BC: SUPERMAN #274

When I was growing up in the early 1970s, you didn’t have a whole lot of choice about who your friends were. You were pretty much limited to any other kids who happened to live on your street. In my case, that included a kid my age who lived down the block named Charles Grella. He was a more athletic kid than I was, and a bit of a troublemaker in the Eddie Haskell style, and as we got older, he became as much a foe as a friend, though we began to circulate in different crowds once we were able to. But when I was six or seven, he was among the cast of characters in my life. And like all kids in that era, he had a couple comic books. He was never really into comics, certainly not the way that I was, but it was inevitable that somebody would buy a kid a comic from time to time. This issue of SUPERMAN was one of the books that he had, and while I never outright borrowed it from him, I did manage to kind of speed-read it at some point when I was over at his place one afternoon.

For one thing, I was mesmerized by this cover, the work of the great Nick Cardy working over a sketch by DC boss Carmine Infantino. I was fascinated by the way the Man of Steel was grabbing and crumbling his own logo on this image, and the manner in which he was talking directly to the viewer–i.e. me. This piece started showing up in house ads this month as well, but I’m pretty sure that I saw it on a copy of this issue first during a visit to the 7-11 at which I didn’t buy it. But now I had a chance to see what it was all about. I remember relatively little about the story, only that I felt as though the cover promised more than was delivered. But let’s see together.

This story involves two characters of slightly greater note today. The first is author Wade Halibut Jr., who makes an appearance on the Johnny Nevada show and tells the interviewer that he’s stuck on the plot of his next novel, which is about a reporter stumbling upon a doomsday device. In order to work out an ending for his book, Halibut decides to use Clark Kent as a stand-in for his character, creating the same fictitious situation around Kent that his character experiences and seeing what he does. Halibut, of course, has no idea that Kent is secretly Superman. And Halibut is a thinly-disguised stand-in for renowned author Kurt Vonnegut, (just as Johnny Nevada was Metropolis’ version of Johnny Carson) not that I understood this at the time. But Curt Swan’s depiction of Halibut was so specific in its design and mannerisms that there was clearly something going on that I wasn’t following.

The second player of note today is a scientist named Dr. David Trump–a name that evokes unintended connections in 2026. Trump has been working on a method to create wormholes in space that will allow for instantaneous travel between the Earth and Mars. Because his research is of interest to enemy nations, Superman has given him a signal watch with which to summon the Man of Steel should the scientist be in danger. And that’s exactly what happens here, as Trump is abducted by enemy agents looking to steal his device. They say they work for a criminal conglomerate known as Protectors of Earth, Inc, which acquires powerful super-weapons and uses them to blackmail the nations of the world. One bit that I remember from reading this story initially is that, when Superman comes to the rescue and the bad guys trap him in an energy cage, he’s able to free himself by vibrating his molecules in the manner of his friend, the Flash. Of course I remembered that bit. In later years, however, it was decided that Superman’s molecular structure was too dense to permit him to vibrate through solid matter in the manner of the Flash, thus preventing him from being able to use that trick regularly.

Anyway, the situation is complicated when Halibut approaches Clark Kent in disguise and passes him what he says are the microfilm plans for a doomsday weapon. This exchange is overheard by agents working for the Protectors of Earth, which makes both Halibut and Kent targets. Superman has to spend a bit of energy getting the author out of the jam he’s stumbled into as a result of his actions, while still keeping one ear out for danger to Trump. But in the scuffle with the Protectors’ agent, Kent’s hair was dusted with a radioactive compound, allowing the organization to track his whereabouts–or rather Superman’s. This brings them to Trump’s laboratory just when a critical part of his experiment is in the process of being completed. Superman must hold the triggering mechanism for the wormhole absolutely still while it’s being primed–which means that he can’t do a single thing when the Protectors’ agents invade the lab.

At first, the criminals think that Trump simply has a Superman statue he’s working with for some reason, and they delight in shooting at it–the bullets bounce off harmlessly, of course. But when one of them makes a move to shoot Trump, Superman has no choice but to step in, even though it means dropping the trigger mechanism. Trump is saved for the moment, but a wormhole is being formed right there in the lab, one that threatens to pull the entire Earth through it and deposit it at some far-off point in space like an extended strand of spaghetti. Determined not to let another world die like his homeland of Krypton, Superman steps into the breach and blocks the wormhole with his own body.

For a page, the Man of Steel struggles to keep the entryway closed, like a kid with his finger in a holed dike. His body is horribly distended in the process, but he triumphs through sheer force of will. Eventually, the device powers down and Superman limply slumps to the ground–but only momentarily. The Protectors guys don’t want to mess with him at all after witnessing what he just did, and so the story wraps up at this point. All except the epilogue, in which Kurt Halibut reveals in an on-air interview with Clark Kent (who doubled back to the lab to help keep his secret identity a secret) that because Superman isn’t a character in his novel, he can’t use what he learned from following the reporter. So he’s simply going to have the book end with the world being destroyed. Simple, huh?

As it turns out, this issue also contained the yearly Statement of Ownership, which charted how well a title had been performing in the 12-18 months prior. The one for this issue wound up running as the bottom third of the house ad page that included the reproduction of this issue’s cover. In any event, it reveals that at this time, SUPERMAN was selling a not-inconsiderable 325,826 copies on a print run of 661,000, giving the series an efficiency rating of 49%. This was right around the time where Marvel’s sales overtook those of DC, but the Man of Steel continued to remain incredibly popular during this period.