DC Comics has a super team of teenagers who live 1,000 years in the future. They were inspired by the adventures of Superboy. They go back in time and bring Superboy into their time and actually recruit him for the team.
They originated in the 1950s in a Superboy story and became the lead feature in the 1960s. When I was a kid, they printed digest-sized reprints of their comics, and I had a few. They were some of the first comics I read. And my favorite character got his powers by being swallowed by a whale in space. I’ll come back to him.
I had always thought they’d make a great Saturday morning cartoon. They eventually were a Saturday morning cartoon in the waning days of the CW’s Kids’ WB Block of Saturday morning cartoons. They got two seasons. They did a decent job representing them in animation.
One of the characters was Mon-El. He was basically Superboy, but instead of a weakness for Kryptonite, he was vulnerable to lead. He was from the planet Daxam. It had been a colony of Kryptonians millennia ago. He accidentally ended up on Earth with amnesia, where Superboy assumed he was his brother. So Superboy, whose Kryptonian name is Kal-El, gave him the name Mon-El because he found him on a Monday.
Superboy was jealous that Mon-El was getting attention from Lana, Superboy’s girlfriend. So Superboy painted pieces of lead green, with what was almost certainly lead-based paint, this being 1961, staged a fake Kryptonite meteor shower, and faked his own poisoning, expecting Mon-El to stand there unharmed and be exposed as a liar. Instead, the lead worked, and he poisoned the amnesiac kid he’d just decided was his brother. He had to exile him to the Phantom Zone, a sort of limbo Kryptonians used as a prison, to keep him from dying.
That’s petty teenage jealousy that escalated into a millennium of solitary confinement.
Another was Brainiac 5. He was a descendant of sorts of the Superman villain Brainiac. Only smarter and fully organic, whereas the original Brainiac was mostly a cybernetic organism. When Brainiac 5 devised a permanent cure for Mon-El’s lead poisoning 1,000 years after Mon-El had been locked in the Phantom Zone, he was released and allowed to join the Legion.
Eventually, 14-year-old Jim Shooter convinced DC to let him write them in the 60s. He basically applied a lot of what Stan Lee was doing at Marvel to the Legion comics. They were a bit of a soap opera and drama, but they also progressed with time. They were also rooted more in reality. This was new for DC.
Shooter went on to work at Marvel as an editor and writer as an adult, becoming the editor-in-chief at Marvel for about 9 years. He was the EIC during the height of the X-Men, and a lot of the key stories of 80s Marvel that still get callbacks came from his time.
In the 1970s and early 1980s, the Legion of Super Heroes was DC’s equivalent to the X-Men. In fact, most comic book readers I grew up with were either Legion fans or X-Men fans. Several of the X-Men, including Storm and Nightcrawler, were designs that artist Dave Cockrum developed for the Legion before becoming the X-Men artist and bringing them over to Marvel.
In the mid-1980s, when DC decided to revamp and reset their entire universe, they decided there was never a Superboy. That meant there were major changes to the Legion comics. They couldn’t use Superboy or Supergirl; this new timeline had no Supergirl or Krypto the Super Dog either. No Streaky the Super Cat or Comet the Super Horse. They largely fell out of favor and were subject to frequent reboots and never regained their original glory.
I say all of that to tell you about Ultra Boy. He was my favorite Legionnaire. He basically had most of the same superpowers as Superboy without the Kryptonite weakness, but the catch was that he could only use one superpower at a time. He could have super strength, but he’d have to turn off his invulnerability and flight. He also had penetra vision, which was like X-ray vision, but he could see through lead.
Brainiac 5 also invented rings that could allow the wearer to fly. Each of the Legionnaires got one. So Ultra Boy could be invulnerable, the power he kept on by default, and fly at the same time.
Ultra Boy’s real name was Jo Nah. He was flying a spaceship, and the spaceship got swallowed by a, wait for it, space whale. The unique radiation inside the space whale gave Ultra Boy his powers.
Jo Nah got swallowed by a space whale and got superpowers.
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