Usually, light-based superpowers are considered weak, but Rainbow Boy totally managed to make it his own thing! Eastern Color Printing began near the end of the Platinum Age of Comics as a publisher of collected newspaper comic strips in magazine form, but in the Golden Age started an original line titled Heroic Comics. The main hero featured in this was the tragically named Hydroman created by Bill Everett who ironically also made Namor, aka: The Original Aquaman. Hyrdroman is secretly Harry Thurston who was a chemist that gained the power to transform himself and parts of his body into water, so he could drip into any non-airtight situation, as well as some forms of elemental shapeshifting. One of his cases as a moist superhero in Issue #14 had him confronting a villain who in a previous issue had frozen the watery wonder where he frees himself and just happens to run across the new kid on the block, Rainbow Boy! He must have used his "rainbow-sense" because how he ended up finding Hydroman and knowing he was in trouble is left up in the air. The lad's origin story is completely glossed over in a quick narration explaining that he is Jack Walton, a quiz show winner that somehow gained the ability to project rainbows, but only when light is shining on him which he overcame with a solar battery he carried around with him. Rainbow Boy can project a prism of light which he controls its density that allows him to be either shoot rainbow beams out to e
wrangle up or blind bad guys, deflect bullets, as well as bursting out of his back allowing him to fly at super-speed, and being able to see infra-red rays. Walton sported one of the more idiosyncratic superhero costumes with red boots, red gloves, an "R" belt buckle, plus rainbow images on his chest and wrists, as well as what could be described as a mohawk on top of his red mask. The teen superhero helps Hydroman defeat the bad guy of the week making it home just in time for that night's radio game show. Rainbow Boy went on to team-up with Hydroman a few more times, and eventually got his own feature in future issues. It should be pointed out that he was not considered to be Hydroman's sidekick since he had already established himself as a superhero, but that didn't stop him from effortlessly meeting up with Hydroman on other daring rescues. Jack's career as a radio whiz kid helped pay the bills as he had his own car, and some kind of deal working as a plain clothes agent for the army. The colorful crusader went on to deal with tire thieves, racketeers, air pirates, kidnappers, foreign spies, and genuine space invaders. He might appear like the mascot for a retailer trying to pawn off their pride merch to LGBTQ buyers who would know better, but Rainbow Boy was an undisputed junior superhero that still gets some traction in indie comics to this very day.
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