Seeking a loan to build his space ship from his friend Calvin McClary, the president of the Grover Cleveland National Bank, he was turned down. Shortly thereafter, Grayson’s long efforts to make radio contact with extraterrestrial beings finally succeeded. He made radio contact with the colony of Eternals, an evolutionarily advanced offshoot of humanity, who lived on the planet Uranus. They gave Grayson via radio transmission the knowledge needed to build a spaceship capable of interplanetary travel. Believing that the Uranians’ colony would be a better place to raise his infant son Robert than Earth, Grayson built the spaceship and journeyed to Uranus with the baby.

Arriving on Uranus, Dr. Grayson and his son were met with open arms by the Uranian Eternals, which lived within a small five-mile diameter, environmentally-controlled dome that protected them from the intense
cold and poisonous atmosphere outside. Dr. Grayson and his son were given special wristbands containing advanced technology that manipulated gravitons, allowing them to move about on Uranus as if it had Earth-level gravity. Dr. Grayson was enamored of the tiny, peaceful Uranian community and decided to make the place his permanent home. For their own part, the Uranian Eternals were eager to hear news of the world that had spawned them millennia before and listened with rapt attention to Dr. Grayson’s discourses about life on Earth.

Robert Grayson was raised as a young Uranian Eternal, but he was always curious about the world of his birth. At seventeen, he convinced his father to let him go there. Before his departure, young Grayson was given a more advanced pair of energy-manipulating wristbands and was shown how to use them to absorb and reflect light to use as a weapon.

Robert Grayson traveled to Earth aboard his father’s spacecraft, which had been refurbished with Uranian technology. On Earth, following his father’s suggestion, Robert became a crimefighter called Marvel Boy, using his almost superhuman skills, advanced knowledge, and wrist-bands to battle crime in order to spread the Uranian way of peace.

Robert waged his personal crusade for three years before receiving an urgent summons from his father to return to Uranus. Dr. Grayson was in poor health, and the Uranians, unfamiliar with his particular ailments, were having difficulty giving him medical treatment. Robert set out once again for Earth, this time to obtain a wide variety of medical supplies to take back to Uranus. Robert asked the same bank for a loan for purchasing the supplies, but McClary turned him down, asserting that his board of directors would never believe that Horace Grayson was still alive on another planet.

Eventually Robert obtained the supplies he needed and returned to Uranus only to discover that some unknown disaster had destroyed the dome, and all of the inhabitants of the colony, including Dr. Grayson
and the Uranian woman whom Robert had loved since boyhood, were killed by exposure to Uranus’s harsh environmental conditions.

Grief-stricken, Robert Grayson saw that he would have been back on Uranus earlier had it not been for McClary’s rejection of his loan application. Enraged, Marvel Boy decided to return to Earth and take his vengeance for the Uranians’ deaths on McClary and his financial empire.

However, en route to Earth, Marvel Boy’s spaceship passed through the tail of a comet. Inexplicably, radiation from the comet caused Marvel Boy to go into a state of suspended animation in which he aged very slowly into adulthood. He finally revived from suspended animation when his spaceship crash-landed on Earth decades later.

Perhaps as a result of both his intense grief over the deaths of his father and friends and the effects of the comet’s radiation, Marvel Boy became insane. Renaming himself the Crusader, he vowed to fight against all that was evil and corrupt in society, beginning with Calvin McClary. The Crusader struck McClary with a hurled mass of concrete, nearly killing him, and, attempting to destroy McClary’s financial empire, attacked various branches of the Grover Cleveland National Bank. The Crusader used as his weapons energy-manipulating wristbands that were still more advanced and powerful than those he used in the 1950s as Marvel Boy.

The Fantastic Four attempted to halt the Crusader’s rampage. In an effort to defeat them, the Crusader recklessly manipulated the controls of his wristbands to augment their power. He thereby caused the bands to absorb so much solar energy that they overloaded and disintegrated Robert Grayson in a blinding flash of energy. All that was left of him was his energy-manipulating wristbands.