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From SCIFIPEDIA
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Lightning Lad is a fictional super-hero character owned by DC Comics. A thousand years from now, Garth Ranzz will come from the planet Winath, a planet of farmers known as the bread-basket of the United Planets. Winath is also notable because almost every birth results in identical twins. Despite this fact, although Garth has an identical twin sister named Ayla, he also has a rare singleton brother named Mekt. The three siblings are ship-wrecked on the primitive planet Kobal, where an accident with a "Lightning-Beast" gives them the amazing power of shooting lightning bolts from their hands. Later, back on Winath, due to trauma related to his rare singleton status, Mekt has some kind of nervous breakdown and runs away from home. Garth comes to Earth to search for Mekt, but ends up a founding member of the Legion of Super-Heroes, a teen-age group dedicated to protecting the security of the United Planets in the 31st century. His sister Ayla later joins the team as Lightning Lass, though later loses her lightning power and gains the ability to negate the effects of gravity on objects, and changes her super-hero name to Light Lass. Still later, Mekt becomes the super-villain Lightning Lord, and the two brothers are destined to meet in battle.
Lightning Lad may have the distinction of being the first superhero to actually die and come back from the dead, preceding Superman, Green Arrow and Green Lantern (Hal Jordan) by decades. In Adventure Comics #304 (1963), Lightning Lad is killed by the deadly ray of the evil invader Zaryan when he takes Saturn Girl's place on a mission. In Adventure Comics #312 (1963), on Mon-El's home planet Daxam, the Legion finds a method of bringing him back. The method involves connecting a wire to a special lightning rod that will transfer the life force from a living being to a deceased one when hit by lightning. The problem is, it requires the person holding the rod to die, sacrificing their life to bring the dead person back.
The Legionnaires couldn't decide who would make the sacrifice (they all wanted to do it) so they each stood out in a lightning storm with a different rod, all connected to Lightning Lad's lifeless corpse, leaving it to chance whom the lightning would strike. Saturn Girl, who felt responsible for her friend's death, tried to cheat by making her rod from Duralim, a super-conductive metal that was sure to attract the lightning before the other rods. The big plot twist comes when it turns out that Chameleon Boy's pet, the shape shifting Proty, tricked Saturn Girl into getting lost in a cave and secretly took her place, so that he would die in her place. Proty's trick worked, and Lightning Lad was brought back to life.
Recently, in Justice League of America #10 (2007), the Legion uses the very same method to bring back Wally West (Flash) and his family back from the speed force.
Lightning Lad has been linked romantically to fellow Legionnaire Saturn Girl.
The Legionnaires wait to see who will die to revive Lightning Lad
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