Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur, a film by Marvel Comics, will be the first time that the only legitimate T. Rex superhero will launch a series of his own. However, Moon Girl, who is known as Lunella Lafayette, isn't a recent creation. Both have a long history in the Marvel Universe.
Lunella Lafayette was first introduced in Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur #1 back in 2015. Although she is a young Black girl with an above-average intelligence (it's been stated in the comics that Lunella is smarter than Tony Stark, Bruce Banner, and Reed Richards), she is nonetheless (or perhaps predictably) mocked by her classmates and given the nickname "Moon Girl." In the new TV series, Lunella accidentally brings Devil Dinosaur into modern New York City through an
Devil Dinosaur first appears in New York City via 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 outrageous crime-fighting duo.
But the origin of Devil Dinosaur goes much further back. In real life and in the comics.
To be clear about it, Devil Dinosaur's origin goes back to the prehistoric period, or to comic books' bronze age. Jack Kirby, the comic-book genius responsible for 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, had first imagined the series.
Devil Dinosaur was created by Kirby and the editors at Marvel in order to capitalize on the current wave of dinosaur fandom in 1978. It was also intended as a potential animated series based on Kirby's old DC property Kamandi: The Last Boy on Earth, which never ran. The original Devil Dinosaur series was only released in the small screen for 45 years, as he was considered the first human.
Kirby's stint on the series was unfortunately short-lived, with the title being canceled after nine issues. Afterward, the characters appeared sporadically in different comic series until Devil was revived for the new series in 2015 (Moon Boy, unfortunately, 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 launch on Disney Channel on February 10 and later on Disney Plus.