The Thinker is the name of five supervillains appearing in American comic books published by DC Comics. The first incarnation, Clifford DeVoe, is an enemy of Jay Garrick. The second, Clifford Carmichael, is an enemy of Firestorm. The third, Desmond Carter, is an enemy of Batman. The fourth, an A.I. version of the Thinker, is an enemy of the Justice Society of America. An unidentified version of Thinker, introduced in The New 52, is an enemy of the Suicide Squad. The character has been adapted from the comics into various forms of media, including television series and feature films. The Clifford DeVoe incarnation of the Thinker made his live-action debut in the television series The Flash, portrayed primarily by Neil Sandilands. In the DC Extended Universe, a variation of the unknown Thinker appears in The Suicide Squad (2021), portrayed by Peter Capaldi. Publication history The Clifford DeVoe version of Thinker first appeared in All-Flash #12 (Fall 1943) and was created by Gardner Fox and Everett E. Hibbard. In October 1947, the Thinker was one of the six original members of the Injustice Society, who began battling the Justice Society of America in All Star Comics #37 (Oct 1947). The Cliff Carmichael version of Thinker first appeared in Firestorm #11 and was created by Gerry Conway and Al Milgrom. Conway recounted, "My original notion on Firestorm was to do a book that would be DC's complement to Spider-Man, in a sense. We would have a young adolescent male who gets superpowers and doesn't know quite what to do with them. My flip on it was that rather than being the science geek who was being picked upon by the jock, my hero would actually be the jock who was picked on by the geek, and that was going to be Cliff Carmichael's role." In The Fury of Firestorm the Nuclear Man #50, the strap on Ronnie Raymond's football helmet is cut, and in the following issues the cast members come to suspect Carmichael of the crime. Though Conway later said that he must have intended to ultimately reveal someone else as the culprit (commenting "Cliff was a jackass, but he wasn't a bloodthirsty maniac"), John Ostrander took over as the series' writer and had Carmichael confess to cutting the strap. In Firestorm, the Nuclear Man #99 Carmichael was transformed into the Thinker as part of the genre-wide trend in which civilian