SupermanFan.Net

For most of its long history, World’s Finest Comics was home to Superman and Batman, first as parallel “lead features” and later as co-stars in shared adventures.  For a brief period in 1971-72, however, DC shook things up a bit, pairing Superman with a rotating cast of guest stars just as they did for Batman over in Brave and The Bold.

Interestingly, I’m pretty sure my first issue of the title (and one of my first comics, period) was from this period.  I have powerful memories of #208, with its tremendous Neal Adams cover showing Superman and Dr Fate pulling the Earth back into orbit with massive chains.  That one sparked a lifelong fascination with both Fate and Adams.

So it was with some eagerness that I dug into the team-up tale in WF #213, titled “Peril In A Tiny Place”.  I mean, with Superman, The Atom and a great Nick Cardy cover, how can you go wrong, right?  Well…

Writer Elliot Maggin (this one’s so early, he hasn’t adopted the “S!” in the middle yet) starts us off at Ivy University, where Professor Ray Palmer is researching the gene factor that allows him to become the Atom without blowing up (as everything else does when he shrinks it).  When the culture on his microscope slide shrinks beyond the point where he can see it, he hopes to get an assist from Superman’s famous microscopic vision.  Placing a phone call to Clark Kent, he shrinks to his Atom persona and prepares to perform his famous trick of riding electronic impulses along the phone lines.

Not knowing he’s about to get a momentous phone call, Clark is trying to relax at  his Metropolis apartment…

Perhaps confusing him with Bruce Wayne (or Hugh Hefner?), artists Dick Dillin and Joe Giella have dressed Clark in a purple smoking jacket with a yellow cravat; decidedly aristocratic duds for a working stiff like our Clark, but at least they skipped the cigarette holder.

The phone rings, and The Atom begins his journey along the phone lines to Metropolis.  Suddenly, however, he comes to an electronic disturbance that blocks his way and looks ready to fry him.  Meanwhile Clark is frustrated at the silence that greets him when he picks up the phone.  He’s about to trace the call with his vision powers when he hears a disturbance outside and goes to investigate as Superman.

All along Clinton Street, traffic has come to a standstill as drivers have abandoned their cars and crowded the sidewalks.  A police officer informs Superman that “every piece of metal for three blocks around is charged with electricity!” (including all those cars).  Superman leaves the patrolman — who bears a distinct resemblance to editor Julie Schwartz — to pay a visit to an art store run by two shopkeepers with familiar names.

I’m not sure if art store employees really dress like pharmacists, but who would know better than these guys?

Anyway, with his newly purchased spray cans in hand, Superman races through the streets, spraying the door handles of all those stopped cars with “non-conducting enamel” so the drivers can return to their vehicles and leave the area.  For good measure, he also sprays the doorknobs on the local apartment buildings…

That’s one powerful stream coming out of those cans, huh?  He hit those doorknobs from 20 feet away.  I sure hope the owners of those cars agree that having their rides sprayed with red and yellow paint is a fair trade-off for avoiding electric shock.   And you know what, somehow having Superman pump all those aerosols into the atmosphere strikes me as running a bit counter to Maggin’s usual sensibilities, but then again it’s 1971…who knew?

Still stuck in his sub-atomic limbo, The Atom turns on his Justice League emergency signal, albeit without much hope it will help him.  Spotting a planet-like structure, he manages to maneuver himself to it and begins exploring.

By now, Superman has traced his neighborhood’s electrical problems to the phone lines under the street.  He returns to his phone, still off the hook, and listening closely he faintly detects a distant sound in “the same pattern” as a JLA emergency signal.  Using the Kandorian Shrinking Ray from his Fortress, he reduces himself to miniature size and jumps into the phone to investigate.

The Atom, meanwhile, has discovered an alien race, led by a yellow and green Mark Twain lookalike.  We know Dick Dillin designed him because, as usual, we can never quite tell whether he’s wearing gloves or not.  His shirt sleeves are pushed up to expose his bare forearms but a close-up shows seams stitched in his fingers.

Here’s where I get lost, frankly.  If I understand correctly, these humanoid, English-speaking aliens live inside the phone line, their tiny world powered by the flow of electrons going through the lines.  Recently, however, an electronic something-or-other (the same disturbance Atom saw earlier) appeared in their “sky” and started absorbing the electrons, weakening the denizens of this subatomic world and causing them to start dying off.

Right about now, Superman is drawing near.  He sees the electrical disturbance and exclaims, “Oh,no, it’s…a GENESIS MOLECULE!”  My sentiments exactly.

Locating The Atom, Superman explains that the molecule “is going to reproduce by fission any moment…and this whole universe will blow up!  I have to get you out of here and move this THING to an uninhabited world.  It may be the basis of a new form of life — based on electrical rather than chemical energy.”

“You want to move that thing,” asks the Atom, “and let it absorb everything in this sub-atomic universe?”  “Yeah,” answers Superman, even though the Atom’s question presents a complete contradiction in terms.  How can he move it elsewhere AND at the same time leave it to destroy the place where it is now?  Anyway, Atom introduces Superman to the local population, the existence of which moots the “absorb everything” option.

So it is that Superman and The Atom fly around for two solid pages doing…well, it’s unclear what they’re doing, but the captions relate an inspiring “Pledge of A Superman” (more on that later).  The Atom is finding it hard to survive near the Genesis Molecule, so Superman comes up with a plan to help him.  Sort of.  I think.  Heck, even the Atom is lost by this point, and he’s a physicist.

Note our pal Dick Dillin at work again in the above image.  We know The Atom is wearing gloves, but Dillin draws him with fingernails.  Maybe Dick lived in a Bizarro world where gloves have nails and hands have seams?

“The molecule is about to split into two!” says Superman (in a panel where Dillin and Giella are drawing it as two molecules already).  “The only way to destroy it now…is to HIT the two nucleii with our force at the exact moment of fission!”  So, hitting a nucleus keeps it together instead of splitting it apart?  Right, got it.

At exactly the right moment, the heroes hit the nucleii.  The resulting explosion sends them back along the phone line and out of Clark Kent’s phone.  Atom enlarges to his Ray Palmer ID and enlarges Superman with the Kandorian Shrinking Ray (good thing you found someone in that phone line, Superman, or else who would’ve enlarged you?).  Superman (now Clark) says he saw that the alien race survived, and Ray is happy, but Clark points out that they had to destroy one thing — and the life it may have spawned — to save other lives, a choice that is causing him some emotional turmoil.  For some reason, Ray is turned on by this revelation.

This panel is just weird.  Since when does Ray Palmer, physicist, university professor and all-around square have the anti-establishment, hippy sensibilities of Oliver Queen?  Would he really use a term like “Superguy”?  Was there ever anything in his past potrayals to suggest he’d see Superman as “a muscle-bound enforcer of his definition of Justice”?  If he thinks the guy is such a lumbering fascist, why did he seek his aid in the first place?

However, even if he botched the Atom’s character (for me, anyway), it’s great fun to see the still-new-at-it Maggin developing his distinctive vision of Superman.  There’s an early bit where Clark is listening to his favorite music, “the classic Sonic Flare Patterns — by the musicians of the planet Polaris Four,” establishing the exotic tastes and unique sensibilities acquired by a veteran of interstellar and inter-dimensional travels, and adding to what will become a long list of arcane references to alien cultures and peculiar hobbies for the Man of Steel.

Better yet is Maggin’s “Pledge of A Superman,” still inspiring despite the accompanying pictures of our heroes flying around in an incomprehensible aerial dance of some sort:

I will use this power for all the good that can be done…

To work for peace…

To encourage virtue…

And above all, to preserve life, in all its forms…

Or failing in that, to give up this power…forever!

Nice bit, that; a proverbial diamond in the rough that is this plot.  Other than that, the high point of the book is a pair of ads for other books due to hit the shelves in the coming months.  One is a mysterious Jack Kirby project featuring a hideous, yellow-skinned monster in spandex and cape: “From the mists of the past comes a strange, unearthly hero!  The Demon! Like nothing you’ve ever read before!” The other is a much more low-key ad saying simply, “A different comic mag is coming…” while a nearby picture shows a shadowy, green creature looking at us over his shoulder.  Beneath him a legend reads: “Swamp Thing.”

Yeah, as if.   I ask you, who would waste their 20 cents on two such weird and unappealing concepts as those, when everyone knows that in a few years, collectors will be offering me big bucks for this here Superman/Atom team-up?

Wait a minute, Superman versus…Wonder Woman?!!  The cover blurb blares, “the Battle You Never Thought You’d See,” which must qualify as one of the few times a comic was actually marketed with an understatement.  I remember when this was first advertised all I could think was, “How are they going to make that work?  The answer, as it turns out, is:  better than you might think.

Gerry Conway scripts this tabloid epic, set without explanation or apology during World War II (there’s not even a “this adventure happens on Earth-2″ line. Nuthin’.) and it works nicely.  The opening splash shows “classified documents” from the war era, finally de-classified for release to the public and promising to reveal at last the formerly top-secret battle between Superman and Wonder Woman.  As the story unfolds, each chapter will be introduced in similar fashion.  It’s a neat narrative device.

We first see Superman in a spectacular two-page spread, flying to the aid of an American aircraft carrier under attack from a squadron of Japanese fighter planes.  It’s just the first of many visual treats from the ever-amazing Jose-Luis Garcia-Lopez, inked here by Dan Adkins in what was, along with Neal Adams’ “Superman vs. Muhammad Ali,” easily one of the best-looking DC tabloids of them all.

The Zeros turn out to be flown by cutting-edge “calculating machines” (a helpful editorial note reminds us computers have not yet been invented in WWII), so Superman is free to cut loose on them.  Then he detects a Japanese submarine and makes short work of that as well.

The commander of the submarine lets slip a plot to disrupt something called “the Manhattan Project” and when Superman asks Admiral Chester Nimitz what it’s all about, he’s sent to Washington for a debriefing.  Wonder Woman, meanwhile, is already in D.C., saving a high-ranking official from kidnapping at the hands of Nazi agents outfitted with explosives.  Ever practical, she drops a car on the lot of them and Ka-Boom!…problem solved.

When a mysterious car near the scene of the crime pulls away from the curb and drives off, Wonder Woman follows it to a train station, where she prevents another attempted kidnapping.  This time the intended victim is none other than Albert Einstein himself.  Following clues and instinct, Diana Prince uses her security clearance to enter the War Department H.Q. and pilfers the file on the Manhattan Project.  Shocked and enraged at what she reads, she heads to Paradise Island to seek her mother’s advice.

Meanwhile down in Mexico we encounter the Nazi supervillain Baron Blitzkrieg. First introduced in a Wonder Woman (of Earth-2) story in World’s Finest Comics #246 (and later to figure prominently in All-Star Squadron),  Blitzkrieg is a former concentration camp commandant whose face was destroyed when a prisoner threw acid at him. Efforts to restore his features were unsuccessful (so he wears an iron mask), but under the care of Nazi doctors he gained super-strength and the power to fly and shoot optic beams. However he can only use one such power at a time.

Blitzkrieg is meeting up with Sumo, a Japanese super-soldier trained to expert levels in various martial arts and embued with even greater strength (and stature) by a mysterious potion. The two agree to cooperate in locating and stealing two halves of an atomic device, but each secretly has his own agenda.

Soon afterwards, Superman follows up on reports that Wonder Woman is terrorizing the University of Chicago campus.  He arrives to find her swinging a lamppost to demolish a building at a busy intersection. When he tries to stop her, things get ugly fast.

As they battle, Wonder Woman reveals her motives; having learned of atomic research on the campus, Wonder Woman intends to confiscate all related materials, in the belief that the atom bomb is too dangerous for any nation to possess, even her adopted home of America.  Superman on the other hand has by now been briefed on the Manhattan Project and is convinced America’s in the right.

When buildings start crumbling around them, the two agree to continue their fight in a place no bystanders can be hurt, which turns out to be the Moon.  When they arrive, Wonder Woman spots the radioactive ruins of a lost civilization and tries to make it a teachable moment, but Superman is not in a listening mood and goes on the attack.  Here we come to a show-stopping moment for me as a youngster, as Garcia-Lopez seems to forget to draw Wonder Woman’s clothes.  Adkins likewise doesn’t fill in the blanks and the colorist seems unsure just how to handle the situation. Consequently I probably spent more time on this page than any other in the book.  Dirty kid.

Back on Earth, Sumo is launching a one-man raid on the atomic research facility at Los Alamos, New Mexico while Blitzkrieg and his men attack the one at Oak Ridge, Tennessee.  With only mere mortal soldiers to oppose them, both succeed in stealing their respective halves of a protoype atomic device.

A desperate search for Superman ends when an astronomer spots him on the Moon (bitchin’ telescope, there).  With no other way to contact the Man of Steel, U.S. officials elect to turn all the lights along the Eastern Seaboard off and on repeatedly in a Morse Code S.O.S. sequence  (neat touch, that).  Sure enough, the heroes spot the signal and make haste for Mother Earth, where Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson updates them on the situation.  Though divided on the issue of whether America should have the A-bomb, both heroes at least agree the Axis powers shouldn’t have it, so they split up to battle the villains.

Baron Blitzkrieg has taken his half of the device to New Orleans, where he waits in vain for Sumo to appear with the other half.  Superman shows up and the two battle through the streets of the city.  Superman takes some punishment before realizing Blitzkrieg can only use one power at a time.  He pummels the Nazi with a series of blows that break his mental control over his abilities and leave him knocked out.

Wonder Woman tracks Sumo to a small island in the South Pacific and the two battle over the remaining half of the atomic device, which Sumo intends to keep for Japan despite his earlier promises to Blitzkrieg.  Wonder Woman triumphs just as Superman shows up with an unconscious Blitzkrieg and his half of the device.  However, it turns out Blitzkrieg was just playing possum; jumping to his feet, he fits the two halves together, creating an atomic reaction that somehow paralyzes the heroes.

Superman uses his heat vision on the device and frees himself and Wonder Woman, but in the process starts a chain reaction that will result in a nuclear explosion.  He and Wonder Woman flee the island but the villains stubbornly refuse to leave, battling each other for possession of the weapon.  In a two-page spread, the island goes up in a mushroom cloud as the heroes look on in horror.

As the story ends, the heroes are granted an audience with President Roosevelt, who promises Wonder Woman she needn’t worry about the bomb on his watch:

This is a really fun book despite my early misgivings.  For fans of Jose Luis Garcia Lopez, it’s a gold mine, with gorgeous double-page spreads of Paradise Island, the Mexican coast and the Lunar landscape (among others) and masterfully staged action sequences throughout.  As to the latter, the fights with the villains work better for me.  Superman is able to let loose on Blitzkrieg to an extent he can’t on Wonder Woman, and Diana’s judo-intense battle with Sumo is much more graceful (and seemly) than her bare-knuckled fisticuffs with Superman.

The elephant in the room here for continuity buffs is the incongruity of finding an Earth-1 Superman and Wonder Woman operating in the WWII era.  At one point, Superman mentions the Justice Society of America, suggesting events are unfolding on Earth-2, but the costumes are all wrong for that, and to my memory the war-era Superman wouldn’t have been able to travel to the Moon and breathe in space unaided.

The most logical explanation is that DC wanted to use the most widely recognized versions of its characters, and with the Wonder Woman show airing on TV and Superman: The Movie just around the corner, the more media-established designs won out.  This would also explain the WWII setting, since viewers of the Wonder Woman show would have associated her with that era.

One minor quibble here is the Moon battle, where Wonder Woman shows up wearing a glass helmet.  It’s hard to understand just how Superman considers it a fair contest to battle someone reliant on oxygen when he isn’t.  If you rule out blows to the head (which would break the helmet and kill her) and blows to the upper body (which features…umm…girl parts), that means the only tactic he has left is punches to her stomach.  Kind of limiting, don’t you think?

Writer Gerry Conway is in much better form here than in his later “Superman vs. Shazam” book.   The main improvement is that both heroes in this story remain true to character and in their right minds, rather relying on the time-worn comics tropes of misunderstandings, mind control and/or mistaken identity.  At the heart of the battle this time is a genuine conflict of equally legitimate beliefs. Consequently we are for once interested in seeing who comes out on top, and not just to settle fanboy arguments about who’s strongest.

So despite its flaws and against all expectations this book remains one of my favorite “versus” tales.  In closing, just because it’s cool, here’s the back cover to the book, which could as easily have been the front cover…

In DC Comics Presents #61 (Sept 1983) Len Wein, George Perez and Pablo Marcos (with assist from Rick Hoberg) give us “The Once And Future War.”

We begin in the far-flung future, where Jack Kirby’s OMAC (One-Man Army Corps) is busy busting up an “unlawful laboratory” run by the nefarious Intercorp organization.  As he trashes the facility, a team of Intercorp scientists fire up a “time transmitter” and use it to transport a robotic “pre-programmed assassin” to an unknown destination.  At the last second, OMAC leaps into the transmitter and follows the robot to its mysterious destination…

We cut to current-day (well, if you’re wearing Izod shirts and listening to A Flock of Seagulls) Metropolis, where a group of crooks is holed up in a liquor store, surrounded by a heavily armed police force and biding their time until the final shoot-out.

Suddenlty the Intercorp robot appears in their midst, identifying itself as “Murdermek…Intercorp Death-Droid Classification 42119.” A quick scan of the crooks confirms they’re not who Murdermek’s looking for, so it blasts out of the building and wades through a hail of police gunfire, smashing cop cars and officers out its way while the delighted crooks use the distraction to effect their escape.

Down swoops Superman, slugging away at Murdermek, which in turn blasts the Man of Steel across the street into an abandoned building (Comic-book Chaos Rule #32: any building destroyed by a superhero in an uncontrolled fall shall be uninhabited).  Now the crooks are really impressed, and decide to follow Murdermek wherever he might take them.

Now OMAC arrives, still on the trail of Murdermek and a bit confused about what’s going on.  The police assume he’s in league with the robot and attempt to detain him.  He’s in a hurry, though, and so throws them off, just in time for Superman to emerge from the rubble and misinterpret the scene.  He says hello with a punch to the head. (Comic-book Chaos Rule #12: any two costumed characters meeting each other for the first time shall assume the worst and come out swinging).

With protocol now satisfied, cooler heads prevail and the two heroes have a kibbitz on a nearby rooftop.  OMAC recaps his origin as nebbishy Buddy Blank, transformed into a futuristic super-soldier (hey, it worked for that other guy) and now battling to save mankind’s future.  Meanwhile Murdermek explains to his new gang that he’s looking for one Norman Blank, ancestor of Buddy, on the theory that by killing him he will prevent the creation of OMAC.

After a search of the city, Superman spots Murdermek at Metro Central Station, where he’s finally found Norman Blank and opens fire.  Superman swoops in just in time to rescue an unwary commuter, placing him in a seemingly safe corner of the train station before resuming the fight with the robot.   Meanwhile Murdermek’s hapless “gang” enters the scene flying futuristic weapon-vehicles constructed by the robot and open fire on the poor commuter.   OMAC shows up and engages them in a side battle while Superman takes on Murdermek in the main event.   The robot proves surprisingly tough against a Man of Steel with pre-Crisis power levels.  In fact for a moment it seems he has Superman on the ropes, before our hero rallies with an everything-I’ve got punch and a decidedly immodest declaration of how freaking great he is.

Even after this punch, Murdermek keeps moving forward (giving Superman a scare), but then he keels over and explodes.  Finally taking a moment out to talk to the suffering commuter at the center of all this chaos, they learn he isn’t Norman Blanks at all, but rather one Arnold Berkowitz. Confused but glad it’s over, OMAC returns to the future and in the last panel we learn that “Norman Blank” is actually a sanitation worker who’s always been near the action but “invisible” to us because of his uniform and Perez’ careful placement of him in his panel designs.   The final image of Norman resolutely working away with his pushbroom amidst a giant pile of rubble and robot parts makes for a neat, Eisner-esque coda to the tale.

So…a relentless, seemingly invincible robot sent from the future to destroy the one-day savior of mankind by preventing his birth.  Sound vaguely familiar?  The interesting thing is this issue came out in the summer of 1983 (with a September cover date), which places it a full year ahead of James Cameron’s Terminator, although Cameron’s script was supposedly already in place in 1983 (with filming delayed nearly a year to accomodate Arnold Schwarzenegger’s work on Conan the Destroyer).  However both the comic and the film have echoes of Harlan Ellison’s Outer Limits episodes, Soldier and Demon With A Glass Hand, so maybe that’s the common thread.

Anyway, this issue made a big impression in 1983, largely because of the dynamic, gorgeous Perez art on a title that tended to be a bit lackluster, visually.  Also, with the Byrne reboot and Superman’s consequent Marvelization still three years away, a cover-to-cover slugfest was still a novel and exciting concept at this point.  But for me the most interesting aspect of the story is the way it feels like an “homage” to a film that still hadn’t come out yet, right down to the inclusion of an “Arnold” character in the dénouement.  Freaky.