We’ve now reached the point where all that was left in my stack of comics purchased in my 1988 Windfall Comics sale were issues of ACTION COMICS, so get ready for a steady stream of ACTION reviews before we’re done. This particular issue featured a lead story that I had already read years before, in an issue of DC SPECIAL
But it was nonetheless one of the more interesting and engaging issues in the pile, mostly due to the fact that Superman had to contend with a legitimate menace here, and not simply some puzzle-problem that seldom seemed worthy of his awesome super-powers. So let’s take a deeper look.
The story was called “The Legion of Super Creatures”, a Mort Weisinger title and concept if ever there were one. Mort had certain themes and ideas he liked to come back to, and any concept that had proven itself to have legs wound be routinely pounded into the ground through variation. So here, having scored with the Legion of Super Heroes and the Legion of Super Pets, Mort tries for a trifecta. But it’s writer Otto Binder and artist Curt Swan who actually play the game and produce the material, and they do a splendid job of it.
The story opens with Superman encountering a series of different creatures–insects and sea serpents and the like. And all of them are as powerful as he is, and possibly more. What’s worse, these creatures are beginning to multiply and to eat through everything in their surroundings. Despite his best efforts, Superman can’t come up with a way to rid the planet of them. They’re not from Krypton and are thus immune of Green Kryptonite and for some unexplained reason they can also resist the pull of the Phantom Zone projector. For the first time in his career, Superman is confounded by a foe that is even more powerful than he is.
Ultimately, Superman locates the pod that transported these creatures to Earth, and he’s able to backtrack with it to their source. It’s a colossal world called Giantia, whose inhabitants are nihilists that worship death. They’ve been sending out their pods filled with super-creatures to annihilate life throughout the universe, a pretty grim notion for a Superman comic of this era. Superman doesn’t really have a clue as to how to put a stop to things, but the Giantians provide a solution themselves, by blowing up their own world. Superman escapes just in time, and fragments of destroyed Giantia are pulled along n the wake of his pod as it returns to Earth. The detonation has transformed them into Giantite, which is fatal to the super-creatures. Problem solved! True, Superman didn’t really do much here, apart from accidentally conveying the Giantite back to Earth. But it was still novel to see him to flummoxed by a problem, and not the typical sort where his secret identity might be on the line or Lois might trick him into marriage.
A pause here for a half-page house ad, this one promoting an early appearance of the Teen Titans in BRAVE AND THE BOLD. The Titans were a concept that seemed to have been hit on accidentally–a previous issue had teamed up Robin, Kid Flash and Aqualad for a one-off adventure. It must have performed well, because, before long, the Titans’ had a team name, a new ally in Wonder Girl (though nobody had thoroughly-enough researched her appearances in WONDER WOMAN, where she was the adult Wonder Woman in stories set in the past. oops!) and were getting tryouts in both BRAVE AND THE BOLD and SHOWCASE. Their own regular series wouldn’t be far off, and they’d even be on television in just a couple short years.
In the back of the issue was the latest SUPERGIRL story as usual–this one written by Jerry Siegel and illustrated by Jim Mooney. As opposed to the lead feature which was almost always a one-off, the Supergirl strip had more of a sense of ongoing continuity to it. It was more akin to a soap opera, and was done that way probably because having a female lead character suggested it. It’s really amazing how many of these stories involved Linda Danvers falling for some new would-be flame only for fate or circumstance or the bad character of her prospective partners to prevent any romance from flourishing. This is one of those stories.
The story opens with Linda attending a dance with her steady beau, Dick Malverne. But when a mysterious new man enters, Linda ditches Dick and is drawn to dance solely with him. His name is Al Mintor, and Linda is uncontrollably drawn to him. But there’s clearly something mysterious about Mintor–for one thing, he’s a crook, stealing gems and things even when Linda is watching him. When he tries to rob an armored car, Superman catches him–but Supergirl is still compelled to bail him out. What’s more, Mintor knows that Linda is secretly Supergirl. This all seems like some strange case of mind control or something, but the true reveal is actually far weirder than that.
You see, Al Mintor is actually a life-size synthetic doll that Supergirl’s father Zor-El had ordered for her to play with when she was a child. This is why she has such an uncontrollable love for him. Having been used as a test subject and projected into the Survival Zone, the doll survived and eventually came to Earth, where it was drawn to Supergirl. But Al Mintor dies in a fire when he tries to rescue the other dolls that he’s been creating, confessing the truth to Supergirl before he perishes. The entire final page is pretty much lawyering away as many of the obvious plot holes in this crazy resolution as Siegel can, before attempting to stick an emotional landing. It doesn’t really work, but just the sheer bravura of the ideas here make this one entertaining, despite itself.
Another house ad here, this one promoting the latest BATMAN 80 Page Giant devoted to stories of the Caped Crusader on other worlds and back in time–you know, the typical sort of fare that you’d expect to find in a Batman story.
The Metropolis Mailbag letters page is crammed in here right before the end, although it only takes up half a page, with the remainder devoted to an ad for Lucky Charms cereal. The letters page here really felt like an afterthought, like a bit of a bother that needed to be gotten through, and so it lacks a bit of the charm of earlier installments.
The Tom Brevoort Experience 
I wonder if all those bad suitors were a mix of a)it’s a girl’s strip it should have romance and b)unlike YOUNG LOVE they can’t marry them off and move on to another character. Though Dick Malverne, whom they settled on, was way blande.
By Teen Titans time we’d had several years of WW, Wonder Girl, Wonder Tot and Wonder Queen adventuring together in what were originally presented as imaginary stories, then without any explanation. It would be easy for anyone looking at them without familiarity with Diana to assume yep, she has sisters (https://atomicjunkshop.com/youre-a-wonder-wonder-family/)
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So all the super creatures died from the exposure? Dang, I thought his solution would be to try and save them. Seems like a better ending would have been exposure made them weak and he could move them somewhere or didn’t he have an intergalactic zoo at the Fortress? Side note I remember being surprised that Superman, more or less, was killing the aliens in the first episodes of the Justice League animated series. Sure they were trying to kill everyone on Earth but I had thought he never killed. People were upset when the Cavill Superman killed Zod, I didn’t agree, you have a threat that could kill billions, take he butt out! ________________________________
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The no-killing rule infamously seems to apply strongly just to organic humanoids, and weakens considerably the further one gets from there. It doesn’t necessarily apply to sapient robots, or Bizarros, or unintelligent animals. And it’s worse than the Batman/modern Joker problem when it covers intelligent menaces who could literally destroy Earth. It’s one of those conventions that doesn’t bear too much examination. I think creators trying to be “edgy” about it just end up stressing how it doesn’t logically work.
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I re-read this one recently. and not only can’t Superman halt the main threat, he doesn’t even find his own way back to Giantia. All he really does is find the space probe that brought the critters, and once he enters it, it automatically takes him to the planet, where the death worshipers greet the hero and explain their whole mad plan before blowing up the world. So– they wanted the satisfaction to telling someone what they’d done, before they blew that witness up with their adoptive world? Had Binder wanted to give the hero something more pro-active to do, Superman might have used super-science to reverse the probe’s original course, rather than getting dragged along because the death guys just wanted someone to boast to.
Two years before this, the Legion also encountered a “Legion of Super Monsters,” who to my knowledge not even the most fervent fans have yet revived.
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