Sun Boy

Original Sun Boy

To outsiders, Dirk Morgna looked like the luckiest person on Earth. He came from a rich family, had great looks and a way with people that always got him what he wanted. But scratch the surface, and what came up was a child who nursed an inferiority complex. Note: Sun Boy's real name was first revealed in Superman Annual #4 (1961).

Raised by his father Derek to stand up to humiliation and injury by responding in kind. Dirk often found himself badly alienating anyone who started up with him. This turned out to be a bad move in the case of Doctor Zaxton Regulus, who had been employed by Dirk's father at a time that Dirk was doing odd jobs in his laboratory. The two got along badly from the start, and Regulus's anger burned even hotter when Dirk interrupted an illegal experiment that Regulus was performing. The resulting accident killed one of Dirk's co-workers, and destroyed Regulus's career. Regulus blamed Dirk, (who had ignored warning signs around Regulus's lab, and so, to an extent, was responsible despite the illegality of the experiment) and locked him in a nuclear reactor for revenge. But Dirk got lucky. Instead of killing him, the radiation made him into a living sun.

With the power to radiate bright light, he tried out for the Legion as Sun Boy and was turned down. (Action #276) He reapplied later after discovering that he was also able to project heat and was accepted. (Adventure #290) He was once forced to leave the Legion after a temporary power loss, but this was very short-lived. (Adventure #302)

But somehow, he never felt that the Legionnaires truly accepted him, and constantly set out to prove his potency as a Legionnaire and as a man. His insecurities once led him to take too many space missions, driving him mad with space fatigue and almost dooming himself and the entire population of the planet Xenn. (#318) Dirk has come to be known as a womanizer, and has never kept a relationship for long.

His past, too, had come back to haunt him as a Legionnaire; Doctor Regulus has become one of the Legion's most persistent enemies. (Adventure #348, Superboy #191, 232, 286, Legion vol. 3 #15)

Glorith Reality (Legion vol. 4)

In Glorith Reality continuity, Dirk suffered a rather ignoble fate.

His insecurities once led him to take too many space missions, driving him mad with space fatigue and almost dooming himself and the entire population of the planet Xenn. His past, too, had come back to haunt him as a Legionnaire; Doctor Regulus has been one of the Legion's most persistent enemies.

But few people ever suspected him of such feelings, as he was always a dependable Legionnaire, the Xenn incident notwithstanding. It was he who held the Legion together in its last year, seizing command when then-leader Timber Wolf became incapacitated during Black Dawn. But eventually, the harassment of Earthgov and the ill will of the people of Earth became too much for him to bear, and he quit the Legion.After being attacked by a lynch mob of Legion-haters even after quitting, he was rescued by longtime Legion friend Shvaughn Erin, he saw the comforts she lived with, and compared them to the squalor in which he and most Earthmen lived. Though Shvaughn told him that the comforts weren't worth the price, he was easily seduced by them, and by Circe, an officer in the Science Police who was employed by the Dominators who ran Earthgov. He became a spokesperson for Earthgov, and Circe, in return, fulfilled his every fantasy. However, after a while, it became obvious to him that Earthgov was no longer the beneficent authority he had remembered, and that any protests of his regarding government injustices were going to be ignored. Finally, he reached his breaking point, just before the deployment of the Dominator Triple-Strike program, and tried to present himself to the people of Earth as their hero once again. But it was too late. The people of Earth were mad at him for his Earthgov advocacy, and would nolonger accept him. In addition, he would not get the chance to perform any more heroism; Triple-Strike detonated fusion powerspheres all over the globe, sending the powers of metahumans, such as Dirk, out of control. Dirk's solar powers were now burning him to death. Earthgov released news of his death.

Batch SW6: Inferno

Actaully, he was placed in the Dominators' underground chambers for further study, but before anything could be learned about his condition and how to alleviate it, the chambers were seized by underground resistance fighters, and then destroyed by them. But still this didn't kill Dirk, who was in more pain than ever. By chance, he stumbled upon the Legionnaires who had emerged from Batch SW6, and upon Circe, who was nearby, and who had turned against the Dominators. The Legionnaires, including his own younger counterpart, kept a watch on him, but eventually Circe was left alone with the suffering Dirk. Over the weeks of her rebellion, she had come to the realization that she truly loved him, and she refused to see him suffer any more. Out of her love for Dirk, she shot him, and then herself. Sun Boy died on May 18, 2995.

But this was not the end of Sun Boy's story. Shortly after Mordru's animation of dead bodies (including Dirk's), Wildfire managed to gather his energies back together and think coherently. He needed a vessel to hold his anti-energy, but found that his old containment suits couldn't handle the solar energy with which he had become mixed. He made his way to Shanghalla, where he found the perfect vessel for storing solar energy -- Sun Boy's body. With this and an improved containment suit, he managed to keep himself alive for a while longer. But he was too ashamed of the desecration he wrought to reveal this to anyone.

The Sun Boy of Batch SW6 has renamed himself Inferno, and is slightly more subdued than he was before seeing his probable end in the older Dirk. Nonetheless, he still loves a good time, especially with a good-looking girl, and he is still quite talented at making enemies, having had an unwitting hand in the creation of the third Emerald Empress. Despite this, he has been a member in good standing of the Earth-0 team of Legionnaires. When he found himself still in existence as the clock approached Zero Hour, he challenged the Time Trapper's assertion that the SW6 Legionnaires and the adult Legionnsires were two time-split versions of the same being, as he thought his adult counterpart had died. This forced Wildfire to reveal his secret shame...but Inferno accepted this, disappearing, with Wildfire, in one last, friendly handshake.

Notes

Jim Shooter on Sun Boy: "Your typical upper-middle-class happy, well-adjusted A & B student, put-together fun guy. He doesn't have to screw Dream Girl, he undoubtedly gets enough action on his own." —Interlac (1976)

Tom and Mary Bierbaum on Sun Boy: "He turned out during our run to be a tragic hero, raised on the notion that you had to win, no matter what the cost. He really tried to rise above the fuzzy morality of his upbringing and win within the rules, but that meant pushing himself beyond his limits and he suffered a nervous breakdown. Probably never fully recovered from that, leaving himself all too vulnerable to corrupting influences during the Great Collapse of the Five-Year Gap." —Interlac (2000)

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