Alias Super-Thief!
In the last two posts, we’ve seen Superman pose as the President of the United States and a professional wrestler in his efforts to reclaim his forgotten secret identity. In Action Comics #374 (Mar. 1969), he explores the possibility that his alter ego is Public Enemy #1.
We open — as we so often do — in the offices of the Daily Planet, where Superman is reviewing a clip file of his past escapades for a clue to his missing identity. Ironically, his helper is “Clark Kent,” actually a foreign spy who sent the real Clark to his apparent death and took his place at the Planet. In reality, his assasination attempt took away Superman’s memory, which is how we got into this mess.
Unable to turn up a helpful clue, Superman takes his leave. Noting that he’s already goofed twice and adopted the wrong identities, he decides “from now on, I’ll just carry out my regular duties, such as crushing crime!” (The other duties including, of course, saving reckless girlfriends and sidekicks from their own stupidity, cutting ribbons at building dedications and putting on truck-juggling exhibitions for charity).
A quick visit to the police station sets up Superman’s latest red herring.
Over at the state prison, a pair of convicts blow open a wall and initiate a mass break-out, which Superman quickly quashes. One convict escapes, however, and as luck would have it Superman recognizes him as a member of the missing Super-Thief’s gang. He follows him to abandoned train car, and with his x-ray vision spots an underground vault beneath it.
To his surprise, Superman finds a portrait of himself in the vault, along with a lead box, chained and labeled “Kryptonite: Never To Be Used.” That clinches it; yes he’s promised not to jump to any more conclusions, but the painting and Kryptonite are conclusive proof that the missing Super-Thief must be Superman himself…right? Anyway if he has any doubts, they fade when he finds a set of rubber masks in the image of the crook.
In the disguise, Superman goes to meet his “gang” and finds they’re scheduled to pull a crime that very night. “Ulp!” he thinks, “I’m…uh…stuck! I have to rob the ice capades!”
That night, a performance of the Ice Capades uses a giant prop studded with real gems, when Super-Thief and his gang appear on skates to steal it in mid-show. Police try to stop them, but a blast of super-cold breath trips them up.
As the gang collects the jewels, Superman thinks, “Why would I pull robberies like this? What I do with that loot? How can I be Super-Thief when it goes against my instincts to break the law?”
Sending his hoods out of the room, Super-Thief changes to Superman and prepares to return the loot, when a Superman robot appears. Thinking fast, he asks the robot to tell him his identity.
Learning that his usual “fence” for gems operates out of candy factory, Super-Thief makes a trip there and dumps his haul into a chocolate vat so they can be disguised as candies. He’s interrupted when an FBI agent storms in to arrest him and the fence, known as “Gem” Horton. Horton surprises the agent with a gas-bomb Easter Egg and takes him off to kill him, which Superman cannot allow.
Protecting the FBI man from the effects of the car crash, Superman returns to the candy factory to find it abandoned, Horton having run off with the chocolate-covered jewels. Disgusted, he vows never to pull another job.
Back at the hideout, Super-Thief makes a series of mistakes that threaten to expose him, so he decides to go ahead with the next job after all, to divert suspicion. Breaking into a lab to steal a “radio-isotope,” he uses his super-powers to prevent the lab workers from being injured, and when a radioactive isotope falls from its container, he swallows it to save his gang from radiation poisoning.
Miserable in his secret identity, Superman seeks out a psychiatrist to help him. The doctor conducts a word association test, and the results are disturbing.
Returning to his vault-hideout in his Super-Thief disguise, Superman gets a shock when the real Super-Thief shows up. Just then, Super-Thief’s various fences show up en masse, having realized he’s led the FBI to all of them. Superman unmasks and the crooks open fire, except for one who has a slightly…unorthodox plan of attack.
Happily, the Superman robot appears and disarms the would-be bomber.
When the police arrive, the second Super-Thief is revealed as an FBI agent. The real Super-Thief had been killed a year earlier, but the FBI took his place (thus explaining the rubber masks Superman found).
Superman still wonders why he gave the psychiatrist the answers he did, and the robot suggests it’s because he’d convinced himself he was a crook, and answered accordingly. Of course that still doesn’t explain why the robot said he was Super-Thief.
Dazed, the robot eventually located Superman and spotted him dressing up as Super-Thief, and thus concluded that was indeed his master’s secret identity.
At this point, Binder’s little magnum opus is, like the robot, beginning to self-destruct from its own illogic, so in the next issue we’ll finally get some resolution.
You have to suspend a great deal of disbelief to get through this entry. Superman says he has an instinct against committing crimes, yet he does so repeatedly when he could just as easily have used his powers to sabotage the jobs without his gang catching on. It’s anyone’s guess why a robot’s computer brain would be affected in the same way as a flesh-and-blood human brain, even allowing for the incredible coincidence of showing up at precisely the wrong moment to get hit by the amnesia ray. Having the robot blow up just as it’s about to give up the secret just tips us totally into the realm of farce.
Even though Binder’s story is very much stuck in the Weisinger past, with its over-reliance on coincidence, “irony” and improbabilities, Swan’s art is obviously moving forward, with creative page layouts and panel designs that break from (what was up til then) tradition. The stage is being set for the arrival of Murphy Anderson on inks and Julius Schwartz as editor, when the Man of Steel will finally be allowed to zoom forward into a new era of greatness.
But in the meantime, Curt’s stuck with inks by Abel — who’s never more than just that — and stories like this one. And any way you slice it, that’s a crime.
It is just getting worse and worse. Now that this story has shown Superman remembers his robots, whatever thin possibility he doesn’t remember his Fortress of Solitude snaps. That place is jammed with rooms full of statues honouring Superman’s best buds and comrades, not to mention a heavily secured room revealing his own secret identity (along with Batman’s and more). I always thought those secret identity dioramas were silly, but now it’s obvious Superman created them for situations just like this. Too bad they’ve gone to waste.
This “epic” shows that Superman is rather obsessed with clothes. The fact he is wearing the remnants of a suit of clothes when he crashes in the helicopter has him super-leap to the conclusion he has a “secret identity”. Not, “I must’ve been undercover for the FBI” or other idea. He immediately assumes he has a complete alternate persona. Then, the fact the President’s and Super Thief’s wardrobe fit him well means, obviously, that he is them and they are he. Who knew Supes was such a slave to fashion?
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In the next installment, Superman should overhear a song on the radio hinting at someone else confused about his identity:
“I am he, as you are he, as you are me, and we are all together.”
and conclude that he is The Walrus, and therefore he must be John Lennon.
But then he hears another song, “Glass Onion”:
“Here’s another clue for you all, the Walrus was Paul.”
Which of course convinces him he is, in fact, Paul McCartney.
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My personal fave is the crook who pulls the bomb and says, “You wanna haul a bunch of stiffs to the cops?” Talk about a team player.
I’d have paid good money to see the other crooks pause for a moment, then turn their guns on that guy and shoot him down.
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Okay, at this time the Justice League probably had NOT shared secret identities with one another, but WHY couldn’t Superman have simply gone to Batman or Supergirl?
That’s ANOTHER area where the story falls down.
But the art IS very nice.
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An excellent point! If the conceit of this arc is that Superman retains all of his memories of being Superman—except for his secret identity and the location of his Fortress—then seeking out Supergirl or the Batman would be a logical action.
Or . . .
He could call an emergency meeting of the Justice League and present his fellow members with his dilemma. A simple plea of “If one of you know my secret identity (as the Batman and Hawkman did at that time), please contact me later, in private, and tell me.”
Another tack would be for him to ask Green Lantern to restore his memories with his power ring. Or he could ask Hawkman to use his absorbascon to learn the Man of Steel’s identity and tell him. (Something which the Winged Wonder had already done back in JLA # 41 [Dec., 1965].)
Or . . .
Superman could zoom through the time barrier to the thirtieth century and ask his Legion of Super-Heroes buddies to tell him what his secret identity is . . . er . . . was.
Or . . .
The Man of Steel could just go a little ways back in time and, as an invisible phantom, observe himself until he sees what identity he changes into.
Or . . .
He could overtake light rays in space and do the same thing.
Even leaving out the absurd leaps of logic in the stories themselves, there are too many holes left unplugged in the premise that Superman cannot find out his own secret identity for me to buy it.
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Stories like this and the solutions you give, Commander, are one of the problems with shared universes for our heroes. While it’s fun to see the heroes team up to take down a greater menace (NOT fight with each other), it begs the question: “Why didn’t they call Captain So-and-So for help THIS time?”
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But the rub of it, my friend, is as tj pointed out—the readers were able to think of easier solutions to Superman’s dilemma, so why didn’t Otto Binder and Mort Weisinger also anticipate them and allow for them?
The Justice League option is the easiest to thwart. A simple comment that the rest of the JLA were away on a mission to another dimension would have plugged that hole. And Supergirl could be explained away as on a mission in space or visiting Kandor.
(Speaking of Kandor, the Kandorians routinely monitored Superman’s activities, so there’s another option that has to be cut off.)
But that still leaves the time-travel option—either by visiting the Legion or simply going back and observing himself in the past, the Man of Steel should have been able to solve his problem in about four panels.
By this point, Weisinger—who really was going to retire within the year (as opposed to simply threatening retirement to get a raise, as has been reputed)—was on auto-pilot, so he probably didn’t bother. But it’s a sure bet that if Julius Schwartz had been in the editor’s chair by then, he would have insisted that these alternatives be dealt with.
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I was trying to catalog all the ways a Superman with selective memory loss–knowing his abilities and associations at this point–could piece together his own identity, but Commander Benson has adroitly beat me to it. I imagine he merely skimmed the most obvious ways,
What’s interesting is, regular title READERS in 1969 could have named any of a half dozen ways Superman might have pieced together his identity. That’s what makes it, from a contextual standpoint, a pretty silly plotline.
The only explanation that really makes sense is the machine unlocked some Freudian super-ego inside his persona that really doesn’t WANT Superman to know he’s Clark Kent… maybe some secret shame that his only connection to friendships and family and private life is built around the facade of being a cowardly doofus. He doesn’t WANT to remember he’s that clod.
THAT would have been completely cool to explore, but I don’t see it happening here.
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One of the faults of Otto Binder in Silver Age “Superman family” stories (and Jerry Siegel is just as bad at this, if not worse), in my opinion, is that his characters (whether Clark/Lois/Jimmy/Supergirl, or whoever) are very often super-champions at jumping to conclusions with little or no facts to base their conclusions on. Sometimes the few facts available may be open to more than one or two interpretations.
The fact that they are often right doesn’t deny that they arrived at their conclusions often on the basis of the flimsiest of evidence.
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