Legion World Forums LEGION CLUBHOUSE The Legion of Super-Heroes Fictional Elements/Molecules/Minerals etc.

This is a list I compiled for an essay in Klordny, a nostalgia trip through the Adventure era. May be of some interest in that regard.


What got me started on this was reading a Star Trek novel, How Much for Just the Planet? in which dilithium crystal figured prominently. The Adventure-era Legion was full of loony details and a flip through the first 11 Archive volumes revealed the following. It's certainly not a complete list and most of these were never mentioned again. In some cases, there are just references to an element or mineral with unusual properties. One story, The Chemoids are Coming/Black Day for the Legion (Adv #362-363), was full of unusual chemical substances, but none were identified by name.


Kryptonite: Harmful to Superboy and Supergirl (Several stories, not a Legionverse original)

Sigellan: Turns things blue (Prisoner of the Superheroes Adv. 267)

Element 152: Gold+silver+iron, anti-grav (Secret of the Mystery Legionnaire Adv 305)

A petrifying chemical (unnamed) (Mutiny of the Legionnaires Adv 318)

Spectrium: a high value rainbow metal )The Stolen Super Powers, Adv 304)
Ultrasite: Unknown purpose (Treachery of Molock Adv 320)

Brobnium: Unknown purpose (Eight Impossible Missions Adv 323)

Neutronium: Heaviest element (Revolt of the Girl Legionnaires Adv 326)

Cancellite: Cancels Durlan powers (Revolt of the Girl Legionnaires Adv 326)

Zuunium: Gives super powers, but only used on Brin Londo (The Lone Wolf Legionnaire Adv 327)

Valorium: Alloy of Nth metal, anti-grav (The Bizarro Legionnaires Adv 329)

Inhibitor Gas: Cancels superpowers (The Unknown Legionnaire Adv 334)

Inertron: Extremely hard metal (The Secret of Starfinger Adv 335) Not a Legion invention, but ensconced in the stories. According to everybodywiki.com, the earliest known mention of inertron was in the August 1928 pulp magazine Amazing Stories, in the first Buck Rogers story, entitled Armageddon 2419 A.D., by Philip Francis Nowlan.

Rejuvium: Reverses old age (The Secret of Starfinger Adv 335)

Fountain of 1000 Chemicals: Presumably many things, but in this story, "neutralized age regression" (The Menace of the Sinister Super-Babies Adv 338)

Arctite: Generates super cold, from Saturn (The Devil's Dozen Adv 351)

Durlamite: Very hard, used for the gates at Takron-Galtos (The Outlawed Legionnaires Adv 359)

Lurium: Scrambles thought waves (The Fantastic Spy Action 298)

Rakurga: Deadly poison (Twelve Hours to Live Action 378) from dc.fandom.com: The structural formula of Rakurga demonstrated by Brainiac 5 is nonsensical, but from appearances, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and cyclobutane are important substituents. Several presumably variable R-groups are part of the basic structure of Rakurga as well.

Unique metal insulation (unnamed) (The Mystery Legionnaire Action 389)

Energite: The most valuable mineral, a cure-all (Superboy & the Five Legion Traitors Superboy 117)

Element 271 (mentioned at cosmicteams.com; the element which contributed to developing Lyle Norg's invisibilty. The reference was to his origin story in Superboy #176, but I couldn't find it. Maybe from another source?)

Magnozite: Composed of poisonous metal alloys (One Legionnaire must Go! Superboy 184)

Crystalak: Unknown purpose, mined on Wondil IX (Once a Legionnaire LSH 257)

Supermanium: Forged from heart of a star by Superman, originally used to imprison Brainiac. Like Kryptonite, not a Legionverse original. A pedestal of Supermanium appeared in Of Pride, Passion and Piracy (LSH 275)

Eternium: Shards of the Rock of Eternity. Removes powers of Shazam!, causes injury (Shadow of the Sun LSH (reboot) 110 - 118)



The interest in weird elements and molecules waned as the Legion stories became more serious. I didn't go through the individual issues after SLSH 212, except for a few stories I remembered. DnA may have provided some unusual additions to the list, but that will have to wait for another time. Glancing through Waid and Kitson's early 3boot revealed a couple of gems, however:

Liquid inertron: Qualities not defined, but mined like oil with drill rigs (LSH 9)

Polybdenum: Very hard (implied), used in razor wheels to attack diplomats (LSH 3) Polybdenum actually sounded like something that really exists, possibly as some form of molybdenum, so I looked it up. Court's out on this one: it was mentioned in The Dharma Bums and thought to be a mistake by Kerouac (he refers to a polybdenum thermos), but it has also been more recently used in Chinese Patent CN 02269396 for "carbon steel, aluminum and molybdenum diffused alloy layers". I guess it does exist after all, but Waid probably got it from Kerouac, or happened to think it up on his own.

Wow, that is an extensive list. That took some real time to compile. Good on ya, ma'am.

Super-awesome!

Huh, I thought neutronium was the actual scientific term for the matter which comprises a neutron star, but it turns out they are different things that got conflated and now some people use 'neutronium' to refer to the compressed matter in a neutron star, but that's not anything official!

Arctite is interesting, and Lurium sounds like exactly the sort of material you'd want to use to make a cell to hold Saturn Queen, Esper Lass or (gasp!) Saturn Girl.

Something for Grimbor the Chainsman to go looking for...

Speaking of Intertron: do we have a confirmation on whether it's an element or an alloy? I feel like both things have been said over the years.

It's usually just referred to as a "metal" on DC information sites, so it could be either depending on who's writing. You have to wonder if it's indestructible, how is it mined, which would suggest an alloy (I think? never was a chemistry student). Mark Waid came up with the idea of mining of liquid inertron, which solves the mining problem, but doesn't mean it's an element.

Element Lad has certainly treated it like an element, but I also had the notion that it was a standard metal of some sort (possibly an iron-derivative like steel) that had been atomically-compressed (made 'inert', less room between the atoms, more tightly packed, like the difference between marble and limestone, or diamond and coal) making it more dense and durable, but I don't think that's ever been stated anywhere, and could just be a product of my weird brain as a weird kid with too much time to think about comics and not enough knowledge about actual science.

If it's one of those hypothetical composition of metal or alloy that can only form / be composited in the zero-g environment of space, that would fit the wa-hoo *science futurism!* of the Legion setting.

Here's the description of inertron from Armageddon 2419:

"[Inertron] is a synthetic element…It reflects 100 percent of the heat and light impinging upon it. It does not feel cold to the touch, of course, since it will not absorb the heat of the hand. It is a solid, very dense in molecular structure despite its lack of weight…It is a perfect shield…in many ways resembles the fabled hypothetical antimatter. It can co-exist with matter from our universe without mutual destruction, but it doesn’t much like to. Given a choice, it will try and head to the nearest perfect vacuum—which, from a terrestrial point of view, is always straight up. Thus it forms an effective anti-gravity agent. It also has the happy faculty of being a nearly 100% perfect insulator against any and all forms of electromagnetic radiation."

How much one can infer about the Legion's inertron from Buck Rogers inertron is questionable, but it's kind of cool.

That description makes inertron a near-everything substance. Curious that Hamilton dropped the anti-gravity property when he introduced inertron; the flight ring had appeared several issues earlier in Adventure #329 (writer Jerry Siegel), with no description of what materials it was made of. (I'm assuming Hamilton took the Buck Rogers inertron to use in his own story, but his gigantic creative mind could have come up with it separately.)

Yeah, as I recall, it's primary use was for its anti-gravity properties in the Buck Roger's stories.

I kind of like the idea of it as something that's not really either matter or anti-matter, but some sort of third thing that's neutral between them. So it's not just some super-hard matter, but its impenetrability is a result of it just not interacting with the physical world in the way that ordinary material objects would. I'm not sure that makes much sense from the point of view of physics or in terms of fitting in with what we've seen of it in the comics, but it really does sound like an idea Hamilton would've loved, so I think that might be how I think of it from now on.

I vaguely recall back in the X-Men/Teen Titans crossover, that Darkseid had shackled the captured X-Men and Kitty Pryde tried to 'phase' to freedom but couldn't, and Darkseid explained, 'Frozen valences. There's no space between the molecules for you to phase between' or something to that effect, and that feels like the kind of thing that could work with Inertron.

It's just standard matter / metal alloy, but configured in such a way as to be super-tough, like carbon atoms rearranged into the configuration that makes it hard as diamond, instead of crumbly as coal.

That feels like an appropriately comic-book-bad-science-y explanation for me.