gave stars up above

Are you ready for the sensational character find of 1965? No? Well, that's all right, because what I have for you is Ultra, The Multi-Alien. He made his debut in Mystery in Space #103 (November 1965), where he took over Adam Strange's slot after the market for fin-headed Burroughsean homages began to wane. The character was more super-hero than space-adventurer, reflecting the shift in genre interests occuring in the wake of DC's upstart rival, Marvel, putting a successful new spin on the formula. One one side, you had Stan Lee and Jack Kirby continuously raising the bar for innovative concepts and storytelling in Fantastic Four; on the other, there was Ultra The Multi-Alien and the Canine Space Patrol Agents. (I enjoy a lot of DC's goofy 60's material, and not just in a gawk-and-mock sense. Taken as a whole though, it seems indicative of a corporate culture similar to that of General Motors when cheap imports began entering the market -- facing the competition with a "do what we've been doing, only more so" attitude while taking ill-conceived and clueless stabs in a different direction.)

Ace Arn, a standard-issue big-chinned starship captain, finds his vessel dragged along in the wake of a comet, and crash-lands on a strange planet in another star system. Arn is not alone on this strange new world; a group of galactic miscreants are using the planet as a base camp as they try to figure out a use for the Highly Inefficient Super Weapons^TM provided to them by their de facto leader, the shaggy green reject from a Big Daddy Roth character concept sketch in the upper left insert on the cover above.

The weapons allow the wielder to transform anything they hit into obedient duplicates of themselves, which is clever, I admit, but lacks the to-the-point planet-splitting power of a gamma ray laser or disintegration beam. Such are the vagaries of comic book science, where utility is measured in units of PDE (plot device effectiveness). There's a catch, though. The devices cannot work on matter from the aliens' own stellar region, which begs the question of why they chose such a target poor area as a base, but hey, I'm not a megalomaniacal invader from beyond, so what do I know? Fortunately for the bad guys, Ace Arn -- who just happens to be from outside the stellar region -- stumbles right into the middle of their camp.

Anxious to try out their duplication guns, the four aliens blaze away without any sense of hierarchical or organizational deference. The four beams strike him simultaneously, transforming him into a composite being reflecting the appearances and powers -- super-strength, flight, and control over electricity and magnetism -- of all four aliens.

Because of the restrictive end-user license on the mind-control aspect of the ray guns, Arn retains his own identity (though augmented with the advanced knowledge of the aliens) and uses his new abilities to crush the alien cabal's poorly-considered scheme in embryo while explaining events to the less astute readers with a rather curious choice of words:

It's no Betty and Me #16, but we must take our cues for sophomoric humor as they come.

After taking the opportunity to review the design specs of the duplication guns, Arn discovers that the process is irreversible, which leads him to an single panel (two sentences) of soul searching before deciding to embark on an exciting career in superheroics. As my great-gran used to say "When life gives you a scaly bird leg, use it to claw the shit out of ne'er do wells." (It sounded more profound in the original Swedish.) The only thing that remains is to pick out an appropriate code name, but the causal serendipity that is the glue of the superheroic genre has that covered:
That was actually Arn's fourth try, after R-A-T-L-U, T-R-U-A-L, and L-T-R-A-U. Arn placed dead last in the Space Academy's Space Boggle competition four years running.

Ultra, The Multi-Alien's run in Mystery in Space lasted until the title's cancellation with issue #110. He's popped up here and there since then, especially after the enactment of the "No Intellectual Property Left Behind, No Matter How Obscure" Act in the mid-1980's. His most effective post-60's use was in Grant Morrison's Animal Man, where he was shown to be a resident of Comic Book Limbo, an imagined manifestation of DC's voluminous junk drawer of fallow properties. Attempts to bring the character into the DC Universe proper have been less successful, as there really isn't any compelling reason to do so outside the thin gruel of appealing to fan gnosticsm through the character's obscurity and garish design.

My five year old nephew stopped by for a visit a while back. He's a huge fan of the animated DC television shows and their related merchandise, but hasn't shown much interest in the comics themselves. When I went to get a toy he was asking about off one of my bookshelves, he picked up the copy of Ultra, The Multi-Alien's first appearance I had lying on the coffee table (a gift from my brother, not yet filed away in one of the attic longboxes) and was completely fascinated by it. He placed the comic down on the couch and pointed in turn at each alien and their corresponding anatomical contribution to Ultra. It just goes to prove that no matter how odd and out-of-touch those 60's DC books seem to be, the folks in charge knew exactly who their target audience was and how to appeal to them, even across four-plus decades.

Betty James - I'm a Little Mixed Up (from a 1961 single; collected on The Chess Story: 1947-1975 box set, 2000) - Sure, Ace seems okay with his existence as a xeno-chimera, but I suspect he does have a touch of the low-down, "my man-junk is half-feathers, half-lightning bolt" Multi-Alien blues.

KMFDM - Ultra (from Nihil, 1995) - Every hero needs a theme song.

Japan - Alien (from Quiet Life, 1979) - Doing it before Duran Duran did, and in many ways, better.