Validus
2988 - Validus is first grown in a Science Police Lab in an attempt to understand a long lost Kryptonian retro-virus.
2991 - 3-year-old Validus's brain is activated, generating such violent electrical storms that he destroys an entire cities power grid. The Legion are called to stop him.
2995 - 7-year-old Validus is released by Rokk Krinn to join Tharok's team to help stop a rogue Sun-Eater. They are able to escape, becoming the Fatal Five
2997 - 9-year-old Validus & the Fatal Five attempt to assault Legion headquarters. They are defeated by Val Armorr single-handedly & imprisoned.
3003 - 15-year-old Validus & the Fatal Five escape from prison and begin rebuilding their criminal empire.
3006 - 18-year-old Validus & the Fatal Five wage all-out war with the reunited Legion, and are eventually defeated.
The world of the Legion of Superheroes has perhaps born the brunt of DC's penchant for continuity shenanigans more than any other part of it's history, so when you add to that the tendancy to completely rethink villains with most of their appearances, it actually becomes almost impossible to nail down any sense of the Fatal Five having any consistent story at all. Still, they are suprisingly prolifict concepts in DC, appearing in modern times (somehow) almost with the same regularity they appear in the 30th century.
The real fun here is that each of these five characters represents a pretty solid villain in their own right, so we're going to expand on them all just a little bit, and in doing so will get a nice spectrum of treats to throw up against our team of future teen heroes.
The real fun here is that each of these five characters represents a pretty solid villain in their own right, so we're going to expand on them all just a little bit, and in doing so will get a nice spectrum of treats to throw up against our team of future teen heroes.
Validus's StoryValidus appeared for the first time along with the rest of the Fatal Five in issue #352 0f Adventure Comics in 1967, an invention of (notably 16-year-old) Jim Shooter. Of all new villains introduced in this issue, Validus is probably by far the most threatening. He's a hulking beheamoth of a character who is stronger than Superboy, seemingly impervious to harm, and whose thoughts summon up electrical storms so dangerous that when he's upset, the Legion AND the Fatal Five all immediately stop whatever they're doing to try to calm him down. It really sets him up as this absolutely time bomb of a character that is completely impossible to control
He also notably is given no origin or backstory, although some readers apparently noticed that the idea of mentally-generated electrical storms was a suspiscious combination of the powers of two founding Legion members, Lightning Lad & Saturn Girl, who also happened to be a couple, and so some readers wondered if there was some connection. This wound up playing out decades later, when Paul Levitz had Darseid actually kidnap Imra & Garth's son (they were expecting twins but were suprised when they had only one), and sent him back in time, mutating him into Validus as a curse against the Legion, making them potentially kill their own son. We're not going to be using this admittedly very clever story idea. First because it has a time-travel component, and second because holy hell, that's dark. We're going instead to use a concept that wouldnt be introduced to comics until munch later; the Kryptonian retro-virus that was responsible for the creation of Doomsday. In this case, it's combined with distant future technology, but spawned out of control, creating this unique monster and threat to the Legion. |