Happy Birthday: Insect Queen
Lana Lang was one of teenaged Clark Kent’s closest friends, and Superboy’s biggest fan—he was romantically interested in her as well, and she was sometimes referred to as “Superboy’s girlfriend.”
Lana was a normal human girl with no powers of her own—until one May 16th when she rescued an insectoid alien from a fallen tree. The grateful alien gave Lana a biogenetic ring that allowed her to gain the power and partial form of any insect or arachnid, though she could only duplicate a particular form once a day.
The newly empowered Lana decided to try her hand at superheroism and donned a costume to become Insect Queen.
Lana eventually became a reserve member of the Legion of Super-Heroes, but got tired of her double life and began using her ring more sparingly.
So, in theory, Lana Lang still has the Insect Queen ring and could make a reappearance at any time, in any DCU comic. Wow. Let's see an Insect Queen cameo in Birds of Prey. Generally birds eat insects. How about Insect Queen takes on the Hive! Or the Hive tries to steal the Insect Queen ring; you would think they would want something like that.Oh, I guess there is a New Insect Queen and the All-Hive in recent Superman stories (Superman #671-673). So much for the ring.
She just did. Insect Queen reappeared (in a radical new form) in a recent couple of Kurt Busiek's spectacular issues of Superman. An alien bug creature borrows some of Lana's DNA and makes a new body for itself in her image. She is eventually beaten with a baseball. (I love spoilers like that – they actually make you MORE keen to read the book to see what the hell that could mean.)
I'll take the old Insect Queen who help the Legion beat Mordru in that great old Adventure two-parter.
Don't tell Grant Morrison that she still has that ring. She'll end up in Batman. Everybody is appearing in Batman, even characters used once 5 decades ago.