Legion World Forums LEGION CLUBHOUSE The Legion of Super-Heroes Questions on rejected Legionnaires

There's a couple of people rejected from joining the Legion who I'm not entirely sure WHY they were rejected. Anything that I missed or that comes from a later source?

Rainbow Girl from Adventure Comics #309
Did they give any reasons? I don't think it's mentioned in the story.

Animal Lad from Adventure Comics #311
Technically speaking he's rejected because he's not evil: the Legion that holds the audition has been taken over by Dynamo Boy. Animal Lad's status as a legitimate candidate is questionable at best, I know, but... why wouldn't he try later?
Having the power to transform other people into animals is quite creative, I can't think of any other character with that power.

Quake Kid from Superboy #218
I assume it's the same reason for the rejection of Calamity King (it's dangerous to other Legionnaires), but it's not mentioned in the story. Is it clarified somewhere else?

Lamprey, Nightwind and Crystal Kid from Legion of Super Heroes #272
Is it just the vague "they're not ready yet"? The Legion had more strict criteria for membership in this period (or so they claimed), but I felt that at least Lamprey and Nightwind knew their powers enough for rookies and deserved a spot on the team better than Invisible Kid II.

Checking WWitLSH:

Rainbow Girl doesn't get a specific reason for a rejection, but it does say that she only wanted to join the Legion as a stepping stone to a holovid career, so maybe that had something to do with it?

Nothing really on Animal Lad, other than he was saddened by his rejection and applied for a job at the Metropolis Game Preserve. I agree that it's unfortunate that he never tried out again. Maybe the LSH's takeover by a villain wasn't publicized, so he didn't realize that was why he was rejected?

Quake Kid Kid's rejection is attributed to lack of control.

NIghtwind's "youth and inexperience" is mentioned as a reason she hasn't joined, Lamprey is said to be "too reticent" in dangerous situations, and Crystal KId's "overconfidence" gets him in trouble. I always kind of imagined Lamprey and NIghtwind would have problems with the fact that their powers depend on specific environments (water and an atmosphere), though the Legion tends to be pretty inconsistent with that excuse.

Didn't one of the Who's Whos say Rainbow Girl was rejected because her green aura was kryptonite and she was too dangerous for Superboy/Girl to be around? Was that a fever dream I had??

I also had that dream! Red was heat, yellow was light, blue was cold/ice and green was kryptonite radiation!

It could be funny if she also had other rainbow colors available. Orange was electricity, Indigo was darkness, etc. But after the kryptonite reveal, they couldn't show her the door fast enough.

Meanwhile, Element Lad can just whip up *gold* kryptonite casually, and cause Superboy to lose his powers *permanently,* so he's just whistling nervously in the background as he sidesteps out of the panel...


Technically, Sun Boy also would require an atmosphere to shoot flame blasts. In a vacuum, he could still produce light (his original power), and even heat up distant targets with infrared light, but not shoot actual fire (which doesn't burn in space). But that sort of science stuff doesn't really impact comic-book logic. Following the Sun Boy example, perhaps Nightwind actually *creates* air, instead of just moving it around? That would be a much more useful power to a spacefaring culture of air-breathers! Even if she's just an air-mover, not an air-maker, I feel like the Legion is at least as likely to have encounters or missions in areas with atmosphere than areas surrounded with handy metallic items for Cosmic Boy to use his powers on, and she'd hardly be the first Legionnaire with situationally useful powers (Saturn Girl's telepathy isn't much help when hostile robots are the threat of the minute)...

I am amused that Crystal Kid, who can turn himself or others into 'nearly indestructible crystal', as well as create barriers and restraints and other objects of said crystal, is though to be 'overconfident.' Sounds like 'quite appropriately confident' to me!

Given that Lamprey's original power was a 'death touch' before she downgraded to merely an electrical zap, I kind of like that she might be a little reticent to going nuts and dropping bodies left and right.

I much prefer "generates heat and light" as Sun Boy's power set rather than the more modern "generates flames". But, as I said, the Legion is incredibly inconsistent in whether they reject people on the basis of their powers not being useful in all environments. And, of course, the Legion would later admit Harmonia, whose main use of her "elemental" powers seemed to be moving air around.

So the super-weird thing about Rainbow Girl is that the character first appears in Adventure #309 as a Legion reject with nothing stated about her powers or the reason she was rejected. Then, in Adventure #340, a character named "Rainbow Girl" is suggested in the Bits of Legionnaire Business column, and this Rainbow Girl has "the power to split into four forms, each with a different color and a different power", though nothing is said about the fact that Green Rainbow Girl has kryptonite powers being a reason to reject her. One might think it would be logical to give the previously introduced Rainbow Girl the power set of the later reader-suggested character, but when WWitLSH came out they gave her pheromone-based powers instead (manifesting themselves in a rainbow aura), and of course Geoff Johns would ignore that to give her powers connected to the emotional spectrum.

re Rainbow Girl, I think it was implied in her first appearance, that her only power was that rainbow aura - which was pretty, but ineffective in battle (that's what I remember from her one panel, where Sun Boy is also flirting with her... she was rejected pretty nicely actually!)

Lamprey and Nightwind are still a sore spot for me as well. they did pretty well in their debut issue, even knocking Wildfire into a fountain for a bit. Wildfire evens calls it out when Invisible Kid II gets voted in...



I do recall them having Harmonia generate fire and moving earth around too, I guess they thought they could make her versatile enough if she could control all four classical elements...

I kinda perversely like the idea that Rainbow Girl is all quantum-entangled with other Rainbow Girl's in other alternate universes, and her powers sort of randomly change with each appearance, *and nobody else notices.* She's the only one who has to deal with her powers one day being emotional manipulation, the next day is an Aurakle (like the Outsider, Halo), and the next day is a descendent of the Roman goddess Iris who is strong and tough and rides around on a flying rainbow. Meanwhile, everyone else in this world, except perhaps those with unique perceptions of time and space, like Shikari or Dream Girl, just remember her 'always having' whatever powers she is manifesting *today.*


Missed opportunity, IMO, for her not to have controlled the five Chinese elements, earth, fire, water, metal and wood. (Air, Harmonia's most-used power, was not one of the Chinese elements!)

That said, I like various other air, plant, metal and fire manipulating characters like Nightwind, Chlorophyll Kid, Cosmic Boy and Sun Boy and would rather see them than her.

Her one unique gig would have been water control (under either element scheme, western or Chinese), and... I don't remember her really using it.

Maybe Xera of Manna-5 had water control? She was shown blasting one of Universo's minions with a water jet pulled up from a well, IIRC, back in the Universo Project (and hey, the fact that she was on that planet at all means she's one of the smartest heroes in the galaxy, right up there with the four smartest Legionnaires!).

I am a big fan also of Rainbow Girl's powers randomly changing, and from a selfish POV it's very fun to write in fanfics!

Xera of Manna-5 definitely had water control, she was the one who drained the water from the fountain that led to the machines keeping everyone stuck on the planet

the original connection between Universo's captives was intelligence, but I think in 5YL there was a retcon to it being strongest wills, correct? (one glaring omission re most intelligent was Evolvo Lad; we saw Gas Girl of the Heroes of Lallor, not Evolvo Lad. though Gas Girl may have been there simply for her powers, being one of those likely to counter Universo's method of mind control?)

and I agree re Harmonia: being of Chinese origin (Li is a common Chinese surname), would have made sense for her to control the 5 Chinese elements rather than the four classical "Western" elements

It was during the Magic Wars when Dream Girl leaves Atmos to rejoin the Legion that she figures it out. So it wasn't really a retcon but apparently Levitz intended all along for the characters to have gotten it wrong, and then discovered the true criterion later on.

Hey, Archaeologist! Love your site...seeing this post just led me to take a look at your "Legion Rejects" page. If I could suggest a few corrections:

Night Girl did not join the Legion during the Five-Year Gap, she was officially acknowledged as a Legionnaire only in the "Johns-boot" (in the "Superman and the Legion of Super-Heroes" story).
Jungle KING, not Kid
Eyeful Ethel never became a member of the Subs, and did become a villain - she worked with the Justice League of Earth as a teacher.
I thought Polecat's problem was that he stank too much for other Legionnaires to be around, not that he was useless (also, he was rejected by Dynamo Boy and not by the Legion proper).
Absorbancy Boy became (as Earth Man) a member of the LSV along with Tusker, Golden Boy and Storm Boy.
I'm pretty sure Lamprey was now among those said to have joined the Legion during the Five Year Gap.

you have a good head for trivia CMK!

I think Lamprey wasn't one of thhe Five Year Gap members, at least based on two sources:

https://www.writeups.org/lamprey-lsh-legion-super-heroes-dc-comics/ - states that she was never actually a member

https://www.cosmicteams.com/legion/legion1-original/members.html -- not in the member list

I was thinking the same about Lamprey. I remembered it being odd that she didn't join while Nightwind and Crystal Kid did.

Thank you so much, I've made some corrections.


I have a weird system for those counts... purely on a technicality, I count Dynamo Boy as a member since he was officially accepted into the Legion in Adventure Comics 330, and once he expelled all the others he was technically still the Legion.
I don't take that too seriously of course, since it's abundantly clear he's retroactively stripped of his membership... but it's still fun to include him :-)
Incidentally, since he's not rescued after being stranded into the distant future in Adventure Comics 331 and it's quite clear he's going to die there, he could also be counted as the first killed Legionnaire who stays dead!
Weird to have a villain exiled into the far future without later having the Time Trapper rescuing him. Then again, Dynamo Boy wasn't exactly a great villain.

I liked the idea that he can generate everything that a star creates, from light to heat to radiation, or that he can create and control plasma. Of course you can't throw in gravity as well or he gets to replace Star Boy.


I can't stand what Johns has done to the Green Lantern mythos with all that "colors are emotions" nonsense, but please tell me he also connected this to Color Kid and I might forgive him a little :-)

There was actually a discussion of the "intelligence" link in the Universo Project in the letters page of issue #39. Levitz points out that was the characters' conclusion, not the narrators. (Cham was the one to say it and Brainy agreed. Dreamy made a throw-away line about all this time Brainy appreciating her for her mind rather than her body, and Imra said nothing.) PL also discusses Universo's motivations "... at no time does Universo describe the four legionnaires as being kidnapped because they were the most intelligent, only 'among the most dangerous'. Nor does he say they were a particular threat, only that they might prove useful to him ... and at another point, that he expected to break their will by imprisoning them among 'non-entities'. Take that together with Universo's history, and you might get a clue to the characteristic he believed they shared, and what he intended to do with them."

characters can be wrong, after all

As I recall, the hints are that Levitz had planned The Universo Project as a prelude to a big story about the GL mythos in the 30th century that never came to fruition (though it's likely that parts of it made it into the retroboot) so the emphasis on Legionnaires with strong wills makes a lot of sense.

Anytime anyone mentions Harmonia Li, I have to repeat my theory that she is, in fact, the most recent form of the Ultra-Humanite.

Interesting, I had not thought to check outside the story itself for 'meta-data.' (On the other hand, I don't much like the idea of a story having to be explained outside of the story by the author, that suggests that the story itself was not given adequate space to impart this information within the story.)

The statement that Brainy's mind was so powerful that he was mere days away from breaking free already, also suggests that Universo might have exiled the Legionnaires he felt were most likely to 'snap out of it' and prove to be a fatal distraction at a tense moment, so he sent them away, rather than keep that ticking time-bomb at his side. (While keeping the Legionnaires he *could* reliably keep under control at his side as bodyguards and flunkies.) So it might not have been 'intelligence' so much as the alien nature of Cham's and Nura's mind (his lacking standards of form and structure, hers flitting between dozens of potential future timelines) or Brainy's sheer processing power / speed and Imra's inherent telepathy.

Although I have no problem accepting Cham's assertion that he, Nura and Imra are the smartest non-Coluan Legionnaires. (Although, using super-speed, Mon-El, Ultra Boy, Superboy and Supergirl should be able to put up a surprising showing on standardized IQ tests!) "What do you mean, 'You're done already'?!? I was supposed to time you! You didn't give me time to click the button! Also, your pencil is on fire..."

Along similar lines, I have a theory that she is the Time Trapper. I really believe that's what Levitz intended to be the Big Reveal about her.

My theory is that she was just a lame ill-conceived character!

ROTFLMAO

That, too. That, too.

I like this theory

I do wish PL had confirmed that Glorith was a de-splorped version of the original, however.

I'm still kind of irked that the v7 recruits joined over so many established Academy students.