Marvel has spawned some seriously intelligent heroes and villains. Black Panther’s T’Challa discovered a whole new wing of physics. The High Evolutionary unlocked unexplored facets of the human consciousness. But Moon Girl may just take the top spot for smarts.
Lunella Lafayette first appeared in the comic Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur #1 (November 2015). She hails from Lower East Side New York and is described by Marvel as “the smartest person in the world.” But why is this?
For a start, she is just nine years old in the comics and is already creating Inspector Gadget-level inventions in her bedroom. Lunella created her own “battle armor” including a computerized utility belt. After being exposed to the Terrigen bomb, she unlocked Inhuman abilities, including being able to transfer her consciousness into Devil Dinosaur (though this has the slight drawback of turning Lunella’s human body into a werewolf when the Moon is full).
Then we come to the infamous Banner B.O.X. The Brain Omnicompetence Examiner was crafted by genius Bruce Banner and was a puzzle so complex that no mortal could solve it, not even Banner himself. That all changed when Moon Girl came along. She managed to solve the mind-twistingly difficult puzzle in mere seconds. As the B.O.X. was deliberately designed to be unsolvable, this led Amadeus Cho to declare Lunella the smartest person in the entire world.
And she does all this as a pre-teen. Just imagine what her already vast intelligence will be like in adulthood.
You can now watch Lunella in the series Marvel’s Moon Girl and Dinosaur Devil, available on Disney+.