TFMSR 022: Superman #156 …

Welcome to Superman Month here on Tales from My Spinner Rack! 85 years ago, the dream of two Cleveland teenagers hit the newsstands for the very first time, kickstarting the entire comic book industry. Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster’s Superman first appeared in Action Comics #1, cover-dated June 1938. Over the next two weeks, we’ll examine some of my favorite 1960s Super-stories. This is Part 3 of our “Super-Month” posts!

Superman #156, October 1962. Cover by Curt Swan. Art in this post TM and © DC.

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Just seven short issues after Superman “died” (click here for details in our last post), he almost bit the big one yet again. Superman #156, written by Edmond Hamilton and drawn by Curt Swan and George Klein, chronicled the tale of “The Last Days of Superman.” In this story, Superman comes down with a bad case of “Virus X,” a Kryptonian disease for which there is no known cure. A scientist on the doomed planet sealed a sample of it within a chest and launched it into outer space and an American manned space capsule comes close to colliding with it while in orbit. Superman saves the capsule by knocking the green, glowing, Kryptonite-poisoned chest to Earth, where he and intrepid cub reporter (and frequent pain in the butt) Jimmy Olsen encounter it. Good ol’ Jimmy—always helpful—opens the chest in front of Superman, thus poisoning him with the deadly virus from Krypton. (Cue “I Get by with a Little Help from My Friends …”)

Superman is immediately incapacitated, summoning his team of Superman robots to build a lead-lined glass booth to quarantine himself from Supergirl, so she, too, doesn’t catch the deadly virus, since it only affects Kryptonians. Stalwart pal Jimmy Olsen stands by his Superman through all of this, offering what small amount of comfort only a BFF like he can provide. Superman comes up with a bucket-list of things he wanted to accomplish, and charges Supergirl with getting these Super-chores done before he expires. Small things like building canals on Earth to irrigate the deserts, destroying a rogue planet that would eventually menace Earth, sending a Saturn-like ring of metal into space to electrically charge a giant fungus cloud that also threatens our world … you know, just your general superhero to-do list, all in a Super-day’s work.

Superman continues to weaken and Brainiac 5 (the “good” Brainiac from the future, a stalwart member of the Legion of Super-Heroes) works diligently to find a cure for Virus X, but ultimately fails. Meanwhile, ol’ Supes, in a moment of remission, visits Smallville and muses about the loves of his life, Lois, Lana, and Lyla Lerrol (it’s okay to say “WHO?!” here; she’s a one-time love interest from a trip back in time to visit Krypton, pre-catastrophe and a definite footnote in the Man of Steel saga), plus pay a heartfelt visit to Batman and Robin. He takes the time to carve a message into an abandoned planet in a moment of Super-graffiti, which reads: “Do good to others and every man can be a Superman.” (Sorry, ladies … you’re on your own.) Superman returns to his desert isolation box only to collapse once again as he nears Jimmy and Lois. The end is near …

Meanwhile, Supergirl travels back in time (it’s a neat trick if you can do it) and journeys to Krypton, where she learns that the scientist who launched that sample of Virus X into space had actually found a cure. Virus X can be killed by using Element 202, but that element is also fatal to any human being. BUT … and this is a big but … she learns that the scientist DID kill his sample of Virus X before exiling it to space. So what’s killing Superman? WHAT’S IN THE BOX?!!

Enter Mon-El, Superman’s “big brother,” introduced in a Superboy story and placed into the Phantom Zone when he is found to be suffering from lead poisoning from his time here on Earth. (He’s really from another planet, not Krypton, and lead is his Kryptonite, but that’s a whole other story.) Evidently the Phantom Zone is also the “Voyeur Zone” … seems Mon-El has been watching the entire time and saw that when Superman destroyed the Kryptonite-laden Virus X chest, a small chunk of the glowing green rock ricocheted into Jimmy Olsen’s ever-present camera, and thus Superman is weakened every time he’s near his ol’ pal, Jimmy! The lead-lined glass booth kept it from affecting Supergirl and once the offending piece is excised, Superman lives again! Lois and Lana are so happy that Superman is cured that they claim they don’t care who Superman’s secret identity is (that’ll change soon enough, I’m sure). The Man of Steel realizes when he carved his little message to Earth on that abandoned planet, he signed it “Superman (Clark Kent),” so he, Supergirl and their canine pal, Krypto, the Super-Dog, use their heat-vision to “erase” the Clark Kent reference. The End.

The writer of this tale, Edmond Hamilton, looms large in DC Comics across three decades. Another comic book writer who came from the sci-fi pulps (he was wrote most of the Captain Future stories, a character co-created by pulp magazine and DC Comics editor Mort Weisinger), Hamilton wrote numerous stories for the Batman titles before moving over to the Superman family. He did the first Superman-Batman team-ups, introduced many new concepts and characters into the Legion of Super-Heroes series in Adventure Comics, and a number of Superman, Jimmy Olsen, and Lois Lane stories, including this one, “The Last Days of Superman,” generally regarded as a high point of 1960s Superman stories (and not just by me).

Superman writers Edmond Hamilton (left, with some of his pulp magazines) and Leo Dorfman.

I have the feeling editor Mort Weisinger (you know … the irascible one), was a bit of a hypochondriac, because six short years later, Virus X was once again threatening Superman’s health, but this time making him “The Leper from Krypton!” (Cue overly dramatic music, maestro!), in a five-part series in Action Comics #362 through #366, Superman becomes ill once more, but this time his skin becomes all green and lumpy. This run of issues features some early Neal Adams covers (#s 362, 363, 364, and 366 … #365 is by Ross Andru and Mike Esposito, who draw the interior stories). And while #362 concerns a ventriloquist who brainwashes Clark Kent into wanting to kill Superman, #363 sets the story straight with the revelation that it’s all a Lex Luthor plot to kill Superman with Virus X, using the brainwashed Clark to infect Superman (little do they know Clark IS Superman!). The Man of Steel’s condition quickly deteriorates in #364, to the point where the infected Superman launches himself into space via a rocket ship hearse. Action Comics #365’s cover proclaims that issue’s story to be “The Saddest Story Ever Told … Superman’s Funeral!” Superman’s life story is retold as he slowly dies (and becomes increasingly more green and lumpy) from the leprosy-like effects of Virus X. Supergirl brings Lois Lane, Lana Lang, and Lori Lemaris into space (inside the requisite snowglobe-like plastic bubble) to watch Superman’s ultimate destruction as his spaceship hurtles him into “Flammbron, mightiest solar furnace in the universe … [where] in another second, [he’ll] be a pinch of cosmic dust!”

But all is not lost, dear reader! In Action Comics #366, Supergirl begins a search for “The Substitute Superman,” but there’s no need … the Living Flame residents of Flammbron, the Flammbronians, save Superman, who realizes that the White Kryptonite thrown at Superman’s rocket ship hearse by prankish Bizarros, have killed the deadly Virus X, because—as everyone knows—White Kryptonite kills all plant life, and Virus X is a fungus! OF COURSE! The Flammbronians fly Superman to safety (in a rare moment of 1960s DC Superman continuity, it seems as Superboy he saved a fellow Flammbronian; a Stan Lee-like footnote is even provided with the issue number). Superman makes his triumphant return to Earth only to find Supergirl’s search for a new Superman has succeeded. Turns out she’s using members of the Justice League to masquerade as ol’ Supes in shifts, each geared to their own particular power-set, and the world thinks the masquerading Supermen are the real thing, his flight through the intense flames of Flammbron having killed his leprosy! (Editor’s Note—as they used to say in the comic books—Kandor turned out to be useless in providing a substitute super-powered Superman, because they had to vote on who it would be, even though two obvious choices—Van-Zee and Don-El—were dead ringers for Superman. So goes democracy.)

This rare five-part story in Action Comics (amounting to a 62-page mini-epic) was written by Leo Dorfman, a DC workhorse who wrote numerous Superman family tales and created the supernatural anthology title Ghosts for the company. The art for all five issues was by the above-mentioned Ross Andru and Mike Esposito, who seemed to be kind of the wunderkinds of DC at the time. Once relegated to the pages of Robert Kanigher’s corner of the company, including Wonder Woman, the Gunner & Sarge stories of Our Fighting Forces and the soldiers vs. dinosaurs stories of “The War That Time Forgot” in Star Spangled War Stories, the duo co-created (with Kanigher) Metal Men, and suddenly Andru & Esposito became the artists everyone wanted on their books after the success of that title, which was reportedly one of DC’s best sellers in the early 1960s. They did a few issues of Action, plus took over the art chores on The Flash after Carmine Infantino got kicked upstairs into various management positions (including editorial director and eventually publisher).

I never really appreciated Ross Andru in this era. I found his figures incredibly clunky- and chunky-looking, and it wasn’t until he moved over to Marvel and took over the Amazing Spider-Man title from John Romita—and ultimately became the artist on the mega-hit Superman vs. the Amazing Spider-Man—that I could see the elegance in his figures and his storytelling prowess. I now think he’s a bit of an unsung hero of high-end superhero comics (you can’t get much higher at the Big Two than Superman and Spider-Man), but these issues are a little hard to take, what with Superman being all green and lumpy. I think that might have been an editorial edict from Mr. Weisinger: “Make ‘em ugly, Andru! UGLIER!!!”, but who knows.

As a kid reading Superman #156 for the first time, I was thrilled with the trick ending, which I regarded as “brilliant.” (Hey, I was seven … cut me a break.) Jimmy and his Kryptonite camera was the cause of Superman’s misery all that time, not Virus X, but of course, leave it to Luthor to come up with a real, live version of the Kryptonian disease that almost kills Superman in the later Action Comics story arc. And that’s the pleasure of both these 1960s Super-tales: He almost dies in both of them, something that rarely happens in the comics of that era.

Next time: What’s better than Superman? TWO Supermen! It’s “The Amazing Story of Superman-Red and Superman-Blue!” from Superman #162, in our concluding chapter of Superman Month!