10. Lightning Lad Comes Back In His Team Mate's Bodies
Lightning Lad was one of the founding members of the Legion Of Super-Heroes, one of the brightest and boldest creations from the Silver Age of comics. It was a much more innocent time, before Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns deconstructed the genre and made everything grim and gritty - romances were chaste, language was G-rated, the colours were bright, and the dread spectre of the Grim Reaper was barely even acknowledged. Which made it all the more shocking when, in 1963, Lightning Lad was killed off. This was a good decade before the comic book death trope kicked off with the demise and resurrection of Jean Grey in the pages of X-Men, which took place over the course of a year or so. Fans were shocked and, so, DC threw their grieving readers a bone. Two issues later the Legion figured out that, using lightning rods, they could call the Lad's spirit back to life. Except he had to take control of their bodies in order to do so. So he could be resurrected for brief periods of time, where he possessed his teammate's bodies. That's, erm, not really a long-term solution. And a mite creepy.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
