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LOOK! UP IN THIS THREAD! Let’s Read… Superman!

Beowulf

Son of The Answer Man
(He/Him)
For at least a while, the explanation was that Superman's rocket to Earth needed to open a wormhole to traverse the distance while he was still a super-baby, and a whole bunch of kryptonite debris got sucked through the wormhole and along for the ride into Earth's region of space.
Superman_krptonite.jpg
 

Beowulf

Son of The Answer Man
(He/Him)
By the way, that's from Action Comics #500, and it got me thinking, "Oh, I bet Nelson Bridwell had a hand in that. He was the architect of all of the continuity "fixes" for a generation." And yeah, Marty Pasko officially wrote it, but Nelson and Julie Schwartz were the editors.
 

Octopus Prime

Mysterious Contraption
(He/Him)
Back to Lois Lane #6 for Lois Lane: Convict. Written and drawn by some combination of Bill Finger, Jerry Coleman, Kurt Shaffenberger, Wayne Boring and Stan Kaye.

We open with Lois Lane walking in front of a store admiring a pretty dress, when she’s confronted by some guy who gives her a $5000 prize for being the fifth person to walk in front of that window and admire a pretty dress, and all she has to do to earn that money is not write anything for three days.

In retrospect, her day would have been a lot better if she simply accepted this, since she lives in Metropolis and it’s not like it’d be in the top 30 unusual things to happen on that street that day. But no, she questions it and the creepy guy immediately drops the facade; he’s bribing her because he’s part of the mob and she’s about to expose his boss.

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And Lois figures, “Well… okay… I can expose the leader of this counterfeiting ring in 3 days just as easily as I can this afternoon, and that is an awful pretty dress…” and takes him up on it.

Nominally she also uses the money to get her mother a life saving operation and uses the change to buy a pretty dress, but there’s absolutely no follow up on that and I thought Lois’ mother was dead anyway so… maybe she didn’t?

Anyway, a few days later the same creepy guy shows up and offers her more money in order to stop her story again, and she initially rebukes him, but… well… mobsters aren’t known for their sense of letting bygones be bygones and he blackmails her with photos of her accepting the initial bribe.

He… still gives her the money, and continues to pay her for continuously not publishing her expose, so I feel like there’s a fundamental misunderstanding about how blackmail and extortion are supposed to work.

HVGLYGM.png


Anyway, Lois doesn’t seem to mind too much, outside of some nagging guilt, and immediately starts spending her
Money frivolously on cars and expensive jewelry.

And, yes, it was the 1950s and things were generally a bit less complicated back then but paying for fancy sports cars and expensive jewelry in cash tends to raise a few eyebrows, and, sure enough one of the salesmen identifies money Lois has been spending as crime money, and she’s immediately arrested for accepting bribes!

I should stress that the mob is counterfeiting license plates, not cash, so… how it’s connected is a mystery.

And despite the Daily Planets insistence that Lois would never accept a bribe and also getting a character witness in the form of Superman, and the fact that she accepted the original bribe in order to save someone’s life and the consequent ones under duress, she is sentenced to one full decade in prison.

Is… is that a normal sentence for accepting a bribe? I kind of thought it was a “Well, we’re taking that money back and also you’ve lost credibility” kind of punishment.

Superman at least does his part to make sure Lois’ dime in ol’ stony lonesome isn’t completely miserable.

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Thanks, Kal. Big help.

Anyway, the nameless mobster who kept bribing Lois figures he owes her a solid for being a good sport about taking his money and stages a jail break for her, taking her to the leader of the counterfeiting mob.

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Lex Luthor Baldy Pate, the unfortunately named infamous mob boss! Not sure if that’s a nickname or it’s just a coincidence. Again, Metropolis in the 1950s, both are equally plausible.

Anyway, Baldy has come to discover the ridiculously inept way his underlings have gone about blackmailing Lois and decided to step things up a touch; demanding Lois fork over the evidence of his identity, or else he’ll shoot her dead.

Luckily this is when Superman flies in and says “Oh… nah” and rounds up the gangsters for the cops, and we learn the truth about this whole sordid affair.

Surprisingly, it does *not* involve Superman gaslighting Lois. But it does require subterfuge on a ridiculous scale from a huge number of people and probably still ruined Lois’ entire careers worth of journalistic integrity.

It seems that Lois never actually knew Baldy Pate’s identity (beyond knowing him on sight, or else she’s just incredibly rude and pointed out his baldness), but DID know that there was a license plate counterfeiting ring operating out of the city. So she falsified a story that she was going to expose them, leading to them trying to bribe her, then extort her for further compliance, and then eventually meet their leader after she went to prison rather than identify him as a reward (or being executed gangland style, as the case may be). Then she’d have Superman and the cops show up to arrest Baldy.

Anyway, this all works flawlessly, Lois is exonerated for all her crimes but has to return all the expensive things she spent the mob money on. Except the pretty dress, they let her keep that as compensation for her time and her now tarnished reputation.

I’ll assume they also didn’t demand a refund on her mom’s operation but, again, it never came up and I thought she was dead anyway, so maybe they did. They just ripped that new kidney right out of her.

RIP, Lois Lanes Mom.

And there’s a third story, Lois Lane: US Army, but it’s pretty thin. Lois gets a temporary position in the army for a puff piece, and immediately goes mad with power, but it’s a trick in service of letting her examine the base commanders belongings in order to prove he’s actually a spy for a foreign government. Really it feels more like the artist and writer wanted to spend 8 pages of an attractive lady in a uniform bossing a bunch of guys around and, hey, let your freak-flag fly, some combination of Bill Finger, Jerry Coleman, Kurt Shaffenberger, Wayne Boring and Stan Kaye
 
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Octopus Prime

Mysterious Contraption
(He/Him)
jQoQOfg.jpeg


Well, the idea of this thread was picking a random Superman issue each time but… this was next on the list and how could I say no to a cover like The Secret of the Stone Age Superman (written by either Henry Boltinoff, Otto Binder or Leo Dorfman, and drawn by some combination of Henry Boltinoff, Jim Mooney and Wayne Boring).


Anyway, because this isn’t called Analytical Caution comics, we immediately start with a cave-in in France stranding several spelunkers (including Perry White for some reason) deep underground. Luckily this is international news and Clark Kent happens to be standing near a radio when it’s announced, so… that whole crisis took less time to resolve than it did to read this sentence.

More relevant to the plot, while Superman was busy digging an escape tunnel for the spelunkers, He happened to dig into a hidden cave deep beneath the earth… and in it he found his own corpse, dead and buried for one million years.

oRS3bgf.png


Thats… umm… that’s a way to start your day.

Perry doesn’t really want to write a story about a million year old superman corpse since it’s… pretty frickin’ Wild, and Supes himself says “Yeah, I’m not super enthusiastic about this whole memento mori thing either”, but can’t really let it go (understandable). So he does what anyone would do, and flies through the Time Barrier to travel back in time to France in the year One Million BC.

Unfortunately, Superman apparently never traveled to the year One Million BC before and didn’t realize that this was back when the sun was red, and not its usual healthy Yellow, so as soon as he touches down his powers quickly start to fade.

I don’t think the sun was red one million years ago, but that’s also hardly the only scientific inaccuracy we’re about to see.

Anyway, remember that episode of the Justice League cartoon where Superman travelled to the far future and had to survive amidst the mutated animals of a post apocalyptic earth? Same deal here, but the other direction. Due to a “freak of evolution” there’s still dinosaurs in Ancient France, but they’re all jacked up and weird looking (that may just be the artist drawing without a reference, however), and since Clark is all man, no Super, he has to rely on his wits to survive.

“Wits” meaning “run like hell and hide in a cave” but, like… that’s still pretty far outside his usual wheelhouse for problem solving.

EDf1MjM.png


Anyway, he makes a fire to keep warm using his glasses (which he brought with him back in time in case he needed to convince any cavemen that Clark Kent and Superman are different people) and he’s seen by some cavemen.

Luckily Superman made it a point to learn to speak fluent… err… Cave-French the last time he traveled through time so he can speak to the Cavemen easily. Theyre also extremely erudite cavemen, and the narrow brow ridges indicate that these are homosapiens and not Neanderthals. Which I also don’t think existed one million years ago.

Also, their leader, Guar, looks almost exactly like Abraham Lincoln. This isn’t relevant to the plot but it’s good to know that he could find work as an ancient French caveman celebrity impersonator.

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Anyway, Guar first assumes Superman is a god because he dresses in bright clothing, can conjure flame from the air and has a wallet full of pictures of Guars face. Then he sees Clark struggle to open a walnut without tools and says “Oh… nah.” And declares himself the superior of God instead.

Guar is a man of powerful, changing opinions.

Anyway, Guar decides to prove he’s the superior to any god by beating the absolute holy hell out of Clark, but it winds up being more of an even fight than either expected; Guar has a huge advantage in size and strength, but Clark has taken modern martial arts classes (not a skill he employs very often) so he has the advantage on speed and reflexes.

But Guar still wins and hucks Clark into a ravine, where he’s found by a befoutiful cave lady who looks exactly like Lois (again, not relevant, a weird coincidence, just needed to get her in the story somehow I guess) who nurses him back to health with medicine that can cure… being bashed up by rocked and pterodactyls.

Cave Lois explains that she’d be able to heal Clark faster if she had access to potable water, but her village has been stricken by a drought, and the only Caveman who knows where fresh water can be found is Guar and he’s been extorting the village for months.

These cavemen have access to pottery and a financial system backed on a limited but plentiful resource (in this case; animal tusks), and those are… like… early spots on a tech tree in Civilization, but it’s pretty bonkers advanced for One Million BC. So France was once a futuristic utopia.

Anyway, Superman hears that a big tough guy is exploiting innocent people by withholding a vital resource and taking all their property and says “The hell he is!” And proceeds to Superman the hell out of this problem.

By Silver Age comics standards the solution is minimally bonkers. Clark pretends to charge at Guar and his henchmen and gets cornered and beaten to death with rocks as a result. But it turns out it was actually a dummy full of straw and red berries to simulate blood, wearing Supermans costume. Guar still takes the costume off the dummy because the fancy clothes were really all he wanted anyway.

And while Guar was distracted Clark rounded up all the impoverished Cavemen, taught them how to make aqueducts, and used them to steal the fresh water from Guars reservoir.

Aqueducts are another thing that I am absolutely certain didn’t exist in Caveman times. So either Superman simply does not give a hoot about the butterfly effect or France is the most advanced culture the world has ever conceived of and they just keep it on the DL.

Either way, Superman is still stuck in that era, since he can’t move fast enough to break the time barrier under a red sun, so he decides to settle in and make a life for himself amidst the relatively hyper advanced Cavemen of prehistoric France, when… the writer realized they only had one page left if they wanted to devote the rest of the comic to a Supergirl backup story, so it’s time for a deus ex Machina.

Somewhat more literally than usual since one of the Superman Robots Clark uses when an additional Superman is needed pops into Prehistoric France, saying that it figured something went wrong when Clark didn’t return from the ancient past right away and the red sun doesn’t affect robots like it does flesh and blood Kryptonians, so it can just bring him back to the present.

Which Clark takes him up on, obviously, but he doesn’t bother retrieving his Superman suit from Guar, who went on to wear it for the rest of his life and *that* was the skeleton Superman found that started this whole mess.

I guess the lesson here is… it’s important to go back in time if you discover a corpse wearing your shirt so you can close a time loop.
 

Octopus Prime

Mysterious Contraption
(He/Him)
Bi0RZ2G.png


Moving on to the rest of the comic, The Anti Supergirl Plot, by… whichever combination of Henry Boltinoff, Otto Binder, Leo Dorfman, Jim Mooney and Wayne Boring didn’t work on the Superman story.

And with a splash page like that you’d naturally think “Woah, what could be causing Supergirl to come into conflict with her good friends, Batman, and the Greens Arrow and Lantern?”

Then you might think “Well, maybe not friends, but they certainly work in the same field”

Luckily for those of us who can’t handle stress of the unknown, this is a Silver Age Superman book so that enticing mystery doesn’t really have time to cook before it’s explained.

While attending the first of a weird number of school dances in this 8 page backup story that takes place in a college, the organizer reveals the band she hired to play; in the style of the Beatles and the Monkees, we have The Heroes.

ETXiVZO.png


But the name is spelled correctly, and “Heroes” aren’t animals (well, except, like, Detective Chimp) and those are hardly the first band to be named after a concept. So it’s not *really* in the style of those bands at all.

Also their band includes a harpsichord and a xylophone/tapdancer and their songs have lyrics like “Block Busting Baby, I’m going Batty for you” so… they’re not quite offering the same level of gifted lyricism of Maxwells Silver Hammer either.

Anyway, the band, which includes members dressed like Green Lantern, Green Arrow, Batman and Supergirl captivates the audience with their terrible songs, and admittedly impressive prop work. In fact they captivate them entirely too well, so much so that nobody notices three quarters of the band run off stage while the ersatz Supergirl performs a soft-shoe tap routine on a xylophone. And we learn the horrifying truth; the so called heroes are nothing more than dang dirty crime guys; planning on sneaking through the mansion that’s… hosting a college dance for some reason and looking for stuff to steal.

A plan which works wonders thanks to the Green Arrow having an arrowhead full of “Hyper Acid” that can burn through a safe wall!

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Which sounds more impressive than it is since it takes hours to eat through the wall so they had to Come back later to rob the mansion a second time. And hope that nobody, over the course of several hours, noticed the overwhelming toxic scent of melting steel.

Luckily nobody did, it was the perfect crime.

The next day they decide to do the same thing again; this time the Heroes are playing at Stanhope College itself during a pledge drive to raise money for scholarships.

It’s the mid 1960s and don’t know enough about college finances to know if that’s weird or not. The sheer amount of school dances this college has is weird though, right?

Anyway, same thing happens again, Fake Supergirl takes the stage, the Heroes run out the back door and Fake Green Lantern uses the metal detector in his ring to find treasure and Fake Batman and Fake Arrow steal it; this time making off with the chemistry labs Rare minerals and… umm… blue prints for top secret military weapons.

Stanhope works with DARPA, I guess? Also, maybe lock those up a bit more securely than a combination lock that a guy dressed like Batman can break open real easily?

Anyway, after stopping a traffic accident on the level of the opening of Final Destination 2 (not relevant to the story but there needs to be something like that happening every couple of pages) Supergirl learns that Stanhope was robbed of its WMD plans and rather than saying “Wait… we were building what?!?” SGs main concern was with the head of the… umm… weapon development lab possibly losing his job because he’s been deemed a security risk.

He absolutely should lose his job because he’s a security risk.

I think doing that bad of a job hiding weapon Design plans counts as treason.

Anyway, hearing that a second place that the Heroes have played at has been the victim of a major robbery that same night is all the clues Supergirl needs to decide that this band might be worth questioning (the police did not and do not show any awareness of this significant piece of information), so she decides to follow up on it in the most efficient way possible; by going from hotel to hotel to see if she can see any Members of the band sitting in any of the rooms.

Luckily she guessed right on her first try.

She finds the bands Supergirl crying on a bed , and she explains to the *real* Supergirl that she was hired for her spellbinding tap dance/xylophone skills *before* being aware that the band was using her as a distraction to perform very deliberate and methodical robberies, and then they just blackmailed her into continuing to help them commit felonies/out right treason.

Supergirl comes up with a plan; to replace the Fake Supergirl in the band then, when the Heroes sneak off to do more crimes, interrupt the show to catch them doing crime. And luckily Stanhope has its third school dance that week scheduled so she doesn’t have long to wait.

The plan works well-ish and SG punches the absolute bajeezus out of half the band, but then the thing on the cover page happens and the fake Green Arrow pulls out a rock of Kryptonite he decided to bring along when he realized that the bands Supergirl was putting on a better show than usual so it was probably the real Supergirl!

The fake one performed so well that an entire audience full of people didn’t notice three quarters of the band sneak off stage and Kara hasn’t had any music training so… make of that as you will.

Anyway, Kara is being poisoned to death and the rest of the Heroes resume stealing stuff. They’re already on the hook for treason, what’s a little murder on top of that.

Luckily this is when the real Batman, GL and GA pop in to punch their doppelgängers and arrest them.

Turns out the On Stage Supergirl knew that the gang had some Kryptonite on hand but kind of… forgot to mention it when she and Kara were putting together the plan, so she tagged along in secret and got Kara away from the Kryptonite when the rest of the Heroes left her to die in silence.

Then using the most poorly explained of a Kryptonians abilities; Super Telepathy, she contacted the rest of the Justice League, told them what was up and they teleported right over to pulverize the guys who stole their valuable IP, as she was currently still mostly dead from radiation exposure.

And presumably had them sent off to The Hague because of the stolen military plans they were planning on selling to enemy countries.

Another Super End to a Super Day!
 

Beowulf

Son of The Answer Man
(He/Him)
I can't speak to 1960s Stanhope College, but when I went to college, there were plenty of mansions that parties took place at. (We called them "eating clubs" because we're pretentious, but at most school those are frat houses.) And if there was a new hot band, the idea they'd play parties at multiple clubs in the same couple of weeks isn't actually that unreasonable. DJ Bob played three parties a week when I was an undergrad.

That said, I'm pretty sure there weren't any safes fully of valuables or military secrets. Drawers full of hazing equipment or old tests for cheating purposes, maybe? I remember mine had a big box of stale waffles for a while.
 

Kirin

Summon for hire
(he/him)
I’m glad that girl’s conveniently expository thoughts explained what the heck ersatz-bats is playing there cause I was having a hell of a time figuring it out from the illustration. In my defense, harp is a pretty weird lead instrument choice for a sock-hop.
 

Daikaiju

Rated Ages 6+
(He, Him)
Then using the most poorly explained of a Kryptonians abilities; Super Telepathy, she contacted the rest of the Justice League
Ah, silver age Super powers, DC's Silver Age equivalent of "I've written into a corner, time to invent random BS to get out. Go, Super BLT Making!"
 

Octopus Prime

Mysterious Contraption
(He/Him)
iXPViK1.jpeg


Classic Silver Age bait-and-switch, I saw that cover, and thought "Oh I got to see what this is about" and then BAM, the starting story is Introducing... Lois Lanes Parents, written by either Bill Finger or Robert Bernstein, and drawn by any possible combination of Kurt Shaffenberger, Wayne Boring and Stan Kaye. Nobodys head gets put into a lockbox, and people more familiar with later retcons of Lois Lanes home-life will no doubt be VERY confused (speaking from experience), but here we are.

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Supermans Girlfriend Lois Lane was more in league with Archie style antics, but substantially more bonkers-ass and if Archie and Reggie were combined into a single character with the might of Earths Yellow Sun coursing through his veins, and this is a pretty good example of that.

We open in the Daily Planet offices where Lois Lane has requested a weekend off to visit her parent in her hometown of Pittsdale. And Perry White obliges because there's just no news happening at this week. We've seen what Perry White considers to be front-page worthy events for a major metropolitan newspaper, so if he's saying it's a slow news-day, then WOW, is there nothing going on.

Google tells me that this was several weeks before Hawaii was officially made a US state, and that Early August 1959 just had nothing going on whatsoever, so Perry is right. *No News*.

Anyway, Lois can't get a flight to her hometown and her (just awful) sister, Lucy Lane can't squeeze her in to a chartered flight at the last minute either (this is a pretty reasonable response, especially since Lucy is a flight attendant and not, like... a travel agent or a pilot, but Lucy is awful so her apology sounds more like a backhanded insult).

Luckily Lois is also dating a super-strong flying man so airplanes are kind of a luxury item when it comes to flying cross country.

OoUjRcW.png

Lois also drops some subtle concerns about her relationship status to Superman.

Anyway, in Pittsdale we meet Lois' parents. Despite the title, they're not really very relevant to the story. Now, in modern continuity, and I think it was a Post-Crisis retcon, Lois' father Sam Lane, was an army general who eventually wound up in command of the militaries anti-alien division. Which, naturally, put him in direct conflict with Superman himself, which was a good source of no shortage of Dramatic Tension in their relationship, and her army brat upbringing was a handy explanation for Lois' independent streak that granted her an excessive ability to locate and escape from danger and devil may care personality. Her mom, Ella, I think was dead, but I'm not sure; she never came up in the stories I've read.

Well here Sam and Ella are farmers in a small town, ambiguously far from Metropolis.

Superman writers really only had the one setting for character origins.

Luckily, much like how Metropolis is having a news-free weekend, so too is it having a weekend free from any kind of Silver Banshees or Atomic Skulls, so Supes decides to hang out at the Lane homestead for the weekend with her. He's extremely familiar with farm chores, since this is precisely the same as his own upbringing. All of which serves Sam Lane *just fine* and he says "Hey, why don't you marry my daughter. Then she could be a stay-at-home mother. It's the 1950s so that would be way better than her being a reporter for a major metropolitan newspaper and going on ridiculous adventures several times a month."

Superman says "Uh.... no", but not because of the unexamined biases of the time and mostly because if he was married she'd have to spend her entire life hiding from supervillains who would assuredly threaten her to get to him and her ridiculous adventures would assuredly only increase.

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Unfortunately, a nosy neighbor happened to be wandering nearby and overheard the part of the conversation where Siperman says he'd love to marry Lois Lane and missed the "but..." part. And, small town rumor mills being as efficient as they are, coupled with the fact that this is before Netflix or Gameboys and it's later in the afternoon before the whole of Pittsdale is convinced that Superman and Lois are now engaged and due to be married before the weekend is over. And also organized a parade to celebrate their engagement.

Lois' reaction to her surprise impending nuptials are to say "Okay... this is clearly not in the spirit I meant when I was complaining about you not proposing before. Superman, you usually solve problems like this through gaslighting and elaborate moralizing hoaxes... so... do that".

And Superman says "Well I can't do that on *command*, gimme a minute here..." and in the meantime Lois and Superman just have to suffer through the casual embarrassment of Sam Lane showing embarrassing baby photos and demanding the Strange Visitor from the Stars start boinking his daughter immediately; he's overdue for being a grandparent.

Also Lois is confronted by an old ex.

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I don't know what the graceful form of this interaction would look like, but certainly not this.

Anyway, Supes still hasn't thought of a way to trick the town into NOT forcing he and Lois to get married without breaking the whole towns collective hearts and now it's time for the wedding. Complete with a surprise air-show!

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An extremely surprising, dangerously low-altitude air-show, that manages to drown out the officiant presiding over the wedding. Turns out that just before the wedding, Superman managed to place a phonecall to Lucy Lane who was able to use the apparently infinite power being a flight attendant affords to to redirect a series of air force jets to buzz the wedding and interrupt the I-Dos. Which I thought were just ceremonial, but I guess they have to actually be audible to count.

Then again I also thought at least one of the married couple has to be inclined to marry the other and/or hold a wedding too. Pittsdale has its own customs and we are not to judge.

Anyway, wedding ceremony or no, Supes and Lois had a *hard out* at six PM when their weekend off was over, and the jets were enough to delay the wedding past that, so they have to bid everyone adieu and say they'll get married the next time they're in town. The Essential Superman Encyclopedia I have beside me, does not indicate Sam and Ella Lane showing up again pre-crisis, so I have to assume that Lois simply never met her parents again after this.

And so the day is saved from Superman and Lois having a shotgun wedding, and all it cost was the ear health of an entire town. And that one big-ears guy is probably emotionally ruined for life.
 
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