Bob Rozakis

Superman Stuff #29: Incomplete Classics II

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Once again, today we’re going to look at a few of the older Superman comics I rescued on a trip to an antique mall a few weeks ago. Let’s start with a trip back to 1977, then bounce forward a couple of years. 

Superman #314
Title: Before This Night is Over, Superman Will Kill!
Writer: Martin Pasko
Pencils: Curt Swan
Inker: Dan Adkins
Cover: Neal Adams & Curt Swan

As I mentioned last week, picking up comics from bargain bins is a gamble, because you often will get an incomplete story without knowing it until you sit down to read. Such is the case here – the story starts right off with a child begging Superman not to kill his “dog,” only for next page to reveal that the boy is suffering from an alien germ called “Journalist’s Disease” which has apparently been plaguing Metropolis at least since Lois Lane caught it back in issue #311. (A four-issue arc? Rare at this time.) The “dog” is, in fact, an alien creature called Jevik that Superman believes is responsible for the disease. Jevik was sent by another alien – a pirate named Amalak – whose attack is intended as some sort of revenge against Superman as the last son of Krypton.

There were a LOT of aliens who hated Krypton back in the day. I wonder if James Gunn’s movie was on to something.

Anyway, Superman has a way to cure the disease, but needs equipment from the Justice League satellite. Arriving there, he finds Amalak, who claims to have killed Flash, Green Lantern, and Supergirl, and engages our hero in a final battle. 

The story as a whole is interesting for two reasons. First, there’s the alien Jevik. Aliens in comics past often fell into one of two categories: either they were basically human, save for skin color or an odd extra growth and maybe some sort of racial superpower, or they were so bizarre that one can’t even fathom how such a thing could have evolved. Jevik falls into the latter category. Superman’s description of his life cycle is so strange that it makes almost no sense. Fortunately, making sense is by no means a requirement to enjoy a story of this nature.

The other thing that is noteworthy is how infuriating the last page of this issue is. I’m gonna spoil it for you here, because I want to talk about how mad it made me and I can’t do that without telling you what happens, so if you’re trying to remain pristine on a 49-year-old comic book, skip this. After Superman has engaged the cure to Journalist’s Disease and its many victims are on the mend, Clark Kent visits the recovering Lois Lane in the hospital. Shattered at the fact that he almost lost her, Clark asks Lois to marry him. She says she will – IF he will confess to her, right then and there, that he is Superman. And he says he can’t do that and walks away, leaving them both heartbroken.

It was the 70s, I get it. At this time period, the status quo was God and nothing could change. But Mr. Pasko – you expect me to buy that Clark Kent was willing to marry Lois Lane, but was not willing to tell her his identity? 

And look, I know that 15 years later Clark would propose to Lois before she knew he was Superman, but the idea there was that he wanted her to love CLARK, and he would tell her the truth after they were engaged. There was never any doubt that he WOULD tell her. You can say that it may still have been problematic, but this? This is just absurd.

Loved it. Five-star issue.

Superman #366
Title: Revenge, Superman-Style (Story 1), Perry White’s Superboy Scoop (Story 2)
Writer: Cary Bates (1), Bob Rozakis (2)
Pencils: Curt Swan (1), Kurt Schaffenberger (2)
Inker: Frank Chiaramonte (Both)
Cover: Ross Andru & Dick Giordano

An amazing thing about comics of this era is just how much time they spent recapping the story so far. This issue gives us no fewer than four pages to set up the story and recap what happened in the previous issue: Clark Kent is taking another week off work at WGBS-TV because Superman is needed on a mission in space that he fears he may not return from. Supergirl, meanwhile, is worried about him because last issue she was manipulated into attacking him as a plot by what they assume is the Superman Revenge Squad, and he’s off to fight them on his own. He disguises himself as an alien and allows himself to be “discovered” by the Revenge Squad, claiming that Superman recently thwarted him as well. 

I love seeing the home of the Revenge Squad here. This isn’t a group of five or six bank robbers from Metropolis, friends, it’s a legion of evil aliens that Superman has thwarted time and again. They’ve got their own whole alien base. They even make a giant statue of Superman that they daily force to melt by shouting how much they HATE it. George Orwell would approve.

The aliens show off their various techniques to train while one of them secretly scans the newcomers brainwaves to make sure it’s not a trick…and he passes. What? How can this BE? The narrator even asks the same question. Unfortunately, the answer to that seems to come in issue #367, which I don’t have.

There’s a back-up story, though! A tale of “Superman: The In-Between Years,” which was a serial from that era that told stories of Superboy after the death of Jonathan and Martha Kent but before he began his career as Superman in Metropolis. In “Perry White’s Superboy Scoop,” the boy of steel has gone AWOL. Cities all over the country are claiming that he’s moved into town as various disasters are averted and crimes are thwarted anonymously. As people wonder where he’s gone now that he’s left Smallville, Daily Planet reporter Perry White is determined to prove that the kid has taken up residence in Metropolis. Clark Kent, of course, IS in Metropolis, attending college and carrying out good deeds in secret – deeds like saving Perry White from a mob boss. 

Both Clark and Perry catch wind of the fact that some mobsters Perry recently reported on are meeting a rival gang from Gotham City in a baseball stadium, and both seek it out. Superman stops the gangland shooting and Perry White realizes that, despite the hail of bullets the two gangs unleashed upon one another, they were all knocked UNCONSCIOUS rather than killed. He demands Superboy show himself, and…well…he does. Pretty soon the Planet is formally announcing that Metropolis is the new home of Superboy.

Huh?

Okay, I can SORT OF buy that Superboy wanted to play his location close to the vest after leaving Smallville. Maybe he hadn’t totally settled on Metropolis as his new home yet. But first of all, these are the stupidest gangsters in history, so intent on shooting each other that none of them noticed the teenager in blue tights or the reporter with a camera taking pictures of them while they were standing on the baseball diamond of an otherwise empty stadium. And worse than that is Superboy just basically shrugging and giving Perry the scoop. There’s no change of heart, nothing that makes him sure that Metropolis will be his home, he just throws his hands up in the air and announces he’s in Metropolis now. Perry had no proof, just another freak occurrence such as those that had been happening since Superboy went into hiding. It makes no sense whatsoever.

Another timeless masterpiece.

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. Don’t forget, you can check out earlier blogs in the Year of Superman/Superman Stuff Archive! Got a request for a future “Superman Stuff”? Drop it in the comments!

Superman Stuff #28: Incomplete Classics

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As I’ve mentioned many times, whenever my family takes a trip I like to do a little nerd shopping. Not only do I hit up comic shops whenever possible, but if I can find used bookstores, antique malls, or anything else of the sort, my wife knows that I’m going to want to immerse myself in some back-issue diving. There’s some relationship advice, folks, marry somebody who is willing to be patient with you when you’re elbow-deep in old copies of Donald Duck. 

The interesting thing about doing this is that you never quite know what it is you’re going to find. I like the bargains, the dollar bins, the unsorted pot of gold at the end of the comic book rainbow. Sometimes you get complete sets. Sometimes long runs. But more often, I find, you get utterly random issues that don’t necessarily have anything else to do with anything else in the box. I always like to grab the weird comics when that happens, things that I’ve never heard of before, stuff that I’ve heard of but maybe have never read…and, of course, when I come across a Superman comic that I haven’t enjoyed, I rescue it from the bin.

Of course, this approach to collecting comes with a major complication – not knowing what I’m looking for and not even always knowing what I’m getting, Because I like to approach it this way, I often get incomplete stories. While it’s true that comics of the past were rarely serialized to the extent that they are today, even in the 70s and 80s it wasn’t unusual for a storyline to run for two or three issues, and at the time it was virtually unheard of for them to be labeled as such on the cover. 

When that happens, when I read a comic that’s only a chunk of a story, I don’t necessarily feel like it’s fair to give it a full review. That doesn’t mean that it can’t be fun to talk about it, though. For example, a few weeks ago on a trip to the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain, we hit an enormous antique mall where I scored several cheap Superman books, virtually all of which turned out to be only a part of a story.

Bet you wanna know what’s going on here. Sucker.

Action Comics #507, for example. The lead story in this issue is “The Miraculous Return of Jonathan Kent” by Cary Bates and Curt Swan. Younger folks might not remember this, but until the John Byrne Superman reboot in 1986, most versions of Clark Kent’s adoptive parents had passed away by the time he began his career as Superman. So I’m sure you can imagine Clark’s shock in this 1980 comic when Jonathan shows up to visit him in Metropolis as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Clark is dumbfounded, of course, but is even more shocked when he discovers that Lana Lang, too, thinks it’s perfectly natural for the late Jonathan Kent to be there. Whooshing off to Smallville, Clark can’t find his father’s grave or any other evidence that he died – in fact, there is a preponderance of evidence that Jonathan has been alive and well in Smallville all this time. Superman even finds letters (people used to do that before email) written to Jonathan FROM Clark, in his own handwriting. How is such a thing possible?

What a great question! I assume the answer can be found in Action Comics #508. I didn’t get that issue, though, so I can’t be entirely certain.

Bet you wanna know how this started. Sucker.

Adventure Comics #455 from 1977 has the opposite problem – it’s the end of a story that began in the previous issue. In “I Can’t Go Home Again” by Bob Rozakis with art by Juan Ortiz and Vince Colletta, Superboy begins the issue in outer space looking down on a Smallville that seems to have been somehow inundated with Kryptonite. Although (in this Pre-Crisis era) Kryptonite is harmless to humans, Superboy is trapped outside of town, and a recap of last issue tells us that although he’d captured the Kryptonite Kid, thinking him responsible, the real culprit is Lex Luthor. Superboy switches back to Clark and tries to confront Lex, even though the Kryptonite has left him as weak as a kitten. It goes as well as you might expect, and let’s all be grateful that Pete Ross knew Clark’s secret, even if he didn’t want Clark to know that.

The story isn’t bad, but it makes me want to go back and read the first part which – needless to say – I don’t have. It probably also goes without saying that neither of the books I’m hoping to read are available on the DC Universe Infinite app. I’ve written before about how irritating it is that the “infinite” app has such huge swaths of comics missing from its catalogue. By what measure can we call it “infinite” if there are hundreds of comics featuring Superman that aren’t included in the database? (To say nothing of the missing comics featuring Batman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, the Flash, and all the rest?) I get that digitizing old comics takes time and money, but it’s been an embarrassingly long time since there were any more older comics added to the app.

I doubt that they’ll leap onto these two comics that I’ve mentioned here just because I happened to mention it – after all, I’ve been playing this particular song for a couple of years now and DC hasn’t made any real strides to start adding older comics again. But it’s something I find frustrating every time I open the app and look for a comic that turns out to be missing.

Not that this will stop me from picking up the random oldies whenever I come across them, of course. That, if nothing else, is part of the fun. 

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. Don’t forget, you can check out earlier blogs in the Year of Superman/Superman Stuff Archive! Got a request for a future “Superman Stuff”? Drop it in the comments!

Superman Stuff #22: The 1982 Superman Spectacular

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During the Year of Superman, I devoted about an entire month to the epic 90s saga of Superman Red and Superman Blue. After that, I went back and read the original one-off “imaginary story” that partially inspired it. A few months ago, though, I learned of the existence the 1982 Superman Spectacular, a treasury-sized one-shot reprinting a story originally published in Europe by the Egmont Group (the same company responsible for some of the greatest Disney comics of the post-Gold Key era), which was also a different take on that classic story. Had I known about this book last year, I would have tried to hunt it down and include it then. But since I didn’t, it gets a showcase this week in Superman Stuff. 

Superman Spectacular #1
Title: The Startling Saga of Superman-Red and Superman-Blue!
Plot: Bob Rozakis
Script: Paul Kupperberg
Pencils: Adrian Gonzales
Inks: Vince Colletta
Cover: Adrian Gonzales

Our titanic tale begins when Lex Luthor – this is in his fun and feisty Bronze Age mad scientist era – sends a hologram to a Daily Planet staff meeting to boast that he’s going to pull a heist at S.T.A.R. Labs in an hour. When Superman heads out to thwart him, Luthor attacks with synthetic magic energy (I know, I thought the same thing) generated by a S.T.A.R. experiment. Superman takes precautions, expecting a trap, and defeats Luthor, who turns out to be yet another duplicate – a robot this time.

In space, the real Luthor is approached by Terra-Man, a now-obscure villain that they were REALLY trying to push into the A-list at the time. The Pre-Crisis Terra-Man was literally a child abducted from the old west and raised by aliens. He grew up, killed the aliens, tamed another alien that resembled a pegasus, and came back to Earth in the modern day to be a supervillain for some reason. Why they were trying so hard to make him one of the big guns is beyond me. But having found a chunk of the one substance deadly to Superman, Terra-Man and Luthor decide to partner up and destroy him together. Terra is smart enough not to trust Lex, though, and only speaks to him via an 80s sci-fi Zoom meeting, which turns out to cause a problem, as we shall soon see.

Terra-Man attacks Metropolis with a meteor shower, interrupting a date between Superman and Lois (RIGHT before she was about to say the big L-word to him too), and the Man of Steel jumps into action only to fall right into their Kryptonite trap…but instead of killing him, the Kryptonite wave splits him into two, a red and a blue Superman. Lex and Terra-Man hadn’t met in PERSON to discuss their plans, you see, and on his black-and-white monitor, Lex didn’t realize that Terra-Man had a chunk of RED Kryptonite, not the fatal green variety. If you’re not up on your DCU science, red Kryptonite doesn’t kill a Kryptonian but rather has a different, random effect on them every time they’re exposed to it. (You may have seen classic covers with Superman having an ant head or turning into a giant or something – these were usually red K tales.) Anyway, as the Supermen stop the meteors, although one of them is briefly perplexed when his super-breath temporarily stops working as they’re trying to blow the meteors away. The villains escape and Luthor proceeds to activate his next plan, opening up a magical portal to another dimension, because that’s the kind of thing mad scientists do. 

The twin Supermen stumble over one another at the Planet offices, then discover that some of their powers seem to cut in and out whenever they go into action. Despite that, they charge into battle against the two villains. As Blue battles Terra-Man in space and Red fights Luthor on Earth, Blue finally cracks the secret that the reader figured out 20 pages earlier – the two of them are sharing their powers, and only one of them can use any given power at a time. The realization is a bit too late for Red – on Earth, Lex’s sudden magical expertise has him on the ropes. Fortunately for him, the red Kryptonite wears off at just that second and he fades away, re-fusing with Blue in space. The fully restored Superman makes short work of Terra-Man, but returns to Earth to find that Lex’s magical prowess has intensified. In the ensuing battle, Lois Lane is hurled into a wall and nearly killed. Superman rushes to her side and tries to think of a scientific way to save her, a magical way to save her…but ultimately he discards both of those choices and brings her back with…

Okay, I’m just gonna quote the book here.

“Superman knows…of a force mightier than science and magic…mightier even than himself! And though the world would likely go on anyway, he calls upon this greatest of powers – the deity the people of Krypton called Rao! We know that force by other names on Earth – across the dimensions, in every universe, it is also known…it is love.”

Yeah, Superman saves Lois from the brink of death with the Power of Love. Which is also evidently what the Kryptonian sun-god Rao is. I wonder if Huey Lewis had any idea when he wrote that song.

What an odd little book. So strange, so utterly Bronze Age Superman. There are a lot of fun ideas and some nice moments when Red and Blue butt heads a little bit, although unlike the later version of the story it’s because they’re TOO MUCH alike rather than too different from one another. Maybe it comes from growing up in an era where a story like this would have lasted at least three or four issues, but the whole thing feels somewhat rushed to me. It’s like the storytellers had the basic idea, then once they figured they’d gotten all the mileage they could out of the split Superman concept, they wrapped it up as quickly as possible. But it’s fun to read, despite all of that. I’m honestly quite surprised we haven’t seen it reprinted for over 40 years, and I wonder if Egmont technically owns it. I can’t think of any other reason it’s sitting in obscurity when so many other books show up again and again. 

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. Don’t forget, you can check out earlier blogs in the Year of Superman/Superman Stuff Archive! Got a request for a future “Superman Stuff”? Drop it in the comments!