Night Girl Question

Was it ever specified how Night Girl's powers worked? Did it really need to be at night, or could they function in darkness as well? And if the latter is true, why would she carry around a variation of Dr. Mid-Nite's blackout bombs (aside from the obvious reason that no one thought About it) ? 

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  • Originally Night Girl had her super-strength during the nocturnal hours or blocked off from natural sunlight, regardless of what artificial light there was. After all, it was never 100% dark to activate her power. Her home world of Kathloon was sunless but had means to luminate that didn't interfere  with her strength.

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    However in the mid 70s Superboy #212, she lost her powers with any strong light source and had to be saved by Shadow Lass. 

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    But again, that didn't happen in her later appearances.

  • Was it ever specified how Night Girl's powers worked? Did it really need to be at night, or could they function in darkness as well? And if the latter is true, why would she carry around a variation of Dr. Mid-Nite's blackout bombs? 

    I'm presuming you meant to say "why wouldn't she carry around a variation of Dr. Mid-Nite's blackout bombs?".  If so, then, in fact, she did.  In "The Triumph of the Legion of Super-Villains", from Adventure Comics # 331 (Apr., 1965), we see Night Girl employ a "shadow-bomb" for the explicit purpose of blotting out the sunlight, restoring her super-strength.

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    Other stories, such as "The Forgotten Legion", from Adventure Comics # 351 (Dec., 1966), show her using her super-strength when she is simply shielded from the direct rays of the sun, such as within the Subs' headquarters.  I imagine, though, that the reconciliation with the instance that Philip presented from Superboy # 212 is that, if the artificial light is extraordinarily bright, such as the Kleig lighting that was used to illuminate sets for television shows back in the '50's and '60's, then it would also sap her super-strength.

  • Okay, I just knew this was going to happen. You guys answered my initial question, but I've come with a bunch more:

    * Did Night Girl have any powers beyond super strength? Also where was she on the strength scale? Wonder Woman-is?

    * We know Chlorophyll Kid could make plants grow. Could he make them recede as well?

    * What was Fire Lad' s effective range? Did he have to be close to use his powers effectively or could he do do from a distance? Also, given that he was effectively walking napalm, what was his endurance like for his flames? Could he only use them for s minute or so or were they inexhaustible  

  • Night Girl was pretty durable, could see in the dark and had hair that could defy gravity!

    Strength-wise, IMHO only, I would rank her below Ultra Boy but far above Timber Wolf.

    Chlorophyll Kid Can make plants grow super-fast and super-large but nothing was said about him retarding plant growth. However he should be a bigger deal, going around the universe and making famine-struck planets into flourishing orchards like an intergalactic Johnny Appleseed!

    Fire Lad could produce a flame blast for a few seconds as he exhales but he would have to breathe in before using his power again. His range was usually within a few feet away from him but he sometimes used technology to increase it. He was probably immune to fire.

  • "You guys answered my initial question, but I've come with a bunch more"

    You should buy...

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  • Would another way to reconcile the varying lights that could sap Night Girl be in the wavelengths? An interior light would not have, for example, ultraviolet rays. Whereas sunlight has tons of ultraviolet, the source of sun tans.

    That's just a fer-instance. Sunlight includes the entire electromagnetic spectrum, so anything that an ordinary interior light doesn't include would be a possibility, and that's a lot of suspects.

    The interior lights that were shown to sap her strength could be unusual bulbs that radiate more than the visible light spectrum, and include our strength-sapping wavelength, whatever it is. Meanwhile, whatever illumination was used on Kathoon would exclude the strength-sapper.

    Or, it could just be a matter of brightness, as the Commander suggested. I'm on less firm scientific footing on figuring that out, as I don't really know what causes brightness. Is it simply a matter of how much energy is being radiated? If so, maybe her power is negated by other, certain energy sources. But if something else causes the quality of brightness, like more of X wavelength and less of Y, or shorter, more energetic wavelengths vs. longer ones, then I'm wildly off base.

    Either way, I hope she and Sun Boy never become a couple.

  • As near as I can recall, Night Girl's powers worked in heavy shadow as well as night time, just as long as she wasn't exposed to any sunlight.  I'm pretty sure they made the logical choice of teaming her up with Shadow Lass at least once, and that worked, so they avoided doing that too often.  To be fair, I could see why they wouldn't want Shady, an actual Legionnaire, reduced to just being a blackout bomb for a Sub, and with so many other LSHers possessing similar strength levels to Night Girl, there wasn't really a need to call her up to the majors.  It would have been interesting to see what would happen if someone like Color Kid or Projectra used their powers to create a zone of darkness around Night Girl.  Probably nothing, but some of what Color Kid did seemed to indicate that he was actually able to alter the electromagnetic wave lengths of the objects he recolored, otherwise making Green Kryptonite just LOOK Blue wouldn't have made it harmless to Superboy.

    I wouldn't say that no one thought about it, but I'm sure the creative teams were hoping that none of the readers would (some of us did).  After all, they were pretty invested in the Subs having odd limitations to their powers, and providing them with obvious and fairly simple solutions to those limits was the last thing they wanted to do.  After all, much was made of how useless Stone Boy was when he used his power, because it rendered him immobile, but since he had a mentally guided flight ring, he should have been able to fly in his petrified form, either serving as a missile against their foes, or maneuvering himself between his teammates & enemy fire, instead of just standing around waiting for the pigeons to land on him.But that wasn't what they wanted the Subs to be.

  • Ooops, I should read everyone else's answers before repeating them.  I blame sheltering in place.

    Dave Elyea said:

    As near as I can recall, Night Girl's powers worked in heavy shadow as well as night time, just as long as she wasn't exposed to any sunlight.  I'm pretty sure they made the logical choice of teaming her up with Shadow Lass at least once, and that worked, so they avoided doing that too often.  To be fair, I could see why they wouldn't want Shady, an actual Legionnaire, reduced to just being a blackout bomb for a Sub, and with so many other LSHers possessing similar strength levels to Night Girl, there wasn't really a need to call her up to the majors.  It would have been interesting to see what would happen if someone like Color Kid or Projectra used their powers to create a zone of darkness around Night Girl.  Probably nothing, but some of what Color Kid did seemed to indicate that he was actually able to alter the electromagnetic wave lengths of the objects he recolored, otherwise making Green Kryptonite just LOOK Blue wouldn't have made it harmless to Superboy.

    I wouldn't say that no one thought about it, but I'm sure the creative teams were hoping that none of the readers would (some of us did).  After all, they were pretty invested in the Subs having odd limitations to their powers, and providing them with obvious and fairly simple solutions to those limits was the last thing they wanted to do.  After all, much was made of how useless Stone Boy was when he used his power, because it rendered him immobile, but since he had a mentally guided flight ring, he should have been able to fly in his petrified form, either serving as a missile against their foes, or maneuvering himself between his teammates & enemy fire, instead of just standing around waiting for the pigeons to land on him.But that wasn't what they wanted the Subs to be.

  • I don't really know, but given that one of Mike Grell's stories made a point of pairing her with Shadow Lass, I suspect that darkness would be enough.

    Come to think of it, there isn't even night as such off-planet, where Lydda was often enough.

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