I was still routinely buying SUPERMAN and enjoying it for the most part, despite the fact that it was never quite as electrifying as the Marvel books that I was most into during this period, nor also the DC titles that I loved the best. What SUPERMAN had going for it was familiarity. It was comfort food, an old reliable that could be counted on to present a straightforward story of a particular sort, with solid artwork and a plot-driven story. It was never fancy, it wasn’t cutting edge–it was a McDonald’s hamburger, the same every time, filling enough but nothing special, nothing you’d go out of your way for.
This issue did signify something that I didn’t notice at the time: the story was written by Len Wein, who had recently made his return to DC after spending a number of years over at competitor Marvel. Len had written for editor Julie Schwartz before his sojourn at the rival publisher, so it makes sense that he’d be drafted back into service with Schwartz once he returned. Len is one of those writers whose work is often underestimates. Like SUPERMAN itself, his work was seldom flashy or showy, but it was always solid and competent, and it evidenced that Wein himself was a true fan who loved the characters he got to work on. Len also, for many years, had the very best track record for coming up with new characters and that would eventually become television and film properties. Especially at DC, Len wrote a lot of stuff that I really liked, even if he didn’t really come onto my radar as a creator for some time yet.
Like many of the stories under Schwartz’s editorship, this tale is built around a central mystery that drives the plot. But that mystery is simultaneously disguised by misdirection. After a quickie action opening in which Superman uses super-friction to burn some oil off of himself (which appears to onlookers as though he’s been set on fire) he returns to his identity as Clark Kent in time for a staff meeting arranged by boss Morgan Edge. But before anybody can get to the meeting, reports start coming over the wire that Terra-Man, one of Superman’s recurring enemies, is active in Metropolis again. Clark dashes off to become Superman in order to take on the western-themed lawbreaker.
The Man of Steel engages in a quick skirmish with Terra-Man, but before he can overcome the homicidal cowboy, the villain vanishes. But before Superman can catch his breath, he’s suddenly under attack from Metallo, another of his old foes. Once again, the Man of Tomorrow parries his enemy’s thrusts, and again the perpetrator disappears before Superman can capture him. Heading back to the Galaxy Broadcast building for the staff meeting, Superman finds himself attacked a third time, this time by the Toyman. Same M.O.–after a brief scuffle, the Toyman and his murder machine both vanish without a trace, leaving the Man of Steel baffled.
A brief aside here to talk about this house ad which shows up in the book around here. This was the issue in which Iris Allen was murdered (though the readers and the Flash himself wouldn’t learn that until the following issue) and it represented a big status quo change for the series. However, despite the Flash still being a favorite character of mine, as I’ve reported elsewhere, I missed the two issues where Iris met her demise–my 7-11 had been stocking fewer comic books and FLASH was a casualty of that reduction, at least for a time. This moment was for DC their equivalent of the Death of Gwen Stacy, an unthinkable fatality-induced change to the status quo of a series that was solid but moribund. It represents something of a pivot-point for the company–everything after this is clearly in the more forward-looking world of relatively new publisher Jenette Kahn.
Superman is clearly under stress at this point, jumpy from the sudden attacks and mystified by why his opponents keep vanishing. And so when Morgan Edge, owner of the Daily Planet and WGBS gives him some grief in his Clark Kent guise, Superman snaps, taking Edge down a peg in uncharacteristic fashion. While his co-workers applaud Clark for having stood up to the “Smiling Cobra”, Clark himself feels uneasy. He knows that lashing out was a mistake and he feels as though he’s losing control of himself and his life.
Once again, though, before Superman can get to the bottom of his woes, he and the Planet are attacked by another super-foe, this time Brainiac. Brainiac encases Superman inside a shrinking force-field similar to the one used by his future descendant Brainiac-5, and in order to free himself, superman must exert himself to the utmost, which he does after rocketing high into the stratosphere so that nothing will be accidentally hurt as he cuts loose. But as soon as he frees himself, Brainiac is gone, replaced by Bizarro, who hurls square meteorites at him and smashes him into the ground below. As Superman shakily gets to his feet, he finds himself encircled by all five of the foes that he’s so far encountered, all of whom laugh at his misfortune mercilessly.
His composure coming undone, Superman breaks down, saying that he doesn’t want to be Superman any longer. Which is the cue for the true Superman to unmask himself. He’s been posing as the five villains all along, The guy who’s been parading around as both Superman and Clark Kent has been Don-El, the head of Kandor’s Superman Emergency Squad, a group of miniaturized Kandorians who stood ready to replace the Man of Tomorrow in an emergency circumstance. But Don-El suffered a mental breakdown while envious of Superman, and so his doctors arranged with the Man of Steel for Don-El to replace him for one day, so that he’d see what being Superman was truly like. Now that Don-El realizes that he isn’t really Superman, his mental rehabilitation can begin. And as Superman soars off from the Fortress of Solitude back towards Metropolis, he thinks again about his lingering promise to restore Kandor to its regular size, a set-up for next month’s adventure.
The Tom Brevoort Experience 
“…everything after this is clearly in the more forward-looking world of relatively new publisher Jenette Kahn.”
Someone needs to write a book about her tenure at DC. She wasn’t a showman like Stan Lee, or brash like Jim Shooter, but I think she and her leadership team had an outsize influence on the comics medium and comics industry in the 1980s (which continues to be felt today), and I don’t think she gets enough credit for it.
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Fully agreed. And I really want to read that book.
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Someone should tap Paul Levitz to write that book.
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As someone who was there at the time, Paul’s in a position to know what was going on, but as one of the major players of the era, he’s perhaps not in a position to give a wholly-unbiased account. Maybe a book by a good historian who interviewed Paul (and others) a lot.
That said, if Paul did write a memoir of that era, I’d be first in line to buy it.
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So do I.
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Nice to see Clark cut loose and get “Edgy” with ol’ corporate overlord Morgan Edge. It was a few years before Bill Murray’s John Winger told Sgt. Hulka to “GET. OFF. MY. BACK”. And decades before many of us readers would have to navigate our own employment taskmasters…
I was always curious way back then about the cover’s bottom left “corner box”, where the bar code often was. Were the late 70’s where subbing out the barcode for an image or text “DC: Where the Action Is”) began?
And that dynamic upwards figure of Superman in that corner box. It wasn’t drawn by Curt Swan, was it? Very different pose than he usually drew. It was on several of the issues I had back then.
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“I was always curious way back then about the cover’s bottom left “corner box”, where the bar code often was. Were the late 70’s where subbing out the barcode for an image or text “DC: Where the Action Is”) began?”
What was going on with the UPC box was this: DC (and other publishers) started putting UPC codes on their books to serve the newsstand market.
This cover, that Tom’s shown here, with the Superman figure in the box and the Whitman seal was a specialty copy sold to Whitman at a different discount, and those changes meant it couldn’t be returned through the newsstand system.
Direct-market copies, too, were sold non-returnable, and publishers didn’t worry about them because so few copies went to direct-market shops, and they didn’t have UPC readers anyway. But it turned out some direct-market accounts were making deals with newsstand retailers to return their unsold books via the newsstand system, which, naturally, the publishers considered cheating.
So in…1980, I think, DC started differentiating between newsstand copies and direct-market copies by having the UPC on the newsstand books and the “Where the Action Is” or whatever on the direct-market books. Marvel had a Spidey face on the direct-market copies. As a change to the black plate but not any of the color plates, it was easy to do and inexpensive.
Eventually, once comics retailers started getting point-of-sale systems that could read UPC codes, thanks in great part to Carol Kalish at Marvel, the publishers would simply put different codes on the direct and newsstand copies, but that took a while.
I don’t know where that Superman art came from. I think it might be a Ramona Fradon drawing, and they picked it because they thought it would reduce well (it didn’t, really), but that’s just a guess.
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I agree that on the Marvel direct covers that all they needed to do was swap out a new black plate during the printing process. In this case that method works for the Superman in the UPC box and the Whitman logo that’s inside the DC star circle (though they would have to carefully scrape the DC logo off of the yellow and cyan plates.) The Whitman logo under the 40 cent price would need to be stripped in at the film stage due to the white background that isn’t on the newsstand copy. I presume that means they either did a second print run with all new plates, or they doubled up and printed this cover on the same press sheet alongside the newsstand edition. A single plate change in ’77 probably didn’t cost $50, but stripping a knockout on a 3 or 4 color build would have been a somewhat pricier change. The redundant logo does serve the purpose of removing the newsstand date so that this would be considered merchandise.
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Thanks, Kurt! Really interesting. Stuff is always bubbling under the surface, changes always (slowly or quickly) developing behind the scenes, often in response to outside changes. Unbeknownst to many “consumers”.
So much was going on that resulted in that Superman corner box figure, & Marvel’s Spidey head-twip, I mean head shot.
Eveything you mentioned clicks with what I remember, looking back, after the fact. Of course my 7 or 8 yr old self back then had no idea.
I think the deepest thought I had was why Superman’scorner box figure wasn’t up in the top left corner, & in color, like Marvel’s.
46 years later I still like seeing Jorge Jimenez’s Batman drawing up in the top left corner of the recent “Batman” (V?) # 4. Smaller than I’d prefer. But a welcome call back to Marvel’s practice.
I know DC has done it before now. A Norm Breyfogle Batman (& sometimes with Robin) in the late 80s & early 90s. A Jerry Ordway Superman (& maybe another by Dan Jurgens on the series he was writing & drawing). I think a Curr Swan or Murphy Anderson Superman breaking a chain in the early 70s
Spidey & Cap usually were my fave Marvel corner box figures. They’d change as the artists changed, too. And all those Byrne head shots for team books.
Good stuff
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The head shots were great but it had the unintended consequence of people who hadn’t yet figured out Byrne had a very small repertoire of faces he drew now had a primer on it.
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@Steve
All comics drawings are representative. Some more naturalistic than others.
I’m not the biggest fan of Byrne’s work. I see “flaws” throughout. But my simple mind liked his head shots more than other artists’. Just one of those things.
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I had stopped reading SUPERMAN an issue or two before this one, so this story is new to me. It may not be a classic for the ages, but I have to admit, the mystery and its solution are pretty clever! It’s reminiscent of stories during Mort Weisinger’s era, in that it draws deeply from previously-established lore. But it’s also very much of the ’70s, the era of “pop” psychology and self-help books.
And of course, you can’t go wrong with Terra-Man, a deeply ridiculous character whom I unironically love.
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Terra Man was great, wasn’t he. His schtick was so undeniably goofy but he was deadly and a match for Cark when he tried. Did someone put him back as he was Pre-Crisis lately? I only read Superman comics for the writer and Waid is the only one currently that fits that criteria.
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I can’t remember if it was this year or last year but I was curious about the Superman Emergency Squad and looked them up: Members of the squad include Superman’s cousin Van-Zee ( Who also uses the secret identity of Nightwing ), and Don-El, the captain of the Squad. ( This part I found interesting part ) In early appearances of the Squad, the members were specially selected due to their close resemblance to Superman[ Action Comics#276 ( May 1961 )], later stories dropped the concept[ Superman#167 ( February 1964 ) ]. Their costumes are originally modeled on Superman’s, but with the Superman logo in an elongated triangle. Over at Marvel ( not exactly the same concept ) but Thor used his resemblance to then Asgardian villain Harokin [ Thor#130-131 ( July-August 1966 ) second story ] and Harokin working with the Warriors Three, Balder and Heimdall impersonated Thor [ Thor#364-365 ( February-March 1986 ) ] back when Loki turned Thor into a frog. Can’t at the moment think of any other hero impersonated by someone who resembled them. I read this week on a site that the last pre-Crisis Superman robot ( kept by Superman to take care of Krypto in the Fortress of Solitude ) made a reappearance than to the now good Superboy Prime. Lois thought it was the Cyborg Superman because its face was damaged, I doubt the Superman Emergency Squad will make a comeback.
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Deserves a No-Prize! (Despite being a DC topic, not a Marve related.) 😉🙏
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