When Marvel’s Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur premieres on Disney Channel, it will mark the first time Marvel’s only legit T. Rex superhero will headline a series of his own. But Marvel Comics’ other hero that has the initials DD isn’t a recent creation. Nor is his partner, Moon Girl, aka Lunella Lafayette. They’ve both got a rich history in the pages of Marvel Comics with roots going back to one of the prime architects of what we know of the Marvel Universe today.
Lunella Lafayette debuted in Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur #1 back in 2015. She is a young Black girl who invents and possesses an above-genius intellect (it’s been stated in the comics that Lunella is smarter than Tony Stark, Bruce Banner, and Reed Richards) Lunella is nonetheless (or perhaps predictably) made fun of by her classmates and given the nickname “Moon Girl.” In the new TV series, Lunella accidentally brings Devil Dinosaur into modern New York City via an experiment gone wrong.
In the comics, Devil Dinosaur first appears in New York City through a time portal and Lunella finds herself reluctantly partnering with him to acquire The Nightstone, a powerful Kree weapon. Eventually, she is exposed to the Inhumans’ Terrigen mist, which activates her mutant Kree potential and forms a telepathic bond with Devil, forming one of New York’s strangest and most flamboyant crime-fighting duo.
But Devil Dinosaur’s own origin goes much farther back. In real life and in the comics.
Devil Dinosaur’s origin dates all the way back to the prehistoric age, or to the Bronze Age of comic books, to be real about it. The series was first imagined by none other than Jack Kirby, the comic-book genius responsible for the look and feel of the majority of the early Marvel comic book universe, including Captain America, Thor, The Hulk, The X-Men, and perhaps most famously, The Fantastic Four. Kirby had left Marvel in the early ’70s for an extended stint at competitor DC Comics, but finally returned to the company he made famous in the later part of the decade.
Kirby and the editors at Marvel came up with Devil Dinosaur in order to take advantage of the current wave of dinosaur fandom in 1978. Additionally, it was to serve as a potential animated series source to compete with a potential cartoon based on Kirby’s old DC property Kamandi: The Last Boy on Earth. The Kamandi series never happened, but it took 45 years for the Devil Dinosaur series to make it to the small screen. The original Devil Dinosaur series followed Devil and his original partner Moon Boy, a primitive hominid boy similar to the ones seen in Kirby’s comic book adaptation of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Moon Boy was billed as “The First Human” as he was more advanced than the other hominids that populated their home, “Dinosaur World.”
Unfortunately, Kirby’s run on the series was short-lived, the title being canceled after nine issues. The characters appeared sporadically in different comic series afterward until Devil was revived for the new series in 2015 (Moon Boy, sadly, was killed off in the first issue of Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur).
The first episode of Marvel’s Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur will premiere on Disney Channel on February 10 and on Disney Plus shortly afterward.
