I thought they dropped the rule for Ayla Ranzz when she lost her Light Lass powers and rejoined as Lightning Lass. That was years before Magnetic Kid showed up.
The lightning powers were Ayla’s original powers. The Light Lass abilities were later.
The rule has NEVER been ‘entirely unique powers’ - remember, half the major members of the team (including 2/3 of the founders) had powers that were universal to their species - just not duplicating the powers of another active member.
Ayla was originally a member when Garth was dead, then changed her powers when he was revived. Pol joined when Rokk was mostly retired.
(Mon-El got a pass because Superboy and Supergirl were only part time, and they got a pass because…well, they were Superboy and Supergirl.)
Who needs a pass? Mon-El is invulnerable to Kryptonite.
But not lead. I know which one I’d rather be vulnerable to if I were spending lots of time on Earth.
Or anywhere other than Daxam…
Sure, sure. But it still counts for satisfying the No Duplicate Powers rule.
I would have thought that never needed clarification.
Alleged violations of non-duplication within the Legion would take a whole new thread, BTW. (What did Tenzil Kem have to add, with Kal, Kara, and Lar Gand already there? The ability to devour kryptonite? Lead without a special serum?).
Good point about these apparent exceptions.
I beg to differ here. Now, there may have been some confusion even among later writers, as to when Mon-El was first a member. It was definitely not when B-5 perfected the serum to 24 or 48 hours, depending on dosage. Yes, Lar did go through a whimsical “initiation test” as “Marvel Lad” (hmmm!) aka “Legionnaire Lemon” but he had already been accepted by acclamation when he saved the day in Adventure #300 after taking Saturn Girl’s more limited version of the serum. She had then said that he was a member without the need for a test because “we admire you so much!”
My point here is that, with only something like a half-hour freedom from lead weakness, he was much more part-time than either of the super cousins.
Two things:
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Tenzil can eat anything. He’s one of two Legionairres who could have killed Superboy-Prime outright.* (The other being Element Lad). I doubt a Kryptonian or Daxamite could penetrate Prime’s skin with a super-bite. He ate the Miracle Machine also.
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Also, Tenzil seems to have some kind of matter-vaporizer in his stomach. He created a tunnel once by eating his way out of prison. While I’m sure in the long, long history or Superman, he’s been shown probably to have been able to eat an extraordinary amount of matter…I really see no reason why A Kryptonian could eat more than his stomach can hold.
*I HATED how Prime’s molecules just reconstituted themselves after being disintegrated by a freaking Guardian of the Universe. I have no problem with Prime being able to kill said Guardian, but come on.
Which raises the question of why Tenzil is on the same team as Element Lad: one guy can make anything disappear as it enters his mouth, just like the guy who can also do it from across the room – or whip up an instant supply of breathables for his buddies, or create a whooole lotta lead if Daxamites are aforementionedly on the rampage, or provide enough fissionable materials for to make a world go boom, and et cetera.
Well, I have a minor nitpick here. Magnozite, composed of “the deadliest poisons in the Galaxy” could be used to imprison him. My thought on that is that Tenzil has various abilities in composite to neutralize the otherwise deadly effects of any one substance. Or a number of substances. Magnozite is just too overwhelming for his power. Secondly, according to a Substitute story, the gradually-developed poisonous vegetation that caused his people to develop their powers (“just as gradually”) is sill on Bismoll, and the natives can still be killed if they eat it.
While I was still reading the funnybooks when Prime was introduced and then tucked away in Crisis, I’m quite weak on what had happened later to him. I’ve only picked up a few things online. Did Tenzil or Jan confront him and threaten to kill him if he didn’t stop his rampages?
I had almost forgotten that one. Had I only read Dale’s post I would have come back with an especially odd Red K story wherein Superboy and Krypto ate green and red things, respectively. It took him a while to figure things out, until they were confused by a changing traffic light. (Yes, you read correctly. I’m not making any of this up.) They couldn’t vey well wait for the effect to wear off, what with all the chaos they were causing by their uncontrollably fierce appetites. So they traveled to a pair of conveniently colored asteroids and ate each of them until tangerine skin remnant-shapes remained of each of them. There was nothing in the story to suggest that they had developed a new capacity for making matter go away, just the gigantic munchies.
Also, in one of two stories wherein Lana and Lois gained Kryptonian-like powers, each of them made prodigious amounts of cooked food for Supie in competition. One of them made a giant pizza, the other tons of pancakes. While he did forgo most of the latter when he spotted some folks in a food crisis, there was no indication that he had run out of super-appetite.
When his powers are not compromised, his appetite is fully controllable in both directions. Lucky devil. 
Going broadly on this, most fans I have spoken with have the consensus that there can only be a problem with a potential member applying, not with a current member getting the boot. In this particular example, Tenzil joined shortly before Jan.
Re:Superboy Prime…no that was just my fanwank on who could kill Prime in theory.
In universe of course, Jan has a stricter-than-strict no-kill policy.
Tenzil would probably be too grossed out by the thought.
I had forgotten how limited Jan’s powers were in his origin story. He could only change elements, not compounds and probably not mixtures. This was quickly forgotten, as was the idea that he would continue to be known only as “Mystery Lad” with an unknown power or powers to the outside world. Within a couple of years he could transform an arm into a lightning rod, and even transform himself into a life form which could live in space (same story). Leaving these strange ad hoc ideas aside, he certainly showed an unlimited (except for exhaustion after time) control over elements, even in combination, as time went on. He could alter the allotropic form of carbon, to help bribe the Bizarro Legion into disbanding with coal from diamond. He once had to have dust surrounding a villain to make a lead shield, but fortunately developed the power to do it simply from air, in time to confront a villain who could fire disintegrating beams. Finally, he could even transform matter into energy.
The point is that in his origin story he could not destroy things as effectively as Tenzil. So the order of joining would not have mattered. I could have said that earlier when referencing the joining-order advantage but I didn’t think of it.
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I thought as much.
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Right. Of course his rage at the time made him almost kill the genocidal Roxxas, while mindful enough of the Legion code to see the need to resign. I agree that since then he became even more averse against killing for any reason.
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I would certainly hope so. It certainly grosses me out.
Still, the fair-play clue in his first appearance was that he changed corroded silver into shiny aluminum, which is how folks were supposed to deduce that “Mystery Lad” was mentally altering the object instead of manhandling it with superstrength. (And in that same story, he insta-changes a ship’s hull into “gaseous elements”.)
Yeah, the problem with the Miracle Machine was that it was Clarke’s Third Law level supertech and had ridiculous invulnerability in addition to indiscriminately granting the wishes of people in its presence. Brainiac 5 indicated in the comic that none of the active legionnaires at the time could destroy the thing, but he called Tenzil up from inactive status, who was able to eat it. Though they don’t actually show him trying, from context it appears that no one expected Jan could affect the Miracle Machine.
I sort of liked the concept introduced later that he was one of the few Legionnaires with much streetwise sense, as he came from a mostly criminal planet and had a rougher childhood than most of the rest of them.
Also compare him to Duplicate Boy, who had an objectively much stronger choose-your-own power set but was limited mostly because he lacked creativity or much intelligence.
Hmm. I don’t recall that the silver was corroded. My memory for favorite stories isn’t quite that good. I’ll take you word for it. That would certainly be a contradiction to the original statement of his limitation.
However, he could change the ship’s hull because it was supposedly a single element. (It was explicitly stated that his power could not affect the spacesuits Roxxas and scumbag cronies had donned, making them feel safe in the advantage they had thrust upon him.) That he changed the hull into a plurality of unnamed “gaseous elements” is not flatly contradictory to whether the “front-end” of the process is compound rather than essentially a single element.
(I think we have to assume here that the usual small impurities in a mono-element object or portion thereof would not stymie his powers. I wonder, though, whether the writer even knew that such impurities tend to be inevitable, at least by the technology of the time it was written.)
Without reading the thread:
I’ve always fanwanked that there’s some overlap between Ultra Boy’s super-speed, super-strength, and invulnerability. For the former two to work, they have to protect him against injury by acceleration or impact, so if he were about to, I don’t know, be buried by an avalanche, super-strength would work as well as invulnerability. (So would super-speed, but if he turned that on, his natural impulse would be to dash off before the boulders smashed into him, so it doesn’t matter).
But neither super-strengh nor super-speed protects him against high temperatures, lasers, lightning bolts, or so forth. Consequently he can’t go full-out on his super-speed in an atmosphere; the multiple Gs don’t hurt him, but the friction from air resistance does. There was an annual in the late 80s/early 90s that supported this; Jo and some of his fellows were cast back in time and he tried to time-travel forward on his own, rather than with Kal and Mon as he usually did, but he couldn’t handle the friction; he said that the other times he’d super-sped through time, Superboy or Mon-El had carried him and he’d kept his powers set on invulnerability.
The invulnerability, incidentally, is not as simple as it seems. In another 80s story, UB told Phantom Girl that it wasn’t always “harder than any rock” as a Kryptonian’s is; instead, it was “keep Jo alive by any means necessary.” Earlier in the storyline he had been blasted by Pulsar Stargrave with a weapon probably designed to take out a Kryptonian, so the invulnerablity had kicked in (by reflex) and teleported him anyway. Later in the storyline he was locked into intangibility in a similar incident.
Who only joined after Cos retired.
If that’s the way it works, then it’d be great to be the first member to join.
“So what’s your unique superpower?”
“I can… um… I can walk.”
“Like, really fast? Or on water?”
“Nope, just ordinary walking.”
“OK, it looks like you qualify!”
I don’t know…that sounds like a Substitute Heroes power to me…