A boy certainly can change in a half-century.

In 1950, Marvel Boy was an idealistic, bare-legged telepath from Uranus who came to Earth to bring peace and enlightenment.

In 2000, Marvel Comics’ new version of Marvel Boy was a grim, bare-legged alien terrorist who blew up the United Nations building.

“I’ll show you people what paradise looks like if I have to level every city on Earth and rebuild it stone by stone,” proclaims Noh-Varr, the latter-day Marvel Boy created by writer Grant Morrison and artist J.G. Jones.

His name, white hair, costume and alien Kree origin linked him thematically to Marvel’s original Captain Marvel from 1967, who’d also arrived on Earth as a saboteur.

An “Ensign Marvel” from an alternate reality, Noh-Varr has had his DNA altered with cockroach genes to make him a super-soldier.

When his starship is shot down by the greedy, power-hungry Doctor Midas in our reality, Noh-Varr’s parents and girlfriend are killed, and he is captured, tested and tortured.

“We will breakyour resistance. We are all professionalshere,” boasts Midas, who is clad in the original golden armor of another capitalist super-being, Iron Man.

“I am a pirate. A scavenger. A multi-trillionaire in this sorry world of predators and profiteers.

“You are nothing. You are salvage: the flotsam of the void, the property of the Midas Foundation. Myproperty.”

Nevertheless, Midas learns it’s not so easy to hang on to property that possesses super-strength, super-speed, super-durability, mental control over his own body and the ability to launch bombs and poison darts from his nails.

Upon his escape, Noh-Varr takes an understandably dim view of the human race.

“It was the likes of you and this whole murky, hypocrite race who powderized my guiltless crewmates for no reason better than profit and ignorance,” he says. “So, war.”

Morrison astutely underlined the hazy moral line that divides the vigilante from the terrorist, “justice” often being in the eye of the beholder. Remember how his own inexorable moral logic forced the superhero Ozymandias to cross that line in Watchmen?

“The time of the punk superhero had come,” Morrison recalled in his book Supergods. “(M)y idea was to try something I’d never tried: a quintessential Marvel superhero would arrive with clockwork timing to embody the anti-establishment, anti-corporate movement.”

“(T)he book had the ironic title Marvel Boy, named for an obscure Bill Everett character. I reached back to the original Marvel hero — Everett’s wild, teenage Prince Namor — and found the template for the anti-establishment Superman. Kal-El of Krypton’s rocket had been found by a kindly couple, representatives of the best Midwestern values could offer. What if he’d been found instead by a representative of America’s corporate dinosauric military-industrial nightmare, as personified by the monstrous armored Doctor Midas and his zipped-up bondage babe daughter, Oubliette the Terminatrix, representing the establishment media?

“After enduring torture at Midas’s hands, the young alien superhero chose not to fight for America or even human values but to wage a one-man war on planet Earth from his underground lair in Times Square. It was the superhero as terrorist, and its hero was an idealistic boy from a better place who had seen firsthand the result of human cruelty and stupidity and could take no more.”Morrison spotlighted social satire, introducing Hexus the Living Corporation, a sentient “Brand Hex” that begins devouring everything on Earth by recruiting employees with flyers that ask: “DO YOU SINCERELY WANT TO GET RICH?”

Atypically, Noh-Varr thwarts this alien corporate threat not in a super-powered battle, but through a business strategy.

“Noh-Varr defeated the creature by leaking its secrets to its competitors, who then tore the pretender apart on the international stock exchange,’ Morrison noted.

In another atypical move, Marvel Boy has been established as a bisexual character.

“What makes Marvel Boy queer isn’t just his sexuality (he implies his race doesn’t have sexual identities, only sexual acts), it’s how the comic treats him, visually: in a medium dominated by the male gaze, he’s not only sexy, he’s sexualized,” observed Benjamin Riley.

“Created because Morrison thought comics weren’t being ‘sexy enough,’ Noh-Varr was a pouty bad boy in tight, tight shorts whose nemesis was an assassin in a dominatrix outfit,” wrote Andrew Wheeler. “ ‘Sexy’ is his motif in the same way that ‘spider’ is Peter Parker’s.”

Marvel Boy’s original six-issue series ended in March 2001. Six months later, a terrorist superhero would be distinctly out of fashion, for obvious reasons.

He has appeared since, but in a toned-down form.