WC: ACTION COMICS #341

Time once again for what has become a regular weekly feature: looking at the remaining issues of ACTION COMICS that filled out my Windfall Comic purchase of 1988 and seeing just how much each issue lives up to its title–how much action it contains. The cover here promises a bit, albeit in a very clean and bloodless fashion. It’s the work of Curt Swan, who by the middle 1960s when this issue came out had established himself as the idealized look for the Man of Steel. He wasn’t represented on the interiors of this issue, but his cover helped to make it feel like an accepted part of the Superman line of books.

The artwork for the actual story on the inside of the comic was produced without credit by Al Plastino, His artwork tended to make the Man of Tomorrow look older and a bit less dynamic. I always thought his Superman often looked tired and a bit haggard. Plastino’s artwork also want’ helped by the reduction in size of the original art boards, and he never entirely adjusted to the new specs.The clever Otto Binder wrote this story, and its set-up (of course) isn’t as simple as it must have seemed from the cover. There’s no Red Kryptonite at work here splitting Superman into two entities, not Mr. Mxyzptlk playing some game. So what was this all about? Let’s take a look.

The story begins with the mysterious Baron X having stolen a number of nuclear warheads. Clark Kent becomes Superman in order to track down the Baron, but he’s caught in a nuclear explosion that somehow splits him into two beings, a superman and a similarly powered Clark Kent. After first fighting with one another to determine their bona fides, Superman and Kent team up to scour the Earth for Baron X. But the quest ends in failure, though Clark does manage to recover the stolen warheads, much to the gratitude of President Lyndon Johnson, who assumes that Superman did the deed. Traveling to the fortress of Solitude, Kent announces that he intends to leave the Earth to give Superman his space. But before he goes, he’s created a gift for his other self: a miraculous belt based on Batman’s utility belt. (The BATMAN television series was a huge hit at the time this issue came out.)

The belt is a huge hit with Superman, who uses it over the next few days as he goes about his tasks. But “Clark Kent” isn’t a duplicate of Superman at all. He’s really escaped Phantom Zone convict Vakox who worked with Baron X to get free of the Zone and who adopted the Clark Kent persona as a way to ingratiate himself with Superman. The belt is actually a trap designed to project Superman himself into the Phantom Zone and then to detonate, throwing the entire Zone into a distant dimension from which there can be no return. But Superman is on to the plot thanks to a tiny mistake that Vakox made in the Fortress, and he arrives to put the evil scientist back into the Zone. As for the belt, Superman is forced to destroy it, as he cannot separate the Phantom Zone trap from it. So no matter how wonderful it was, into the sun it goes.

Next comes the Metropolis Mailbag letters page, and the way it’s organized and the tone of the responses convinces me that this one was definitely written by editor MortWeisinger’s assistant, E. Nelson Bridwell. Interestingly, two of the letters make reference to Marvel Comics as “Brand I”, a take-off of Stan Lee’s frequent references to Brand Echh. The letter writers are attempting to turn the tables, but using Stan’s own terminology against him just shows how far it has permeated into the minds of fandom even by 1966.

There’s no other way to put this: at around this time, editor Mort Weisinger began to get a bit lazy. He’d been editing for DC for 25 years at this point, and he was clearly getting tired of the constant grind to stay on top. More and more, he’d give business he didn’t want to deal with over to Bridwell to handle. He also did things like this, filling the back pages of his ongoing series with vintage reprints, which was a lot easier than generating new stories every month. This one was only six years old when it reappeared here again, and it was written by Jerry Siegel and illustrated by the omnipresent Jim Mooney.

A quick pause here for another DC House Ad for an upcoming 80 Page Giant, this one devoted to the many romances of Lois Lane.

This story takes place during that period before Supergirl’s existence had been revealed to the world, and she was operating in secret. Here, Linda Lee laments the fact that she doesn’t get to go into action all that often, and as if in reply, she’s faced with a day that has her rushing from one emergency to the next, due to teh fact that Superman is off on a space mission, and so she has to pick up the slack. It’s also a rare story in which Batman and Robin appear outside of their own series or WORLD’S FINEST, as one of Supergirl’s missions is to rescue them from a cave-in at the Batcave.

The whole situation has of course been set up by Superman, both to challenge his young cousin’s wits and to keep her too busy to remember that today is her sixteenth birthday and too distracted to notice the celebration he is putting together for her. All of the various characters who are in jeopardy, including Lori Lemaris and Krypto and Batman and Robin are all in on it. It’s a nice tale, and it has a good deal more action than the lead story, though that action is once again very sedate and matter-of-fact in its presentation. But it gets the job done. Still, the inclusion of reprints such as this one in a mainstay title like ACTION COMICS feels a bit like a grift, even if the common knowledge of the period suggested that the readership for comic books turned over every three years or so, and so the current audience wouldn’t have read this tale when it first came out.