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In Superboy #143 (December 1967), writer E. Nelson Bridwell and artist Al Plastino take “The Big Fall” (as do logic and sanity).

As we begin, it’s nighttime in Smallville, and Lana Lang is on a moonlight stroll to the pyramid on the edge of town.  Yes, that’s right, the pyramid on the edge of Smallville.  I thought everybody knew about that. “Ever since Superboy brought this pyramid from the African jungles,” Lana thinks, “I’ve been curious about it!” No kidding.  Ordinarily Lana’s snoopy nature is a drawback, but in this case, who can blame her? Indeed, you have to admire her as the sole resident of Smallville who possesses enough curiosity to visit a freaking jungle pyramid on the edge of a small farming community in middle America.

Activating a hidden spring, Lana opens the mysterious structure and enters to find a sarcophagus and a strange stone carving of a face.  It is at this juncture that Superboy shows up.

Honestly, dude, what did you THINK was going to happen when you left a pyramid lying around? Like she wasn’t going to end up in there sooner or later.

Superboy swoops in just as a weird energy flashes from the stone face sculpture.  He takes the brunt of the blast and falls to the floor.  Trying to smash through the stone wall, he only manages to hurt his fists, having suddenly lost his super-strength and invulnerability.  When Lana asks how this can be, Superboy points out the heiroglyphs on the sarcophagus, which reveal the pyramid to be the resting place of Ra-Mose, “banished from Egypt for practicing evil sorcery! His whole household is entombed here!  He feared his treasures would be stolen by tomb robbers,” explains Superboy, “so before he died, he created the Guardian Jewel!”  (which Lana has just activated, resulting in the present loss of Superboy’s powers.)  “I was waiting for an eclipse of the Moon, when I could safely enter here!”  Uh-huh, so you could loot it in safety.  Got it. So if an eclipse was so far in the future, why were you in such a hurry to move the pyramid to Smallville?  It’s been in the jungle a millennium already; you couldn’t wait one more month?

Lana says she wishes she could break them out of the tomb, and to illustrate how she would do it, if by some impossible miracle it was even possible, she hits the wall.

Well now, there’s a happy coincidence, huh?  Having made their escape, Lana decides she’d better repair the door to safeguard against other intruders, so she uses super-pressure to fuse it back together.  However, she lacks Superboy’s power of heat vision, so she asks him to seal the door with his.

Yeah, and you know what else it means, Superboy?  It means you flashed your heat vision on Lana’s arm before you knew she was invulnerable.  Good thing she was, or you’d have set her flesh on fire.  Way to go, champ.

Lana says, “I’d better team up with you!  After all, you’ll need my powers now!”  Flying off, Superboy answers, “If you like, Lana!  All you have to do is FLY alongside me as I finish my patrol! Ha! Ha!”  Wow, just wow.  Lana, don’t look now but your boyfriend is a real jerk.

Superboy’s patrol takes him to the Superboy Train, where he…what?  You never heard of the Superboy Train?

What a humanitarian this guy is.  Want to give money to charity?  Sure, just throw your cash fifteen feet up in the air and try to get it in this glass bowl on top of a freaking boxcar.  Too bad you can’t fly like me, ha ha!  Oh and by the way any money that lands on the ground I get to keep.

So anyway, the train is being robbed by gunmen in Halloween masks, so Superboy intervenes. “Since I have no super-strength, I have to hit this guy with all I’ve got!” says Superboy, and with all he’s got lands a haymaker that…um…knocks off the guy’s mask.  “No use firin’ our gats!” he tells his still-masked partner.  “Bullets can’t hurt Superboy!”  The other guy takes aim anyway: “I heard that, but I won’t believe it til I see it!” Hey, Lana punched a hole in a wall, who knows what you can do if you try?

Superboy tries to melt the barrel of the gun before the bullets are fired (he can’t melt the bullets themselves because they’re lead), but Lana shows up and throws herself between Superboy and the gunman, bouncing the bullets off her…um…shoulder (can’t have a bullet hitting a female breast in a code-approved comic, you know).

Lana again appeals to Superboy to be made a partner, pointing out he’d be dead if she hadn’t helped out.  Superboy counters that if she hadn’t shown up, he’d have simply turned the bullets away with a blast of super-breath.  To prove his point, he blows away the pile of logs the crooks had used to stop the train.  (Question: What is “super-breath” if not a function of super-strength? Super-strong lungs force out air at a super-powerful rate.  If he doesn’t have super-strength, how can he have super-lung power?  And if he’s not invulnerable, why doesn’t the blast of super-breath blow his cheeks off his skull?)

Aboard the train is “Emile of Paris,” a fashion designer whose “Superboy-inspired fashions” are among the train’s exhibits.  He offers Lana a “Super” outfit to continue her adventures.  Meanwhile a third crook has been hiding nearby this whole time and has learned of Superboy’s lost invulnerability.  He heads back to his gang’s hideout and tells the boss, who starts planning the Boy of Steel’s demise.

The next day, a bowling tournament at the Smallville Recreation Center is interrupted by the Halloween mask gang, who are after the “valuable trophies and prize money.”

Wow, trophies made with real silver and gold?  That’s a serious incentive for the team from Pop’s Pizza Parlor to finally beat those guys from Sam’s Filling Station. Yep, folks, Smallville is the wealthiest small town in America.  Makes me wish I was a better bowler…

Superboy steps in, beating up three thugs by blowing a punching bag into them, and taking out four more with flying billiard balls.  Then as he starts to fly away, two crooks grab his super-stretchable cape, which “snaps back like a rubber band” and sends Superboy crashing into the thugs, knocking them, and himself, unconscious.

Superboy wakes up to find his head sealed in a featureless lead mask which his x-ray vision cannot penetrate.  A voice transmitted over an intercom tells him he’s in a death trap, with water filling the room to drown him, even as poison gas comes down from a pipe near the ceiling, while the walls are studded with poison-tipped spikes to discourage climbing or searching for exits.

Quite an elaborate death trap, aimed at creating great tension.  If it didn’t look so stupid, it might even have ended up on the cover.  Outside the room, controlling the flow of water and gas with a pair of dials is the crook who’s won the right to kill Superboy…Barney.  “Haw!” chortles Barney, “No matter what he does, the super-kid is a goner now!”

Determined not to have his great career ended by some schmoe named “Barney”…a guy who actually says, “Haw” no less…Superboy springs to action, leaping up to where he thinks he hears the gas pipe and stuffing it with a handkerchief.  (What’s that?  Well, of course he carries a handkerchief…somewhere.  Stop making trouble).

So the gas is no worry now, but after that, things go badly…

Okay, you know what, Clark? Batman and Mister Miracle just called and they are officially ashamed to know you.

Meanwhile, in the outer room, the still-super Lana arrives and knocks down the door.  “I trailed you crooks when I learned you’d kidnapped Superboy!”  (I’m telling you, Red, he doesn’t deserve you) She starts beating the crooks up when one of them produces kryptonite, somehow having guessed that Lana has also gained Superboy’s vulnerability to the substance (hey, she had a 50-50 chance, based on history).

Meanwhile, Superboy comes up with a strategy…

Okay, so a “clang” on the outside of the mask was enough to cause him excruciating pain on the last page, but now he can shout loud enough to shatter lead and it doesn’t hurt his ears?  Hello?

Superboy uses heat vision to melt the steel door of his deathtrap and confronts the villains.  Their bullets bounce off his still-invulnerable costume and he subdues them.  Heading off on patrol again, Superboy notices the lunar eclipse is finally happening.  Suddenly he loses all his powers and falls to Earth, thus providing us with the image that will feature on the cover.  It should be noted, though, that cover artist Neal Adams makes it look a lot more dramatic than Al Plastino does, especially since the script has Superboy thinking, “I’m a gone gosling now!”  A gone gosling? This kid is determined to go out like a punk.

Lana flies up and catches Superboy; now she has all of his powers.  And Superboy looks sick.  “The lunar eclipse…” he says, “has somehow intensified the Guardian Jewel’s effect! Not only are all my powers gone…but now my very life force is being drained into you!”  Hey, whatever, it makes as much sense as anything else in this story.

Superboy has Lana return him to the pyramid, where he regains his powers.   How?  Glad you asked.  “I deduced from the pyramid’s inscription that the eclipse would cause the jewel to give off a different radiation…which would reverse the effect of its usual rays!”  Please, just make it stop.

Hurling the dangerous jewel deep into the Earth, Superboy shows his gratitude to Lana:

Okay, now I’m with you.  Parking a pyramid in Smallville is still kind of goofy, but as a make-out spot it definitely beats a Chevy van.

Almost heroic in its over-use of amazing coincidences, insane behavior, impossible twists and “because I said so” logic, this story raises stupidity to an art form. It’s actually so bad it’s great.  If the Silver Age was beginning to wind down in 1967, “The Big Fall” is a love letter to the era’s kooky extremes.

In Superman #163 (Aug. 1963), writer Edmund Hamilton and artists Curt Swan and George Klein present what promises to be a standard Silver Age tale of misdirection, fake-outs and neurotic behavior but ends up a surprisingly moving tale of loyalty and sacrifice.

We open with Clark Kent leaving the Daily Planet offices, ostensibly to take a vacation but in reality to perform a series of time-consuming super-feats on behalf of mankind. His first stop is “deep in the Earth beneath a western city,” where he rigs up a defense against an impending earthquake. Then it’s off to a new “experimental nuclear power station in Metropolis.” Superman has agreed to turn the reactor on himself, so that if it blows up, no one will be harmed.  But before he can act, a mysterious new figure enters the picture, dressed in his own heroic costume and cape and introducing himself as “Wonder-Man.”

Wonder-Man does Superman’s job for him, erecting a lead shield around the reactor, then braving lethal radiation when the reactor does in fact begin to crack open. On a hunch, Superman checks Wonder-Man to see if he’s a robot of some kind, but he isn’t, so Superman is left as much in the dark as everyone else as Wonder-Man flies off again.

Superman heads to his arctic Fortress of Solitude to see if perhaps Wonder-Man is a resident of Kandor, somehow enlarged to normal size. When that hunch doesn’t pan out, he checks the Phantom Zone for missing prisoners, but they’re all accounted for. Meanwhile Wonder-Man continues to perform super-feats to the appreciation of Metropolis’ citizens.  However, as soon as he and Superman have a moment alone together, Wonder-Man produces a hunk of kryptonite from his cape, telling Superman to leave town and retire from the superhero biz.

“So in the days that follow,” reads a caption, “Superman becomes half-forgotten and Metropolis honors Wonder-Man as its new hero!” Ingrates. As Wonder-Man waves to his adoring fans at a parade given in his honor, he thinks back on his origins. We learn he was once a Superman robot, the strongest of all, named Ajax. One day Superman sent him into space to investigate a passing meteor swarm.  Once there, he discovered a space ship magnetically attached to one of the meteors and attempted a rescue.  In the process, he was struck by a meteor and his robot body was destroyed. Waking later, he found his consciousness had been transferred to a new, android body indistinguishable from a human form, and imbued with super powers.

The operation was performed by the occupants of the rescued ship, who also gave him a costume of “super-durable fabric” and for good measure, presented him with a chunk of Green-K as insurance, just in case “Superman gets jealous.” Apparently Kal-El’s reputation has gotten around.

The flashback sequence ends as the perennially accident-prone Lois and Jimmy manage to snag the rotors of the Flying Newsroom helicopter in a parade banner, and plunge toward the street. Wonder-Man saves them before Superman can, and is so taken with Lois’ beauty that he proclaims his love on the spot. That’s the last straw; Superman dejectedly slinks out of town and heads for “the one place that’s mine alone…my Fortress of Solitude!”

Once there, however, he’s confronted by the waiting Wonder-Man. They have a titanic battle, throwing each other into and through mountains, but Wonder-Man produces his kryptonite and Superman is overcome. “You…won’t get away with…this…” gasps the Man of Steel.  “Supergirl…or one of my robots…will…avenge my…murder…”

Wonder-Man streaks away, and a space ship lands near the dying Superman; the same ship saved earlier by Ajax/Wonder-Man. Its occupants reveal themselves as the originators of the Superman Revenge Squad, and relate how they’d engineered the meteor swarm in space hoping to lure Superman into a Kryptonite trap. When Ajax the Superman robot appeared instead, they crashed a meteor into his body, then transferred his mind into a super-android body figuring “they’re bound to battle in time!” (Again, that dead certainty that Superman is the jealous, resentful type). Now their planning has paid off, as Superman lays dying.

Suddenly Wonder-Man swoops in, picks up the Kryptonite and throws it away, revealing that he’s known the villains’ plans since his first hour as an android, having used his x-ray vision and super-hearing to eavesdrop on their conversations before coming to Earth. Knowing they would show up to watch Superman die in person, he pretended a rivaly with Superman and exposed him to the Green-K. Now, as the villains flee to their ship, Wonder-Man and Superman together throw the spacecraft into the cosmos so hard it will take years to stop.

Superman reveals he already knew Wonder-Man was one of his former robots because “When I told you that Supergirl or my loyal robots would avenge my death, I saw tears drop from your eyes.” Um…yeah, of course, what other conclusion could you logically reach? Only why would Wonder-Man cry when he knew good and well Superman was not going to die?  More importantly, if he knew what the Revenge Squad had planned for Superman, why stage an elaborate hoax to draw them out, putting Superman through mental anguish and exposing him even briefly to deadly kryptonite?  Logically all he’d have needed to do was nab the villains as soon as he heard their plans, while they were still far out in space.

Okay, so in that regard this is a standard Silver Age Superman tale, relying on a convoluted, overly complicated and ultimately unnecessary hoax.  But there’s a last twist to the tale, as Superman moves beyond feeling threatened by the presence of a super-rival and  offers to team up with Wonder-Man “as equal partners together.”  Sadly, Wonder-Man reveals he won’t be around to enjoy the partnership. The villains made his android body so that it would die within the span of a few days.  Having known from the start that his time was limited, Wonder-Man was determined to do as much good for mankind as he could before checking out.

It’s this ending, I think, that elevates Hamilton’s story to something special and memorable.   Of course he’s greatly aided by the powerful artwork of Swan and Klein; the big battle between rival heroes is tame stuff indeed compared to the frenetic, bone-shaking visuals in Marvel comics of the time, but when it comes to emotion and pathos Swan and Klein had no equal, and this is ultimately an emotional tale.  Last week my six- and four-year-old sons asked me to read them a comic and I picked this one at random. I was surprised to find that in the last two panels, I started to choke up.

And so in Superman #163 we have probably the single best take on two recurring Silver Age Superman themes; the “I’m being replaced by that new guy” story and the “robot sacrifices himself for his master” story.  The result is one of the stronger and more memorable Superman tales of the entire era.

A great dad…

- Dresses for success.

- Is patient with your constant distractions.

- Never makes fun of your speech impediment.

- Likes his cocktails.

One of the more memorable foes to challenge the World’s Finest team of Superman and Batman was the Composite Superman, an amalgam of both heroes with the powers of the combined Legion of Superheroes.

Secretly Joe Meach, a custodian at the Superman Museum, the Composite Superman defeated our heroes in World’s Finest #142 but luckily lost his powers before he could kill them. Three years later, an alien named Xan restored Meach’s powers for a rematch which didn’t go much better, although luck saved the day again as Meach had a change of heart and sacrificed himself to save the heroes.

And that was that, until suddenly 15 years later old Compy reappears in a two-parter in World’s Finest #283 and #284 (Sept and Oct 1982, respectively). Cary Burkett writes the tale, with art by George Tuska, at the time the artist on the nationally syndicated “World’s Greatest Superheroes” newspaper strip.

The big mystery of course is how Compy can appear at all with Joe Meach dead, a mystery we won’t solve until part two, when Superman time-travels to the 30th Century to enlist the aid of the Legion of Super-Heroes in their 1982 (real time) configuration. They readily agree and return to 1982 a mere moment after Superman left.

Superman has time to land just one blow (“Keep your hands off Batman!”) before Legionnaire Wildfire makes a crack about the Composite Superman’s infamous costume:

The villain gives Wildfire a powerful punch, but quickly agrees with his assessment. “My current appearance is ridiculous! I only assumed the identity out of convenience — but it was originally conceived by the disturbed mind of Joe Meach!” Determined to be taken more seriously, he comes up with a more awe-inspiring name and outfit…

Oookay, then. And this is better how, exactly? Amalgamax sounds like a laundry detergent, or maybe a company that manufactures dental supplies. Anyway, when a villain shows up with a name like this, you know you’re reading what will be his only appearance.

The Legionnaires give battle but find themselves no match for Amalgamax. Batman tosses a batarang at him, which is good for a chuckle all around, except that inside the batarang is the Legionnaire Shrinking Violet, who appears in my candidate for “Most Fun Panel When Taken out of Context”:

Ahem, yes. “Hey, Violet I have a plan, but before we try it on the villain why don’t you try a test run in MY trunks?”

Anyway, the plan involves setting off an alarm in Amalgamax’s buckle that warns him his power is running out. Sure enough, he trusts the alarm and beats a retreat to his space ship.

Superman and friends hold a confab in a hastily constructed hideout and Batman deduces that their foe must be Xan, the space villain who restored Joe Meach’s powers back in 1967 as part of a plot to avenge his father, a space pirate who died in the prison Superman and Batman sent him to.  Meanwhile in his orbiting space ship, Xan recounts how he’s recreated the events that resulted in the first Composite Superman to make himself into the new model. Returning to Earth, he starts smashing up buildings to draw the heroes out.

Realizing they can’t beat their foe through force alone, Superman returns to the prison where Xan (and before him his father) were held and has a chat with the warden. When he hears the story of Xan’s father’s death, he hatches a plan. Returning to Earth, he has Princess Projectra use her illusion-casting powers to make Xan/Amalgamax believe he’s contracted the same deadly disease that claimed his father’s life.

Amusingly, Tuska draws the “blotches” on the fabric sleeve of Xan’s costume, not his skin, but whatever. Superman tells Xan that since the disease-causing microbes were inside him when he gave himself super-powers, they too are now super-powerful and spreading rapidly. Without a 30th-century cure for the disease — which he cannot utilize in his current state of invulnerability — he will die. Xan surrenders to the Legion for treatment and a good laugh is had by all.

So it is that 16 years after his last appearance, the Composite Superman finally gets a full-fledged, no-holds-barred showdown with the entire Legion of Superheroes. Only he’s not the same Composite Superman. And it’s not the same Legion. And he changes into Amalgamax almost immediately. And there’s very little actual fighting in the story. And he gives himself up. Oh well.

The interesting thing here is that the heroes, the villain and by implication the writer think the Composite Superman is a cool idea except for his “ridiculous” appearance. But it’s not so ridiculous that they don’t milk its sales appeal for two consecutive covers. And when the old outfit goes away, the old problems remain; how to tell an interesting story about a villain who is too powerful to be defeated by any one or group of heroes.

Turns out that old costume was the coolest part of the deal, all along.