BHOC: SUPERMAN #338

This next issue of SUPERMAN was a bit of a minor milestone and it was heavily promoted in house ads throughout the DC line at the time. It was also the 40th Anniversary Issue of the title, and while it wasn’t upsized to mark the occasion, that did provide cover for this story was being done now. After being a fixture in the Man of Steel’s world for more than two decades, this was the story that was going to write out the Bottle City of Kandor, that remaining relic of the doomed planet Krypton that Superman kept safely stores in his Fortress of Solitude and which allowed him to talk among his own kind as a normal man whenever he so desired.

In that first Kandor story, wherein it was revealed that the space marauder Brainiac had miniaturized the city and stolen it before Krypton’s destruction, the inhabitants passed up their change to regain their proper height and stature so as to permit their benefactor Superman to do so. Ever since that time, the restoration of Kandor had been an item on the Man of Tomorrow’s personal bucket list. So him actually accomplishing this feat after so long was a bit noteworthy. Not that I really saw it that was as a young reader–I enjoyed this issue just fine, but as I didn’t have much of a connection to Kandor, i was a bit indifferent to its fate. But this was a bit of a sea change for the strip. After all, it hadn’t been long ago that Kandor was being featured in SUPERMAN FAMILY regularly as the backdrop to the Nightwing & Flamebird strip.

The story was written by Len Wein, apparently with some notable input from his friend Marv Wolfman. As always, Curt Swan supplied the artwork, inked here by Frank Chiaramonte whose finish was a bit scratchier than I preferred. The issue opens with Superman in deep space, clad in a protective space suit and using a device of his own creation to collect certain energies being released by the super-nova of a dying star. These energies can only be collected in this manner, and so they’re rare and hard to come by–which is why Superman is risking his life to procure them. He’s able to make his way back to Earth with the necessary sample, but passes out as he hits the atmosphere. Fortunately, Supergirl is in the area and is able to catch him (not that plummeting to Earth from space was necessarily going to harm Superman.)

Returning to his Fortress, Superman makes an announcement to the people of Kandor: he’s found a method to free them of their diminutive state and return them to their normal size at last. But to do so, he’s going to need to test his process by exposing himself to Brainiac’s shrink ray–and that means luring the android villain into a battle. Meanwhile, as a way to celebrate the milestone of this issue in-story, we learn that Perry White is being honored for his 40th Anniversary of being on the staff of the Daily Planet. This allows the extended Superman cast of civilian players to put in an appearance. But before the celebration can go on for too long, the building begins to shake–and Superman realizes that the signal he’s been beaming out to lure in Brainiac has borne fruit. Accordingly, he ducks away, climbs into his fighting togs, and heads into space for a showdown.

Of course, the problem Superman now faces is in getting Brainiac to turn his shrinking ray on him, even though he’s tried and failed to reduce Superman in size before and failed. So the two enemies engage in battle with one another, and Superman uses every strategy he can think of to get Brainiac to use the ray. Ultimately, he lobs a colossal asteroid at Brainiac and his ship, and the android counters by attempting to shrink it. But before that can happen, Superman pulverizes the space rock and takes the full impact of the ray himself. But Supergirl has been prepared for this, and to prevent Brainiac from completely destroying her cousin, she counters with the Enlarging Ray they’ve built–which has the unforeseen side effect of blowing back Brainiac’s reducing charge at him, causing the criminal to shrink to subatomic size, never to return (until he inevitably does, of course.) What’s more, the Enlarging Ray works perfectly, restoring superman to his regular dimensions and proving that the same can be done for the Kandorians

The narrative jumps ahead at this point, and shows Superman and Supergirl piloting a spacecraft towards an uninhabited planet in a star-system orbiting a red sun similar to that of Krypton–and which will prevent any of the released Kandorians from developing Superman-like powers. We’re told that the population of Kandor voted for this plan, though that seems a bit difficult to believe–who wouldn’t want to be a Superman rather than just a person among many on a remote planet? And so, in a big double-page spread, the Man of Steel turns his Enlarging Ray on the now-bottleless city and it expands to its original size:

As you’d expect, there’s a bunch of celebrating, but it isn’t all happiness. Supergirl, for instance, has to let her parents know that she’s not going to remain here on New Krypton with them–she’s built a life for herself back on Earth that she can’t abandon. More critically, however, after a few moments, there’s a rumbling, and then every inanimate object in Kandor suddenly disintegrates (with the exception of the clothes the Kandorians are wearing–the Comics Code somehow protects those.) Superman is horrified by the error that he made in his calculations, but the Kandorians are nonplussed. Sure, they’ve lost all their stuff and will need to start over again from scratch But they’ve been liberated from their bottle. (I wonder how long this equanimity will last when the entire population needs to be fed and there’s no readily available source of food. Best not to think about it too much.)

Superman offers to remain on New Krypton and help with the rebuilding, but his friend Van-Zee cold-cocks him, knocking him out. He wakes up in the spaceship heading back to Earth alongside Supergirl–and then we learn about the final piece of contrivance in this story, The planet that the Kandorians have chosen to be New Krypton is a “Brigadoon” world that only appears in our universe every once in a while. So when Superman regains his senses, New Krypton is already gone, moved back to some other dimension where he and Supergirl won’t be able to locate it. This is all treated fairly nonchalantly, and neither Kal-El nor Kara seem especially broken up about not ever seeing their brethren again (Supergirl’s parents were on that world, remember?) And that’s all she wrote for the Bottle City of Kandor in the Bronze Age. Of course, it was such a seminal part of the superman mythos that later creators introduced new versions of it in the Post-Crisis Superman titles, so it’s still a thing that exists today. But in 1979, Superman had finally achieved his objective.