Who's This? The pride of the Ivory Coast.
The facts: When his sister was possessed by Computo, Jacques Foccart drank Invisible Kid's serum and became the second Legionnaire by that name (no try-outs, no Academy except a single refresher course issue, no stopping at Go or collecting 200 credits). That was in Legion of Super-Heroes Annual #1 (August 1982). He served the team in good stead through the 80s, had a subplot where he was developing some kind of teleportation power, and when we skipped ahead to 5 Years Later, was the leader of the Earth Resistance against the Dominator regime, and Earth's President after the invaders were ousted. The Reboot Legion had him as a minor character who knew Lyle Norg and appeared only briefly. The Retroboot brought Jacques back to where he'd been left at the end of the Baxter series. Jacques is a very minor part of the Bendis Legion as well, but with a completely different origin story.
How you could have heard of him: Zeno Robinson recently voiced him in the 2023 Legion of Super-Heroes animated movie. He'd had a cameo in the earlier (2006) Legion series.
Example story: Tales of the Legion of Super-Heroes #324 (June 1985) "The Missing planet Puzzle" by Paul Levitz, Mindy Newell, Ernie Colon and Gary Martin
You know I love a French-speaking character, and hate when English-speaking writers mangle the French. Invisible Kid proves the language makes it to the 30th Century, though perhaps in no better shape than it does on Star Trek: The Next Generation. Jacques mostly says stuff like "mon ami", the clunkier "my old ami" (eech), or the reversed "merci Dieu" (thank God, which should be "Dieu merci", and it all predates Gambit by several years by the way. Well, we have to make concessions for linguistic drift over a thousand years... In the back-up I've selected, he's in his home country, visiting a surprint Crisis planet factory where an old ami has made great strides in carto-holography.
And of course, there's trouble at the holo-mill. Emil has been able to construct maps of every planet in the UFP but one: Orsde. Every time they set their computers to map the world, the equipment explodes. And Emil has only one answer...
Poltergeists! (French lesson: the word needs an article here, so it should be "Des Poltergeists".) Jacques doesn't believe it, and it seems like he should refer his friend to his colleague the White Witch. Instead, he goes to Shrinking Violet, currently training in the Danger Room. She thinks it's about politics (there's a Legion election about to take place), but... is it that he suspects Imskians are in play here? He's quite correct, and since it couldn't be an Invisible Kid story if our hero didn't turn invisible at least once, that's how he'll trick them into showing themselves.
I didn't see the vacuum cleaner coming, however. So as it turns out, they are Imsk rebels who don't want cartographers to discover their hidden bases, something Violet was able to confirm (so it WAS about politics after all!). Well, we don't see it exactly, but Jacques did figure it out on his own, and we'll eventually discover he does have a head for politics and the bigger picture.
While I liked the original Invisible Kid in the Reboot Legion, I'm a little bummed that Jacques isn't the automatic go-to for a rebooted Invisible Kid (we'll see if and when they reboot the LSH again), and not just for diversity's sake. He could use a better costume - it was improved in the Retroboot, at least - but otherwise, I've always thought he had great potential, especially when we remember his role in 5YL.
Who's Next? A heroic bloodsucker.
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