Monday, September 21, 2015

Superman vs. Evil


Remember this?



You had to give DC credit for tinkering with their golden goose back in the 1990's.  I mean, they killed Superman off and proceeded to bring him back with a mullet.  And I enjoyed the whole "Death/Reign/Return" saga, so it's not like I was impossible to please.

But what the heck was that?

It turns out, Superman #162 was to blame, 35 years prior:


Yeah, it's an imaginary story, but I couldn't turn away.

In a nutshell, Superman was put on a super guilt trip by the people living in the bottle city of Kandor.  Frankly, they should have been glad to be alive at all, considering there were millions of dead Kryptonians who would have gladly taken "live out the rest of my life in one city" as opposed to "be on a planet when it blows up."  But after a while, gratitude becomes entitlement and there you have it.

So, Superman invents a machine designed to increase his intelligence (which isn't really his problem.... it's more of a personality / attitude kind of thing), and it causes him to split into two beings.  And he's apparently totally okay with this.

Anyway, Supes Squared has some kind of "honeydo" list and he decides to actually get cracking on it now that he's two people and it'll only take half the effort.  I may be reading into that last part.


It's kind of sad that Lori Lemaris feels like she has to identify herself as "Lori the Mermaid."  So, if I call Superman, am I to identify myself as "Adam, the middle-aged nerd"?


You know, if you live under the ocean with a bunch of other mermaid and mermen, I'd like to know who considers you a freak.  I mean, you may get a little guff if you actually leave your undersea kingdom, but it seems like leaving the planet is an extreme solution to a rather nonexistent problem.

Anyway, they toss every person who has a fishtail into the Great Beyond and then decide to invent an anti-evil ray.  Because RANDOM RAY USAGE TIMES BILLIONS!


Apparently, animals and insects are prone to evil:


Yes, when creatures fight, it is because they are evil.


Hmmmmm... It looks to me like this is just a form of sedation via ray-gun.  But you don't want to question the guy holding the hypno-ray.

Evil also apparently means not doing what the United States Government wants:


It's not that I'm a fan of nukes at all, but it's kinda presumptuous that other countries having their own weaponry constitutes evil.  That's kind of relative, depending on which country you happen to be standing on.

And then in culminated in this:


Yeah.  That's Superman Comics, folks.

See you tomorrow!


4 comments:

Cflmaior said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Cflmaior said...

Adam, you could well have printed the panel originally adjacent to #8 in your entry, in which, "elsewhere on a Caribbean island", a tall, bearded man dressed in drab fatigues, under influence of a certain "Hypno-ray", orders a private: "Release all the prisoners at once!" It would strengthen, 52 years later, the old French dictum: "plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose".

Wayne Allen Sallee said...

In back of CONVERGENCE#1, there was a pretty decent list of revisited timelines (or whatever DC said it was), and Superman-Red and Superman-Blue were right there, married to Lois and Lana. (This was a premise for a later issue.)At some point in CONVERGENCE, we see the two Supermen fighting other doomed heroes (or whatever). One panel of maybe a two page spread.

But since Electric Superman wasn't in CONVERGENCE, I guess that part of his past really did happen? Right, DiDio? Johns? uh, Lee? Where's Lee?

-DS- said...

I'm thinking it's more that Electric Superman eventually changed back, so he's the same as "normal" pre-Convergence Superman, while Red and Blue from the 1960s are a separate character branch and so still exist.

Something like that.