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Young Marvelman

Young Marvelman
Real name
Richard "Dicky" Dauntless
Current alias
Young Marvelman
Aliases
Young Miracleman
Alignment
Universe

Characteristics
Gender
Hair
Origin
Creators
First appearance

Young Marvelman #25 (1955)

History[]

Dicky Dauntless was a teenage messenger boy working for the Transatlantic Messenger Service who was given superhuman powers like those of his mentor Marvelman by the astrophysicist Guntag Barghelt (he could transform from his normal self into the super powered Young Marvelman by simply saying his mentor's name, "Marvelman"). He fought crime both alone and alongside Marvelman and Kid Marvelman in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, taking on villains such as Dr. Emil Gargunza, Young Gargunza and Young Nastyman before fading into obscurity.

Later revelations and resurrection

Twenty years later, Marvelman resurfaced and discovered that his entire crimefighting career-and those of his two young allies-had been mere dreams, artificially implanted into their brains by their true "creator", Dr. Emil Gargunza, a government scientist. In fact, all three of them had been kidnapped by Gargunza's Project Zarathustra and given superhuman powers by means of stolen alien technology in order to turn them into living weapons (essentially, genetically enhanced cloned copies of their bodies were created and stored in a dimension called Underspace until, at a trigger word, their minds were transferred into the super bodies which switched places with their normal human forms temporarily). When Project Zarathustra was terminated, the government had tried to kill the three superhumans by having them fly into an atomic explosion, but only Young Marvelman actually died; Marvelman himself lost his memory, however, and only regained it in 1982. Years later, having effectively conquered the world and remade it as a Utopia, Marvleman used the same alien technology that had created him to clone Young Marvelman and resurrect him. Young Marvelman, however, was disgusted by what his mentor had done to the world in his absence and fled from him.

Powers and abilities[]

Powers

Flight; enhanced durability.

Abilities

Time travel.

Strength level

Superhuman.

Paraphernalia[]

Transportation

He can fly.

Notes[]

  • Young Marvelman was created by Mick Anglo for L.Miller & Son in the 1950s, and was a fairly generic teen superhero, created as an analogue to the American Captain Marvel Jr. The later revelations about his origins were the creation of Alan Moore writing for Warrior magazine in the 1980s and later for the American series Miracleman published by Eclipse Comics (in which Young Marvelman was duly renamed "Young Miracleman" for the same legal reasons that had prompted Marvelman to become Miracleman; the publishers were afraid of being sued by Marvel Comics. However, since Marvel now own the rights to these characters but not, it seems, to the 1980s stories, that later information may now be considered apocryphal.
  • Young Marvelman starred in his own title, as well as in several Young Marvelman Annuals.
  • Young Marvelman was supposedly an American in the Miller & Son series', but curiously seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time in Britain, particularly in the annuals. In the 1980s revival, however, Dicky Dauntless is quite definitely British. Even in the Miller & Son stories, though, YM's speech is continually peppered with British terms.

Trivia[]

A character named "Rick", who appeared to be a parallel universe version of Young Marvelman, appeared in Alan Moore's Captain Britain series as the partner of a character called "Miracleman" (before Marvelman's name was changed to this). Rick eventually became the partner of Captain UK, an alternate, female Captain Britain. See also Captain Miracle Jnr.

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