Legion World Forums LEGION CLUBHOUSE The Legion of Super-Heroes Fatal Five Spotlight: Validus!

So, next up in our series of spotlight threads on members of the Fatal Five: Validus!

"By far, the strangest of all living beings is Validus! No one knows his origin... nor even precisely what he is! But his power is known and feared throughout the universe! His strength is incalculable, and though he does not possess a superior intellect, the pure energy of his brain causes mental lightning to flash around his head. He is force personified!

Validus is not truly evil! He has never been known to steal... nor to kill and destroy with deliberate malice. But he is subject to sudden seizures of apparent madness, during which he will obliterate everything in sight!

But at last the Science Police trapped Validus in a cell of impenetrable inertron, from which even he cannot escape! Validus's cell has been transferred to the Galactic Prison on Bismari, where he awaits execution by bombardment of anti-energy, the only thing believed capable of destroying him!"

poor misunderstood Validus.

Execution seems a bit harsh.

Especially when you've got him caged.

If ever there was an 'insanity defense' to justify a stay of execution, it would be Validus, who isn't a bad-guy by choice.

On the other hand, I can see the argument that he's 'too dangerous to live,' but it's not like he can fly or anything. Dump him off on an asteroid or moon somewhere and bury all evidence of where that asteroid is (having telepaths wipe the memories of where it is, for instance, so that nobody can deliberately ever find him again).

Plus, this being the 31st century, they could open up a dimensional portal and make him officially 'somebody elses problem.' Maybe 're-gift' him to a local troublemaker race, like air drop him on Khundia or the Dominator Throneworld.

He's a one person weapon of mass destruction!

Plus, again, the Legion's future has a *ton* of other options to 'giant intertron box.'

A) Phantom zone.
B) Have Crystal Kid turn him into a giant indestructible Validus statue (or, same thing, Golden Boy and giant golden Validus statue, although I'm less clear on whether Golden Boy's powers are reversible, which would pretty much be the same as killing him).
C) Throw him into a storage tesseract and throw away the key.
D) Pitch him into a sun. It probably won't kill him, but nothing short of a Kryptonian is getting him out of there.
E) Pitch him into a gas giant. Almost as hard to get him out of Jupiter's inner layers as the sun!

D and E of course assume that the sun or gas giant chosen don't already have inhabitants, such the Hyrkraians, who would be made very sad by these options....

Poor Validus, all he wants is his rattle.

Surely B5 could find a way to get the tech out of him that allows Tharok to control him then put him on some uninhabited asteroid with some toys and shiny things to distract him and maybe some ice cream.

If I were locked in an inertron box I'd be pretty angry too.

I think the major reason he's in an inertron box is to keep him from being used. Seems a cruel thing. He's just a BABY!!!

I'd like if they could find a way to make him "tamper proof." He could just wander around, looking for a home or something. Of course, sooner or later when some writer runs out of ideas, some marginal villain will overcome the tamper protection but in general, I find that preferable to imprisonment.

Validus is IMO, the BEST nightmare drawn in comics. Simple but hits all the right chords. I don't want a whole society of them. I liked the curse but if not that, I'd much rather his origin, like that of the eye, be never known.

I believe Levitz established that Validus has a history of just sort of mysteriously appearing on different planets, without any apparent mechanism to explain how he got from one place to another. So the concern might be something like that he might just suddenly disappear from his cage one day and suddenly wind up on Toonar or somewhere.

It might be interesting if Validus were actually some kind of mysterious elemental entity, that manifested itself by possessing babies. That's not necessarily inconsistent with the "Darkseid's curse" plotline, while also allowing him to continue to exist without Garridan having to revert to Validus form or something. One might also tie in the "Cult of Validus" idea from the threeboot.

I think I'd be happier if he were just a big guy. No entity, no devourer of worlds, no physical manifestation of some ethereal concept..Just a really big strong frustrated three toed thing with a bubble over his brain. Those are all good things. My preference is that not much be added to Validus' backstory.

The problem I see with adding "backstory" in stories written by a series of authors over decades, is that when they run out of new ideas, they obfuscate and complicate the simple until it is no longer recognizable, or interesting and once the damage is done, it is done. It's the big killer of nearly every good sci fi series on tv, the need to "one-up."

Granted, I did like the curse but to me, that was a rare success and really, there have been a LOT of people posting they did not like it.

I was willing to use the curse idea in my own Legion Legacies stuff, but, given a choice, Validus would just be some mysterious monster with a child-like (and occasionally violently uncontrollable) personality, and Graym would be an only child.

Part of it is that twins are a bit overdone in comics, I think (particularly the 'twin that shows up later, never having been mentioned before' trope, as if a mom could possibly give birth to twins and *not notice it*), and the notion that male Winathians can even make alien women have twins seems like something that should come with a warning label tattooed on the offending organ or something...

The whole 'but, mental lightning! Garth + Imra = Validus! Genius!' thing didn't work so much for me because Validus has never displayed actual mental abilities, and his signature powers include being anywhere from 9 to 30 ft. tall, depending on the portrayal, and having Kryptonian level strength and invulnerability, which means if anything, he's the product of a wild party that ended up with Colossal Boy, Superboy, Lightning Lad *and* Saturn Girl in bed together, and that would pretty much set the Comic Code Authority spinning in it's well-deserved grave.

Validus' original fascination with Imra I preferred as a King Kong / Fay Wray 'It was beauty that killed the beast' homage, to the 'latent recognition of his mom' retcon.

I want Validus' parents to show up.

The "curse" was a bit goofy. So, this is Darkseid's big bad revenge? Kidnap a baby that it's parents don't even know about, turn it into a monster, send it back in time, and hope its parents eventually figure it out or something?

However, I love Garridan as a character.

I really liked the stern talking to Saturn Girl gave Darkseid after that, It was a defining moment for her character. IMO.

The "Validus Plague" was a really interesting idea, but it never felt like it quite got developed.

I, to this day, don't understand the Anti-Life Equation storyline ... of the 5YL ... or the (I forget which) Crisis story.


or how whistleing could stop it. Supes has some mad whistle skills.

Validus is certainly my favourite Fatal Five member (Except for the times when Mano is my favourite Fatal Five Member ). I like the uncontrollable, unstoppable, indestructable rage monster aspect. I think the child-like thing is great, but sometimes gets played up too much. Validus should be a being that inspires fear the galaxy over, with Tharok somehow keeping him in line but just barely. It's been a long time since the Dark Man story, but how did Validus react after that? I imagined with Tharok suddenly gone and the big guy "freed", that he'd just go berserk being a threat to FF and LSH alike.

His size and power levels seem like a bit of a Yo-yo. He's gone from greater than Kryptonian level power to XS or Colossal Boy KOing him. That's been consistent across all boots. He's also been the one least messed with design-wise, because there's not much to improve upon.

I liked "the curse" but didn't like the Annual where it was resolved as a kid. Re-reading it later I got a better understanding of what Darkseid was trying to do, but it was still a bit uneven.

Back then, I did an annotation for the last issue of FC:

http://www.legionworld.net/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=510602#Post510602

The DC Universe/Multiverse works on vibrations. That's how the Flashes were able to move between Earth's, by finding the right vibrational frequency. It's even mentioned in JLA/Avengers, when Iron Man tells the JLA that physics doesn't work like that, well it does in the DCU.

Morrison played with that concept a lot in Final Crisis, with the vibrations sounding like music. When the Ultima Thule (a trippy version of the Beatle's Yellow Submarine) breaches the vibrational barriers of the bleed, you can hear "The music of the spheres". So when Superman whistles, he's creating a note that disrupts or cancels out the vibrational pattern of the sick and poisoned remnants of the Multiverse/Darkseid.

ahhh ... that sounds interesting actually ... hence or plus ... Tyroc's sonic scream can bend reality.

Though thayt finally explains Tyrocs amazing abilities Levitz has kind of forgotten about that side of Tyroc's powers and made him just control sound - which is a shame as it kind of doesn't really work in a visual medium.

I actually suggested awhile back that they might explain Tyroc's powers through string theory, which (at least in some versions) revives elements of the old vibratory theory of matter. A lot of the physics-as-music imagery (which really dates back to Pythagoras) gets used as well.

Funnily enough I'm draft writing a fanfic right now that was going to use something like that.

Busted!

He killed off an incarnation of one of my favorite legionnaires. I can't forgive him. XD

I could most definitely live with that, but when Power Boy wrote




I went "hmmmmm." THAT has great story potential. Haven't decided if I prefer they be evil, magnificent, or Ma and Pa Kent barefoot with three toes. This one I COULD see Giffin doing in ambushing bug fashion.

The Who's Who entry on Validus. I don't know if Earth is a mistake for his home planet, or if that's where Garridan was turned into Validus (which really should be Medicus I then).

Wow, that height and weight are a strange mismatch!

Because of the square-cube law, every time height doubles, weight should octuple, and that's assuming that Validus is made of human-grade meat and bone (which, I'm guessing, he's not, since he can take punches from Superboy).

Assuming, given his build, that he'd be 200 lbs. at 6 ft. tall, he should be 5400 lbs. at 24 ft. tall.

That said, his size has always been inconsistent. He's been maybe 9 ft. tall, just looming over his teammates, and then he's been as big as a small building, wrasslin' with Colossal Boy. I'd just toss a dab of super-growing-power on him, rather than handwave that as artistic license, since I kind of like the idea that the the madder he gets, the bigger he gets.

Edit: Seeing Validus in that giant inerton box makes me wonder; does he eat? sleep? have to pee? need mental stimulation (like to watch reality television? listen to Wagnerian opera? chase butterflies? read trashy romance novels?) That box doesn't seem to have provisions for any of that, and would, even in the real world, constitute cruel and unusual punishment, and the UP future seems a bit more progressive than that...

I mean, if *Tharok* can mess with his head, couldn't a team of Coluans; A) undo it, and B) give him a 'sentience upgrade' or do something about his terrible moodswings?

Seems like there's not even an attempt being made to rehabilitate or deal with the real problem of Validus other than the 'put him in a box on a prison world that people escape from *all the time* and pretend he won't escape.'

Edit2: I also just noticed again that he's got those armbands. In his very first appearance, he's not only wearing clothes, but some sort of mechanical stuff, suggesting that *someone dressed him and equipped him.* Before he even met Tharok, someone was working with him and outfitting him with whatever those things are.

I wonder if he's sort of like a Sun-Eater, a weapon designed by some race (one that may well be extinct, due to their tendency to create unkillable uncontrollable rampaging super-monsters as doomsday weapons!). It would be interesting for some UP exploration team to find the world from which he originally came, a world where there might indeed be more of these weapons (some perhaps looking nothing like Validus, being entirely different 'monsters'), rampaging around a post-apocalyptic wasteland.

Perhaps the culture created some sort of teleportation portal system as well, and it functions on and off, unpredictably, explaining how Validus appears mysteriously from time to time on distant worlds, and disappears from captivity on occasion, as the system has him flagged and when it periodically powers up, it tries to teleport him home, but usually fails and ends up sending him to yet another world in it's database...

Or some unknown force has been airdropping him on various worlds, as part of some research project (lets see how the humanoids of planet X deal with *this!*) or mad scheme or whatever, and is still out there, somewhere, letting Tharok *think* he's taken control of Validus, and, when this unknown person or group wants to reclaim Validus, they'll just snatch him away and undo whatever Tharok did to him, and continue with their own shenanigans, which could lead to an unlikely Legion / Fatal Five teamup, as they have to rescue Validus from the mystery folk that are porting him onto and off of various UP worlds.

Turns out, as much as the Legion and UP don't like the Fatal Five, that Validus does a lot less property damage under Tharoks thumb than be allowed to run rampant on dozens of worlds!