A superhero with an inferiority complex?
It’s a counterintuitive idea that has interesting, dramatic possibilities. And those possibilities were explored, more than once, in DC’s Legion of Super-Heroes feature.
For example, in the Legion’s 15th exploit (Adventure Comics 301, Oct. 1962), artist John Forte and Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel gave us the lowdown on an unlikely recruit to the teenage superhero club.
The year before, DC had published a top-selling 25-cent giant called Secret Origins, so I imagine that suggested the story’s title — The Secret Origin of Bouncing Boy!
Bouncing Boy, who’d been introduced in a cameo in Action Comics 276 (May 1961), owed his superpower to his inattention to his job and his enthusiasm for spectator sports.
Charles “Chuck” Taine, the errand boy for a famed scientist, yielded to the temptation to attend a robot gladiator tournament (“Savage — Exciting — Yet Harmless”) instead of making a delivery to the Science Council.
In the excitement of the stadium, he mistakenly took a drink from his employer’s bottle instead of his soft drink. The “super-plastic fluid” gave him the ability to inflate his body into a huge, invulnerable, bouncy ball.
Thrilled with his new ability, Taine applied for membership in the Legion of Super-Heroes. But Cosmic Boy and Saturn Girl don’t see much use in a human beach ball.
“Your talent for, er, bouncing is not very practical for crusading against evil!” Cosmic Boy tells him.
“Choke!” he thinks. “They don’t want me! And I was so sure I’d make it!”
Taine’s subsequent attempt to prove himself only ends in public embarrassment.
“Ha, ha! There’s that bouncing idiot!” taunts a passerby. “I wonder if he writes bouncing checks?”
I’m glad to know that they’ve gone back to writing checks in the 30th century.
The crestfallen hero is on the verge of giving up when he spots a robber using metallic shock gloves. Even Saturn Girl is paralyzed in an attempt to stop him.
But Taine balloons up and takes the crook down, knowing that he’ll be insulated from electrical shock while bouncing.
His heroic effort earns him membership, and his “secret origin” inspires other nervous applicants.
Bouncing Boy would be the Legion’s first overweight member, introducing some diversity to the club, which sometimes tended to resemble an exclusive high-school clique.
That same theme — the usefulness and self-worth of rejected “outsiders” — would be explored by Forte and Edmond Hamilton a few issues later when the Legion of Substitute Heroes was formed (Adventure Comics 306, March 1963).
In fact, Bouncing Boy might have seemed a more likely candidate for the Sub if he hadn’t already become an “insider.”
These stories reassured their young readers that even undervalued talents could be valuable.
The early Legion tales resembled the British school story genre, which typically dealt with such themes as honor, rejection, friendship, and bullying. Legion members dealt with interpersonal problems at least as often as they battled cosmic menaces.
After all, it’s worth remembering that the Legion was introduced, seemingly rejecting Superboy, of all people.
In 1988, Marvel Comics got its own “bouncing boy” — Speedball, the Masked Marvel.
“One of many ways in which Steve Ditko’s characters tend to be quirky is rapid, unpredictable movement,” wrote comics historian Don Markstein. “He conveys a definite impression that superheroes like the Creeper, the Blue Beetle, and especially Spider-Man are constantly jumping all over the place, like fighting them would be similar to fighting an extra-mobile, self-cocking jack-in-the-box on a trampoline. Speedball, who debuted in the 1988 Spider-Man annual, is probably the apotheosis of that tendency. His superpower involved literally bouncing off walls.”
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