A Once Nonverbal Turned Verbal Autistic Marvel Character Whose Universe Was Sadly Short-Lived

Johnny Do was a severely autistic pyrokinetic child in the comic Psi-Force, which was among the eight comic book runs in Marvel's short-lived "New Universe" of earth-148611 that only took from 1986 to 1989. Johnny was badly abused as a prisoner of the Russian Siberian Project and was treated in the same way as an animal and menaced with a lobotomy. Another prisoner, supernatural vampire Thomas Boyd, escaped the Project and freed him, and later adopted him as his own child.

As Johnny was still nonverbal and severely disabled, Johnny began to grow well and began to open under Boyd's caring security, running together with him as a role of the Medusa Web undercover ops corporation. Possibly reader would have seen Johnny develop even further if the "New Universe" had not been a huge disaster and ruined immediately as soon as it was launched.