BHOC: SUPERMAN FAMILY #196

SUPERMAN FAMILY was constantly a solid B-book, which is to say that the material contained therein never rose to the level of being a must-read. But it was a home to several well-crafted stories each issue, none of which was especially challenging. So it was a comfortable reading experience, assuming that you liked the world of Superman (which I did.) It was also solidly ensconced in the Dollar Comic format. The Dollar Comics were always something of a disappointment to me. The format was most often used on anthology series (for obvious reasons) rather than characters and books that I was more interested in. But I always liked a big, fat comic book package, and that alone kept them on my purchasing list for a long while, even if they were never completely my favorites.

You got six stories for your buck in 1979, the first of which was this Superboy adventure crafted by writer Cary Bates and artist Joe Staton. I liked the work of both these gentlemen at the time, so this was a solid creative team to my eye. It’s all about how Jonathan Kent, Superboy’s adoptive father, is feeling displaced and a little bit jealous of Jor-El, Clark’s biological father. Throughout the story, Jonathan keeps comparing himself unfavorably to the renowned super-scientist. But he’s able to work out what’s causing a series of deadly earthquakes in and around the area of Smallville, and after Superboy rushes to save him when he gets in trouble, and is therefore able to cut off the source of the disasters, Jonathan chides his son for putting his life above those of the many townspeople who were also in danger. Superboy needs to be a hero for all people, not just those close to himself. It’s kind of like Kevin Cosner’s lesson to Clark in the MAN OF STEEL film, except here it actually makes sense and holds water.

The Lois Lane feature, which came next, reads a bit like a typical television adventure show. It’s a story that has no Superman in it, or any other need to suspend disbelief (well, there are some android staff members, but it’s a relatively minor plot point.) But it was well-drawn by Bob Oskner, whose work I always enjoyed, and writer Gerry Conway ran the bases in it well. It’s all about Lois investigating a weight-loss camp whose wealthy clients are dropping dead. It’s got some decent interplay, a death-trap, a mystery, and a resolution. There’s absolutely nothing memorable about it, but it does its job as a couple of minutes of entertainment.

The next story is a bit more well-remembered today, if only because a panel from it of Clark Kent doing disco dancing moves has turned up as meme fodder in recent years. It’s a private Life of Clark Kent story in which the newscaster is shanghaied by the mostly-female members of his fan club (didn’t know that Clark Kent had a fan club, did you? He was a popular television journalist in this period!) to a disco where they want him to judge a dance context among the membership. But Clark’s x-ray vision shows him somebody planting bombs throughout the place for reasons that are never clearly explained, and so Kent himself must get out on the dance floor, using the super-vibrations of his dance moves to disarm each of the explosive devices in turn.

It’s a silly story by Cary Burkett tapping into the excitement surrounding Saturday Night Fever, but Kurt Schaffenberger makes it look appealing.

Gerry Conway returns for a kind of blah Jimmy Olsen adventure in which the ace reporter goes searching for a missing balloonist on behalf of her sister, and finds a coven of pirates that the pair need to escape from. They do so, of course, by repairing the woman’s damaged balloon. As with the Lois Lane adventure there isn’t any Superman in this story whatsoever, so it plays like an episode of a TV adventure series, with low stakes and low interest. John Calnan’s artwork is straightforward and basic, and he’s given no particular polish by inker Vince Colletta.

I was a big fan of Earth-2, the world where the original DC heroes of the Golden Age lived, and so the continuing series of Mr and Mrs Superman stories were a big part of why I kept showing up for issues of SUPERMAN FAMILY. These tales were set in the past, sometime in the 1950s although that date is seldom made overt, and concern the continuing adventures of the elder Man of Steel now that he has married Lois Lane. In this one, Clark Kent accidentally out-performs star reporter Perry White and becomes George Taylor’s successor as the editor of the Daily Star, the newspaper where both are employed. Cary Bates and Kurt Schaffenberger collaborate on this story.

And the final tale is a fun little Supergirl adventure by Jack C. Harris and Don Heck that concerns another teacher at Stanhope College where Linda Danvers is employed as a student advisor who suddenly believes herself to be Supergirl. The thought-transference is caused by an alien gem that Supergirl brought back with her from space (and which isn’t introduced as an element in the story until it’s time for Supergirl to destroy it, a bit of poor plotting) and it complicates the Maid of Might’s attempts to corral a new super-villain, the Gyronaut. The Gyronaut has one of the most dangerous designs in comics, he wears essentially a ring of helicopter blades around his neck, which turn him into a human helicopter. All through the story, I was waiting for him to accidentally cut his own hands off by raising them at the wrong moment. So it’s dumb, but entertainingly dumb.