Answer Manic Monday #2--Get A Job, Ralph!!

One of the mysteries of the pre-nu52 DC Universe:

This is a surprisingly good question.

Sue was independently wealthy...She was a wealthy socialite and heiress.

But Ralph? He was just some middle class kid who grew up in Nebraska and became fascinated with carny contortionists. So how was he independently wealthy?

The common Silver and Bronze Age answer was that he made a "fortune" with television appearances. Possible, I suppose--but who really got rich just off of appearing on Ed Sullivan? That was just a platform to improve your visibility so you could make the real bucks touring, and making records, etc. No one else retired and funded a luxurious life of mystery solving from a few Johnny Carson gigs.

Of course, Ralph could have made a mint endorsing Gingold...until the inevitable lawsuits because most people were allergic to Gingold (this is a true DC fact).

Also, Ralph was chemist enough (or lucky idiot enough) to develop a "super-concentrated extract" of the gingo fruit. But he apparently didn't sell it to anyone, nor is there much evidence that he performed much else in the way of advanced chemistry during his career.

Maybe he just lived off his wife's money, and the JLA stipend, and hosting the occasional reality show (because face it, Ralph was born to host some crappy "find the ghost" type crappy "mystery" show on SyFy).

So, if/when DC gets off their butt and decides to reintroduce Ralph Dibny to the nu52, job one is to find him a...well, job.

From the Answer Man column in Adventure Comics #455 (1978)