Even for a 16-year-old wunderkind, writer Jim Shooter had a lot of good ideas.
For example, any single member of the Fatal Five would have made an interesting solo enemy for DC Comics’ Legion of Super Heroes. But the young comics writer gave readers all of them at once in Adventure Comics 352 (Jan. 1967).
The five cosmic super-criminals were a computer-brained cyborg, the owner of an Atomic Axe that could cut through anything (even Kryptonians!), a radiant femme fatale, and two other memorably designed and uniquely destructive forces.
As comics historian Jeff Rovin noted. “In addition to Emerald Empress, Persuade,r and Tharok, the fiends are the mutant Ma, no who garbed in a yellow bodysuit, hails from the planet Angro and can disintegrate just about anything; and Validus who, dressed in a purple and white bodysuit and standing some 25 feet tall, is ‘force personified,’ his strength ‘incalculable.’
“He is not, however, terribly bright — possibly because ‘the pure energy of his brain causes mental lightning to flash around his head’ day and night.”
“Going Marvel’s Galactus one better, Shooter imagined a celestial threat called the Sun-Eater that … was headed for Earth’s solar system,” wrote comics historian John Wells. “With hope fading, five Legionnaires desperately reached out to anyone with the power to stop the entity and gathered the Science Police’s most wanted … to help.”
These cleverly conceived and convincingly formidable supervillains proved well-balanced as a criminal team and debuted in an epic two-part adventure. The gravity of the Homeric battle was underlined by the fact that the Legion’s Ferro Lad sacrificed his life to eliminate the cosmic threat.
“Like Menthor in 1966, the death of Ferro Lad resonated with fans for years, in part because (unlike earlier Legionnaire Lightning Lad in 1963) it wasn’t undone,” Wells noted. “Indeed, in response to another Weisinger request, the very next issue jumped a decade or so into the future to check in on ‘the Adult Legion’ and reinforced Ferro Lad’s fate by including his statue in a hall of the dead.”
“I thought that Mort might object if I killed an established, long-term Legionnaire,” Shooter explained. “But what if it was one of the new ones I’d created? Maybe that would fly. So I did it. I didn’t ask, I just did it.
“Why Ferro Lad? Because his powers suited the opportunity. How would Princess Projectra or even Karate Kid survive the death-run into the heart of the Sun-Eater?”
Superman editor Mort Weisinger often got inspiration from contemporary movies and TV shows, and in this case, it was the upcoming action film The Dirty Dozen that caught his eye.
Ironically, the Fatal Five debuted on newsstands in November 1966, seven months before the movie that inspired it was released.
The fiendish FF would return in Adventure Comics 353, 365, 3,66 and 378, Superboy 198, 215 and 218, Superboy and the Legion 231, 246, 247 and 269-,271 and Legion of Super-Heroes Vol. 3 24-26.
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