Living Lightning (gh)

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Santos, and all save one of his legionnaires, died when the Hulk destroyed their mountain lair. Even this lone survivor died after telling the story of the Legion’s fate to Santos’s son, Miguel.

Miguel was grief stricken because he had not been present when his father died. He planned to revive his father’s dream of abolishing hatred. Many years passed, and finally, Miguel Santos cracked the code to the Legion’s maps. He followed the directions into the Santa Ana mountains and discovered the location of the Legion’s secret lair.

In order to achieve his plan, he needed a working weapon. He attempted to reconnect his father’s Lightning Machine. When Miguel brought the wires together, there was an intense flash as energy surged from the wires into Miguel’s body. Shocked into unconsciousness, Miguel woke to find himself buried beneath a pile of rubble. After freeing himself from the debris, Miguel was amazed to find that his body glowed and crackled with a strange form of energy.

In reconnecting the wires, Miguel had somehow plugged himself into the lightning machine. Rather than merely giving himself a working weapon, he had turned himself into one.

Attributing this transformation solely to the machine, and fearing that anyone might be able to receive such powers from it, Miguel destroyed the machine so that there would be only one Living Lightning. In fact, only someone with Santos’s rare blood chemistry could have survived this experience.

Miguel now wished to test the limits of his new-found powers. He went on a mini-rampage, causing electrical fires and damage in the vicinity of Fullerton. Miguel’s activities came to the attention of the original Human Torch. The Torch himself had only recently been revived after thirty-six years of dormancy. The Torch was familiar with the California area and eventually tracked down the source of the destruction.

Miguel, who was now calling himself Relampago Vivo or Living Lightning, engaged the Torch in a protracted battle in the sky above Fullerton. Eventually the Avengers, Henry Pym, and the Wasp, showed up in the Rover (a hovercraft type vehicle) and entered the fray. During the course of the battle, Living Lightning grabbed hold of a cable which was attached to the Rover. Because he was in his energy form, he was drawn down the cable until grounded and his electrical charge set off the Rover’s fuel tanks. Though, he was believed to have been destroyed by the explosion, the Avengers had seen too many mysterious deaths to be convinced that this creature was gone for good.

The Avengers’ suspicions proved to be correct as the mad geneticist Doctor Demonicus had been watching the battle between the Torch and Living Lightning. Intrigued by the tremendous amount of electrical power emanating from Living Lightning, Demonicus used machines to drain off Lightning’s corpus of energy. Demonicus siphoned Lightning’s energy to his island base at the same moment that Dr. Pym had ground ed Living Lightning.

Demonicus then used his machines to reconstruct the Lightning into his original human form. In order to keep his body from spontaneously decomposing into electrical impulses, Lightning had to stay hooked up to these devices.

When the Lightning regained consciousness, Demonicus asked him to join a new organization he was forming the Pacific Overlords. Reluctant at first, Living Lightning soon realized he had little choice but to do what Demonicus asked. After all, he was probably still wanted by the authorities because of his exploits on the night when he battled the Torch and the Avengers. Eventually he agreed to work for Demonicus in exchange for certain benefits, the greatest of which was the stasis suit which allowed him to stay in human form.

Though Lightning never much cared for Demonicus’s methods, he had little choice but to serve him since Demonicus possessed a remote control which could turn off Lightning’s stasis suit at any time. In effect, he was more a prisoner of the Overlords than one of them.

His true nature was shown when he squared off against the rest of the Overlords to save the lives of the Scarlet Witch and Pele, a former Overlord. Hawkeye, Spider-Woman, USAgent, and Sunfire showed up about this time and Lightning reluctantly participated in the battle against them.

When Demonicus instructed Lightning to take the Scarlet Witch as a hostage because the battle was turning against the Overlords, Lightning refused to put any more innocent people in danger. Demonicus, brandishing the stasis suit deactivator, threatened to turn off Lightning’s suit. Lightning fired a blast which struck the deactivator, destroying it. He then joined with the Avengers to battle the giant Overlord Kain.

The battle ended with Demonicus revealing to the Avengers the true objective of his machinations. Demonica, Demonicus’s newly created nation, had just been admitted to the United Nations. As a sovereign nation, Demonica did not recognize the Avengers’ authority and they were forced to leave the island. Living Lightning chose to leave with the Avengers. Since the Wasp had chosen to step down as an active member, she nominated Lightning as her replacement. Lightning accepted the nomination and has served with the Avengers West Coast team in their adventures with the Fantastic Four on an alternate Earth, and in their most recent encounter with Night Shift. Despite some grave doubts, Miguel also performed well as an Avengers’ emissary to the Shi’ar Galaxy during Operation Galactic Storm. He has now proven to himself that he belongs among the ranks of the Avengers and his pride keeps him striving to be the best Avenger he can be.