Capeworld Comics

Rainbow Boy

 

Jack Walton was a teenaged prodigy who planned to pay his way through college with scholarships and winnings from the Wizard Kids trivia show on radio station WHIZ. He never intended to become a superhero, but when he found his hand refracting into rainbows like light through a prism, that’s exactly what he decided to become–after he was done screaming his head off.

 

Jack Walton’s hyperstasis story was relatively simple. One day, while experimenting with prisms and home-made lasers in his personal lab just because he wanted to see some rainbows, he was struck by their beauty and started to daydream about objects around him breaking down into beams of color. Then he saw his hand was doing exactly what he dreamed about.

 

Jack gained the power to turn into a living streak of light. While moving, he was imperious at all harm, and being light, could move just as fast as light. He could circle the planet several times in a second. He could control his luminosity and appear blindingly brilliant or no more bright than a candle flame. One of his preferred combat tricks was to blind opponents as living light and then punch them out in human form.

 

While dramatically weaker in his human form, he still had a power–he could see well  beyond the visible spectrum. He could even see invisible objects by detecting the slight differences between light passing through a medium and light passing through an object, which allowed, later in his career, to keep track of individual Hydromen in the Hydroman Navy when they were outside their suits.

 

Jack was also able to use photite, the “hard light” material typically attached to photons in an quantumly inert and intangible state. Jack could activate photite to create powerful trails of rainbows that followed in his wake. These rainbow trails when combined with Jack’s speed created kinetic forces strong enough to surround an artillery shell in flight and divert it to the ground ,cushion a falling plane and gently bring it to the ground, and lift and flip a freighter. These rainbow trails, when combined with Jack’s vision power allowed him to serve as a kind of paramedic for Hydromen. He could spot a Hydroman dissolving in the water and then preserve his coherence by surrounding him in a rainbow barrier.

 

Jack’s weakness was that his powers were dependent on him being able to absorb incandescent light such as that produced by the sun, a volcano, or  lighting. In darkness, he was helpless. This got Jack in trouble several times during his early superhero career. He was young, and being able to lap around the planet made him cocky. He often tried to take on gangsters and Axis agents in the dark, hand-to-hand, only to find himself waking up with a sore head and attached to a death trap. Shortly before he joined the Hydroman Navy, he wised up to his weakness and invented a solar battery harness that allowed him to use his powers even in total darkness.

 

When Jack started his superhero career in 1934, he took the name Rainbow Boy and wore a bright costume with a rainbow arc on his chest and helmet. During the Worlds War, an older Jack called himself Rainbow Man and ditched his costume to avoid being made a target of by Japanese snipers aware of how useful he was to the Hydroman Navy, but once the war was over his bright costume came back on. He liked being seen by good guys and bad guys alike. When the Pride flag became a thing in the seventies, rumors started to spread about his prolonged bachelorship, but he continued to go by the name Rainbow Man until the eighties when an issue of Power Level magazine named him as #3 on a list of “Deepest superheroes in the closet.” He changed his name to Prism Man and took the prism from Pink Floyd’s Darkside of the Moon as his symbol, but in the late 90’s he switched back to Rainbow Man and his rainbow arc as a renewed interest in 40’s superheroes caused people to view him in light of his accomplishments instead of his jokes.

 

Late in 1934, Jack met Bob Blake, the Hydroman. Bob wasn’t the first Hydroman (that would be his scientist friend Harry Thurston, inventor of the the Hydroman formula), and he would be far from the last, but he was the first to put on a translite suit to hold himself together and fight evil. Bob became a mentor to the younger Jack, and the two became close partners in crime fighting. When Gold Star arrested Hydroman for vigilantism in early 1935 by sealing him inside watertight glass, Jack freed him. 

 

When Alf Landon offered America’s Masked Mystery Men a fresh slate in 1936, Bob and Jack took it. Jack took his new legal status as an opportunity to unmask–he never liked hiding his identity in the first place, and he wanted Bob, who Gold Star unmasked and identified when he arrested him, to feel like he had a friend he could relate to.

 

During the 1940’s, the United States Navy mass-produced Harry Thurston’s Hydroman formula and created the Hydroman Navy which operated directly under the USN. As the most experienced Hydroman, Bob was placed in charge of the nascent Hydromen, and the USN went about creating a support system for the unkillable, tragically inhuman soldiers. Jack volunteered himself for the Hydroman Navy to support Bob, and their history alone was enough to get him in the support  system, but he quickly proved to be more valuable than just a source of positive moral for Bob. His speed, ability to “see” invisible targets, and photite trails allowed him to be “lifeguard” to the Hydromen. Hydromen were often used in the water where they were incredibly powerful combatants–at a cost. When a Hydroman slips his translite suit in the water, he starts to absorb the water. He becomes a living tidal wave, a living tsunami with all the power it implies. But Hydromen are unstable quasimorphs. The more they absorb, the more they risk washing away their memories and identity. Rainbow Man could fly above the waters beneath which the Hydromen fought, signal to them with bursts of color that penetrated even to the darkest depths of the oceans, and contain them in photite if they started to act irregularly.

 

After the war, Rainbow Man joined the East Coast Protectors consisting of himself, Bob, various Hydromen, The Orphean, and Steel Doll.

 

In 1952, Rainbow Man’s powers had grown to such an extent that he could move faster than light and observe photons and attached photite like never before. It was through his observations and the observations of other photite-controlling superhumans that the origin of photite was finally made known. Photite came from the living universe of Ialpor. Ialpor was a Form Master, and in Enochian his name means “the burning,” which should give some idea as to his inhospitality.

 

Ialpor is an insane, cosmic arsonist. But he was not always so. Once, he had nothing but love in his heart for life and the cosmos. He extended himself across the multiverse, as his kind did, in order to partake in the diversity of life. He placed himself within all light in the multiverse and incarnated himself into forms he found pleasing.  In one life, around 300,000 million years ago, he was a bright Lorean Angel who devoted his incandescent mortality to understanding evil. Why did beings kill? Why did they cause pain and suffering? He wanted to know why so he could stop such things from happening. He flew across the multiverse learning about the worst killers and sociopaths. But after years, he burned at the end of his life and was still no closer to determining the origin of evil. He became desperate. He did not want to have spent his life exposing himself to the darkest, vilest stories of the multiverse for nothing.

 

He surgically altered his brain to have an abnormality similar to that of an infamous Chromian general known as “The Killer.”

 

An unwise move, to say the least.

 

When the mad Lorian’s life ended, his mad thoughts were absorbed by Ialpor’s godhead.

 

Rage, rage, rage spread through Ialpor’s soul like fire immolating all that was good in it. He looked out of himself, away from himself, and found only enemies.

 

Reality was a mistake. The pain and chaos angered and confused him, as they penetrated into the depths of his heart and could not be dislodged or ignored. The joy and order also angered and confused him as he could see it out in the world but could never bring it into his heart.

 

He was filled with pain. It overflowed his soul.

 

He tried to burn all of reality down and had to be sealed away by his fellow Form Lords.

 

Photite are embers of Ialpor attached to all light in the multiverse. Inert, cool, and solid, they are now instruments of creation where once they were weapons of total destruction.

 

Since learning about Ialpor and the origin of photite, Rainbow Man has worked with the Warp Authority to seal breaches in Ialpor’s containment to prevent him from burning innocent universes. He seals potential breaches with photite, snuffing out cosmic flame with cosmic ashes.

 

He finds it good, rewarding work, though he does remark that its funny that when he started using his powers, all he wanted to do was glow as brightly and as hotly as possible, but now he’s trying to dim, in his own words, “a cosmic bonfire with an attitude problem.”

 

That’s Rainbow Man. He can find the bright side of the darkness cosmic horror.