Fictional Character Biography
Woozy Winks is a bumbling, inept, overweight and slobbish man who served primarily as a comic relief, much like other golden age sidekicks such as Doiby Dickles. In his first appearance, Woozy is a small time crook with a unique superpower. After saving a wizard from drowning, he is rewarded via a spell that causes the forces of nature to protect him whenever he is in danger. Later stories would ignore this ability (one story attempted to explain it by saying that the spell wore off after a while), and Woozy simply became Plastic Man's inept assistant. His personality was based on the comedy of Lou Costello while his appearance was based on Hugh Herbert.
Although a comic figure in both appearance and aptitude, Woozy does have his heroic moments. Thanks to his own dabbling in illegal activity, he can recognize perpetrators on sight and recall their arrest history; he also offers sage opinion (occasionally by accident) on finding and trapping criminals, such as noticing a scene's tire track resembles a suspect's tread design. Winks also is able to hold his own in a fist fight, sometimes taking on several opponents.
One history of Woozy, which appeared in the Plastic Man Special in 1999, gave him an alternative origin. In this tale he was an extremely competent and intelligent agent known as “Green Cobra” whose only oddities were his dress-sense and a tendency to steal office supplies. After being paired together for the first time, he was trapped in a poorly ventilated locker with a wounded Plastic Man. The fumes from Plastic Man's blood, which was similar in composition to airplane glue, damaged Winks's brain, making him “Woozy” forevermore. This is contradicted both by his Golden Age and modern origins, in which he is depicted as having always been dimwitted.
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