tournament was destroyed and the heroines rescued by a team-up between the resuscitated Canary and Huntress (in itself a first, because Huntress and Canary had been in opposition since their violent altercation in Double Date).

Roulette was voiced by Virginia Madsen; Madsen's other characters on the series include Dr. Sarah Corwin in The Brave and the Bold.