Sun Eater
| Sun-Eater | |
|---|---|
| Publication information | |
| Publisher | DC Comics |
| First appearance | Adventure Comics #352 (January 1967) |
| Created by | Jim Shooter |
A Sun-Eater is a fictional, artificially created living weapon in the DC Comics universe. It has played an important role in various storylines.
A Sun-Eater is a living nebula with the ability to drain whole stars of all their energy; this snuffs out the star and causes its planetary system to freeze (and all living beings in it to die). The Sun-Eaters were created by the alien race known as Controllers as a way to destroy entire worlds that they judged to be too "evil." Each Sun-Eater was kept in a dormant state until needed, watched over by a Controller.
A creature called a Sun-Eater was depicted as a minor character in the Legion story in Adventure Comics #305 (February, 1963); it was a fiery green humanoid that roams through space, feeding on solar bodies, absorbing their heat and energy. In a brief vignette, the creature is driven off by Mon-El's heat vision.
Another entity called the Sun-Eater (also called "It") was first seen in Adventure Comics #352 (Jan. 1967), in a story that took place in the 30th century, the setting of the Legion of Super-Heroes, by writer Jim Shooter. To stop the colossal nimbus from ravaging the Milky Way Galaxy, the Legion recruited some of the worst criminals in the Galaxy to help them (these criminals would stay together to form the Fatal Five afterwards). But in the end, only one way to stop it was found: an "Absorbatron" bomb would have to be detonated inside its core. Only Superboy was invulnerable enough to deliver the bomb inside, but he had been weakened by radiation inside the Sun-Eater (from the red suns it had already consumed). Ferro Lad, a new addition to the Legion who possessed the power to turn into living iron, could resist going inside the Sun-Eater, but not the bomb's explosion. Heroically, he stole the bomb and delivered it anyway, killing himself and destroying the Sun-Eater, thereby saving the galaxy.
During a period when Superman was sent bouncing back and forth through time following a confrontation between Booster Gold and a renegade member of the Linear Men, he aided the Legion in confronting another Sun-Eater of the type seen in the 1967 story. Although Legion member Wildfire tried to plant another bomb in the heart of the Sun-Eater, the plan failed when he was detected and the Sun-Eater's internal defenses forced him to retreat. While Superman and the other Legion members occupied the Sun-Eater's attention, Wildfire traveled to the heart of the Sun-Eater and abandoned his containment suit- he was naturally a being of pure energy-, leaving Shrinking Violet to reconfigure his suit's internal workings to turn it into a weapon. The Sun-Eater was subsequently destroyed, with Superman throwing Violet to safety at the last minute, although the resulting explosion sent him hurtling through time once again.
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