BHOC: SUPERMAN #329

Picked up this latest issue of SUPERMAN during my regular weekly Thursday run to the 7-11 for new comics. It was a book that I’d followed steadily for some time. And yet, this turned out to be the last issue of the book that I bought for a few months. I don’t quite recall what made me stop picking it up, outside of maybe starting to become concerned about finances and feeling as though it wasn’t providing me with quite as much entertainment value as it once had. The same thing was true of ACTION COMICS, which I also quit for a period of about three months at the same time. Ironically, this was just when interest in the character was beginning to build elsewhere, as SUPERMAN THE MOVIE would open that December. But I had only a limited awareness of that.

This was the latest story in Marty Pasko’s tenure writing the Man of Steel. I had really been enjoying his stories, at least up to a point, and yet I jumped off after this nonetheless. I have no concrete explanation for why this should be so, but it was. Pasko had introduced some running subplots and a greater emphasis on characterization into the mix in emulation of the Marvel books of the period, and these were elements that I enjoyed. And Curt Swan’s depiction of Superman was nothing if not reliable, often despite the inconsistent inkers who worked over him such as this issue’s Frank Chiaramonte. The whole thing was a very consistent package–you always knew precisely what you were going to get in an issue of SUPERMAN (and in editor Julie Schwartz’s titles as an overall rule–he maintained one of the most consistent editorial offices at the company.)

This issue continues from the last one, and opens with Superman under attack by the Kryptonoid, a bizarre merging of a one-armed military General with a beef against Superman, some alien spores that came from Krypton and the body of a disused Superman robot. The three have merged into a hybrid being that’s out to destroy Superman–the spore portions of it because Jor-El had exiled them into icy space, the General because of his belief that Superman’s actions cost him his arm. The Superman robot was simply a host vessel and didn’t have an opinion on the Man of Steel that we are told about.

As the battle rages, at the WGBS building, Lana Lang is distraught after Clark Kent was apparently disintegrated in an elevator when the Kryptonoid first attacked. So Superman breaks off his battle because first things first–and to justify the cover, he makes it seem as though an impact with the Kryptonoid has disintegrated him. But really, he’s just doffed his costume so that he can show up in the wreckage of the elevator naked and convince Lana that he’s both not dead and not Superman. Lana, for her part, doesn’t question how every shred of clothing Clark was wearing was disintegrated in the explosion but somehow his glasses survived. With his housekeeping completed, Superman picks up his discarded uniform along the way and heads off after the Kryptonoid once again.

Realizing that cold will neutralize the Kryptonoid, Superman has prepared a tank of Liquid Helium. And in order to gain the advantage on the Kryptonoid so that he can hurl the creature into it, Superman reveals to it that the person who caused the loss of the General’s arm wasn’t the actual Superman, but one of his malfunctioning robots–the same robot, of course, that the General has now merged with. This revelation causes the Kryptonoid to lose his composure, and it’s an easy matter thereafter for Superman to dunk him in the liquid nitrogen and put him into a state of suspended animation.

The back-up series in some of these DC Explosion-era issues of SUPERMAN was Mr. and Mrs. Superman, a series that picked up on the events of ACTION COMICS #484 in which the original Earth-2 Superman had married Lois Lane back in the 1950s.

BHOC: ACTION COMICS #484

As it related to Earth-2 and the original Golden Age Superman, this was a series that I was very interested in. It was kept reasonably lightweight as well, with a low-key sense of danger and jeopardy, since we already knew that both Superman and Lois would survive on Earth-2 up until the present. This particular story was produced by Cary Bates, one of my favorite writers of the era, and drawn by Kurt Scharffenberger, whose cartoony artwork had been a part of the Superman mythos since the early 1960s, and so which was right at home there.

It’s a funny, daffy story in which the newlyweds have purchased their first new car–which is promptly stolen. This wouldn’t be such a big deal, except that Lois left her tape recorder inside it, and she and Clark had been talking openly about him being Superman on the drive home. So now the Man of Steel needs to recover the vehicle before the crooks can listen to the tape and learn his secret identity. He’s mostly successful in this venture, but he isn’t able to get there in time for the tape not to have been played. But it turns out that the criminals just think that this is a new wife fussing over her husband, and don’t give any credence to the notion that the guy whose car they lifted is genuinely Superman.