Little is known of the life of Tom Corbet prior to his enlistment in the Foreign Legion sometime prior to the summer of 1940.  When a corrupt magnate organizes an effort at world dominion, he exploits aboriginal peoples across the Southern Hemisphere in a large army.  Realizing there is unrest but not appreciating the scope, an arrogant lieutenant sends a platoon of legionnaires across the desert to confront one of the African tribes.  The ill-fated platoon soons falls to the unrelenting desert climate, all dying save Tom Corbet.  Corbet, near death himself, stumbles as the last survivor into an oasis unknown to any map.  He greedily drinks the waters and is restored but a tiger soon appears and stalks him.  Throwing up his hands, he finds that "neonic" energy fields unleashed from his body strike the tiger dead, Realizing he has been transformed, he takes the new identity as Neon the Unknown.

Returning to his post, he witnesses the aborignal army assembling squadrons of war planes and races back to warn commandant.  Initially dubious, the commandant is swayed when war planes pass closely overhead.  He send his legions with Neon, who uses his powers to aide them in defeating the aboriginal army and destroy the hangers.   As the planes divert toward South America, the Legion gives chase and again Neon uses his powers to shift the tide and the planes are downed into the unforgiving sea (Hit Comics #1).

From that point forward, Neon the Unknown traveled the world confronting evil.  He made particular efforts to defeat Axis activities, including liberating the small Axis ally of Dunland (Hit Comics #2), rescuing a woman trapped in a 5th columnist plot (Hit Comics #8), prevents an Axis takeover in the Balkan nation of Slovia (Hit Comics #11-12) and targeting axis threats against the still-neutral United States (Hit Comics #14, #15 and #17).