Credits | Characters | Plot Summary | Comments | Reprinted In Editor: Mort Weisinger Writer: Jerry Siegel Artist: John Forte Roll Call: Bouncing Boy, Chameleon Boy, Cosmic Boy, Saturn Girl, Shrinking Violet, Sun Boy, Ultra Boy Honorary Members: Pete Ross, Superboy Villains: Kranyak and four members of his gang Other Characters: The Mayor of Metropolis, citizens of Metropolis, Professor Harding (an entomologist), a prison guard, a radiation-beast, a hypno-beast, a Kryptonian flame-beast, two World-Wide Police officers "Sun Boy's Lost Power" (12 pages) During the ceremony at Metropolis Stadium unveiling the first of a series of Legionnaire statues, Sun Boy is forced to melt down his likeness to keep it from collapsing into the crowd of spectators. After this, Sun Boy discovers that he no longer has any power. He concludes that his power must have worn off and he sets about trying to recharge it. First he unsuccessfully uses the clubhouse's atomic reactor, then he is lowered into a volcano but the smoke overcomes him. The next day, while Professor Harding presents the Legion with a gift of rare alien insects, Sun Boy's power momentarily returns. Outside the clubhouse, a heat-reflector device is constructed and Superboy and Ultra Boy use their combined heat-vision to try to recharge Sun Boy. Unfortunately, the experiment fails and Sun Boy is expelled from the club because he no longer meets the requirement of having a super-power. Later, Sun Boy sits in his home watching the Legionnaires go on missions on his porta-monitor and laments his expulsion.
The cover of this comic calls this story "The End of Sun Boy", although the splash page reads "Sun-Boy's Lost Power." Note that the interior title hyphenates Sun Boy's name; he is called Sun-Boy throughout the story as well. Ultra Boy's name also continues to be spelled with a hyphen. The Legion's era is referred to as the "21st century" in this story. Besides excusing it as being merely a typo, one can assume that by the Legion's time, another calendar system is being referred to from time to time. The Sun Boy statue the Mayor is unveiling is the first of a series of metal alloy, larger-than-life Legionnaire statues that are destined to line the "Avenue of Super-Heroes" (first seen in Adventure Comics No. 306). After Sun Boy's new statue is commissioned, Cosmic Boy is the next Legionnaire to be honored with a statue, followed by Saturn Girl (as shown in Adventure Comics No. 306, page 2, panel 1). Sun Boy probably received a statue first because, according to the Mayor, he is one of the most "gallant" Legionnaires of them all. The dictionary definitions of gallant are: "1: showy in dress or bearing, 2: brave and self-sacrificing, and 3: courteously and elaborately attentive, especially to ladies." Sun Boy is definitely the flashiest member at this time, seeing how he often uses his power to, literally, shine amidst his teammates, making him the most noticed Legionnaire. He is popular among young boys (Action Comics No. 287) and girls (Adventure Comics No. 301) alike. Also, Sun Boy was the first Legionnaire to capture and send to prison a major villain, Kranyak, as opposed to petty crooks and hired hands. The first Sun Boy statue was designed to duplicate the Legionnaire's power, but the heat energy caused the thin stand to weaken and buckle, forcing Sun Boy to destroy it to save the crowd. The later Legion statues did not duplicate the members' various powers and heavier stands were built to support them (Adventure Comics No. 306). When Metropolis has a momentary black-out, Cosmic Boy comments that it was "probably a power-plant failure". In Adventure Comics No. 336 we learn that the fusion-powersphere - the seventh and greatest wonder of the world - is what generates and supplies nuclear-fusion-energy to the whole planet. We have to assume that the few seconds of power failure was a connectivity problem to the lights in Metropolis and not that the entire Earth faced a power-outage. The reason why Sun Boy lost his power at the time that he did (Adventure Comics No. 302) is because just prior to this, Supergirl asked him to "transfer" an incredible amount of his heat energy into a giant sphere of rock in order to melt the ice in Antarctica back in the 20th century (Superman No. 156). The next time he used his power, was when he melted a statue of himself that was about to fall into a crowd of people. This heroic act used up his last reserve of power and also helps explain the nature of his power. Originally, Sun Boy accredited the origin of his super-power to an accident in his father's lab, where he was conducting solar experiments: "I gained my super-powers years ago when I was locked accidentally inside an atomic reactor chamber. The atomic bombardment trasformed me into a human beacon of blazing light and heat." (Adventure Comics No. 300) If Dirk acquired his power from being locked in an atomic reactor in the first place then, logically, he should have been able to restore his power in the exact same way. Yet in the clubhouse's atomic reactor, he is shown to be in great pain from the failed attempt to restore his power (Adventure Comics No. 302). When Sun Boy later gave more details into his origin, we discovered that previous to his being locked in the reactor, a scientist employed by Dirk's father, a Dr. Regulus, was working on a secret experiment in multiplied sun-energy using radioactive gold. Dirk walked in on him as it accidentally exploded, and it is highly likely that this initial exposure to the sun-energy was the true catalyst of Dirk's mutation. It also explains how, later, he survived being locked in the atomic reactor by Regulus. Instead of dying like anyone else should have, the sun-energy biologically bonded with his cells absorbed the radiation, empowering instead of killing him (Adventure Comics No. 348). When Dirk transfered his power into the mountain-sphere, he did not merely release energy generated by his mutated cells. Because he needed to make the globe a self-sustaining source of heat, he actually projected out from his body a large portion of is biological sun-energy in order to bond with the rock. Dirk's power was all but gone, and he used up the last of it when he melted his statue. The rays from the Legion's atomic reactor did not instantly kill him due to the lingering presence of trace sun-energy in his cells but, as there was too much energy for them to handle, the excess proved very painful to Dirk. Indeed, in time, it would have been fatal. Contact with the biologically-produced energy of a living creature, such as the Kryptonian flame-beast (or Superboy and Ultra Boy), bathed Sun Boy in a similar energy to the one he had, thus it was able to recharge his lost power. Sun Boy didn't want to wait for the real Superboy and Ultra Boy to arrive and restore his power because he knew that he had to make a comeback fast in order to save his friends. This risk of self-sacrifice earns him that statue - and "gallant" status - like never before. This issue marks the first and only time the Legion uses a craft shaped like a "flying saucer" (over the volcano). Sun Boy is the first member of the team to lose his powers; they stuck to the Legion's constitutional rules and so Dirk was ousted. But when Bouncing Boy loses his power in Adventure Comics No. 321, they remember how much the expulsion had crushed Dirk, and recall the desperate measures he took in trying to get his lost power back. Thus, they decided to create a new branch of the Legion to allow worthy former members to remain in the team's Reserve. Superboy is called to attend a Legion meeting, although he is an honorary member, because it is to bid farewell to Sun Boy. Ultra Boy, however, being a fully active member was simply "playing hookey" in order to celebrate Pete Ross' birthday with the Boy of Steel. Honorary member Pete Ross was not invited to attend the meeting because it is his birthday and witnessing an expulsion would not only put a damper on his party but would also cast the Legion in a bad light to the new member. Pete Ross celebrates his 17th birthday in this story. This is the first time that the heat from Ultra Boy's penetra-vision is referred to as "flash-vision". Ultra Boy is still only using his vision powers in the tales, although as we discover in Adventure Comics No. 316, he did possess other one-at-a-time super-powers at this time, such as super-strength, speed and invulnerability. In Sun Boy's locker we see the trophy cup he had in Adventure Comics No. 301 plus a few new awards; perhaps one of them was for his capture of Kranyak. Expelled members may keep their nameplates, figurines and trophies but must return Legion property, such as the porta-monitor, for security reasons. For this reason, the one-man rocketship and ray-gun Sun Boy uses later on his trip to Lurna cannot be Legion issue; Dirk Morgna must have his own ship as well as a personal ray-gun (and license to carry one). Sun Boy calls one of the beasts on Lurna a "radiation-blast". This is a slip of the tongue on his part, due to Sun Boy's excitement at the time, as it is actually a "radiation-beast". Kraynak planned his attack on the Legion by equipping his flying-platform with a freeze-ray. He wouldn't, therefore, have been simply hoping for rain. It is possible he brought with him a personal weather-controlling device similar to the one that the applicant Storm Boy used in the previous issue (Adventure Comics No. 301). Only two out of Kranyak's four henchmen are captured at the end of the story because only two of them accompanied him to the clubhouse to destroy the Legion. Maybe the two that didn't show were smart and bailed out as soon as Kranyak said he planned to kill Legionnaires. The Superboy and Ultra Boy robots were programmed to tell the Legionnaires they were only robots, so it is possible that the Legion makes a provision for having proxies sit in for members at meetings. Ultra Boy's robot double was probably a refurbished Superboy one. Superboy's robots were never shown flying through time under their own power alone before, so perhaps the Boy of Steel gave them a super-push to help them break the time barrier. (Supergirl had tossed an object through the time-barrier in Action Comics No. 285). The fact that the trip damages the tapes of the robots shows that they were not constructed for independent travel through time. They did accompany Superboy through time to a Legion meeting before this (in Superboy No. 100), but it is possible that they were damaged slightly during that trip because Superboy was bringing them to the future to teach the Legionnaires how to repair them anyway. In fact, in this issue, Sun Boy utilizes the knowledge gained from those lessons by restoring the memory tapes of the Superboy and Ultra Boy robots. When the robots fly through the time-barrier from the 20th to 30th centuries, they encounter a "violent, hurricane-like force" which no other time-travellers have ever experienced. The time-barrier is probably a hard-to-navigate region anyway and the inexperienced robots merely ran into an area of disturbance. Perhaps they passed too close to a passing time-vehicle or time-traveling person and were given sent into a spin. In the very last panel of the story, there is a youth standing in the background as Sun Boy is being cheered by the Leginnaires. For some reason, the Legion of Super-Heroes Archives Vol. 1 reprint has the lad's face re-colored green as if to indicate that he is Brainiac 5. In the original comic he is Caucasian and wears tight-fitting pink-colored sleeves that aren't loose like Brainy's. Since he doesn't fit the description of any particular member, this person must simply be a Legion admirer who was outside the clubhouse at that moment and so cheered for his returning hero, Sun Boy. Action Comics No. 388 (May 1970) Legion of Super-Heroes Archives Vol. 1 |
Meanwhile,
at a nearby prison, Kranyak, a criminal that Sun Boy once
nabbed, escapes and leads his gang on a revenge attack on
Dirk and the Legion. Determined to regain his power to
save his friends, Sun Boy journeys to the planet Lurna
and goads a Kryptonian flame-beast into breathing fire on
him. It was a huge risk, but it worked. His power
re-charged, Sun Boy returned to Earth and defeated
Kraynak. Remembering how his power had returned
momentarily under the presence of the giant lightning
bugs given to them by the entomologist, Dirk figured out
that only the heat energy from a living creature would be
able to recharge his lost power. He had realized from
watching his monitor screen that the Superboy and Ultra
Boy that tried to recharge him weren't living beings but
robots! After repairing the tapes of the robots, they
explain that the real Ultra Boy and Superboy are in the
20th century helping Pete Ross celebrate his birthday.
They sent the robots through time to explain and sit in
on the meeting for them but enroute through the
time-barrier they were hit by a force that damaged their
tapes. In "light" of Sun Boy's renewed power,
he is unanimously voted back into the Legion!