Warworld Saga – Then and Now

Superman has been here before. Phillip Kennedy Johnson’s emotion, darkly lavish Warworld Saga has Superman facing a time in his life that he’s never seen before, but the setting is familiar. As the saga reaches its midgame, it’s an interesting time to look back at a previous epic-length story that covered a bit of this ground before, how they compare, and how they differ.

In 1989, the creative minds behind Superman took a big gamble, moving the hero off-planet for an unprecedented span of time. That storyline, aptly referred to by an early issue’s title, “Superman in Space,” had Superman serve a self-exile from Earth for a whopping 13 issues, plus a bit of the issues before and after. Crossing three titles, it was a full six months in which Superman was not seen on our planet in his solo books, years before the death storyline, before any comparable story had removed a signature DC character from their main setting for so long.

The relevance of that story to Johnson’s current one is in the time they both spend on Mongul’s Warworld. While “Superman in Space” was a much longer storyline than this one, it devoted considerable prelude to many preliminary events and adventures before getting to Warworld, a place first introduced in a 1980 multi-issue arc in DC Comics Presents. It also gave large parts of its issues – including one entire issue with no appearances of Superman at all – to the supporting players back in Metropolis, developing those characters in a way that set up the subsequent Triangle Era’s storytelling that made Superman just the lead character in an ensemble cast.

In the early issues of Superman’s exile, he teleported from one venue to another, visiting no fewer than six different planets, spending some time in three different spaceships, and otherwise menaced while in deep space by alien amoebae, an asteroid bombardment, and one star that he got too close to. Some of these were full-fledged adventures, others more momentary experiences to get the man reflecting on his past sins and his traumas. In the big picture, what that storyline did was take the post-reboot farmboy Superman and give him just a pinch of the space-faring worldliness (universeliness?) of his Bronze Age self. It was a success for developing the character, though certainly a failure of his plan to remove himself from any situations where he needed to handle his powers responsibly.

Almost half of the story, however, involved Warworld. Quite unlike the premise of Johnson’s story, 1989’s Superman was taken there alone and against his will, picked up while unconscious by the pilots of a scavenging spaceship and auctioned off as cargo.

At that point, however, the stories to a considerable extent converge in theme. Superman awakes to find his fellow captives looking to pilfer items of value from his person. His powerful physique leads his captors to choose him as a contestant to fight in Warworld’s combat arena. And he finds, among Warworld’s captives, a surprising and important link to Krypton’s past. Though a mere captive, he becomes a symbol of resistance and hope that upends the social order of Warworld from the bottom up. These are all shared between the 1989 story and Warworld Saga. For that matter, those themes are mostly shared by the 1960 historical fiction film Spartacus. And if you want to trace these things further back, there’s the 1950 film Ben-Hur and the actual slave revolt in Ancient Rome. Perhaps equally stirring, the screenwriter of Spartacus was the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo, and the public success of that film helped to end blacklisting, a triumphant irony of which Trumbo was surely aware.

Warzoons Scavenge Superman, 1989 and 2021

And so, some of the moments and images of the 1989 story are being repeated now. This is neither borrowing nor homage but sequence. Warworld was characterized a certain way in the past, and so was Superman, and so the stories have to cover some common ground. Not every reader of Warworld Saga has read the 1989 Superman titles, nor will many who have remember them 32 years later with crystal clarity. But revisiting the older story is worth it, to see how they align but more importantly how they don’t.

The 1989 Superman was a man who exiled himself because his psychological vulnerabilities made him recognize that he was a danger to the people of Earth. His values, sense of self, and identify were still being shaped. He was near the beginning of a career in which a Kansas farmboy was way out of his element. It was only in issue #22 of Superman, vol 2 – John Byrne’s last issue – in which his execution of the Pocket Universe Phantom Zoners began Superman’s cycle of uncertainty and regret that led to his self-exile in the hands of other creators. Along the way, he suffered a rather disturbing psychological breakdown, operating under a different identity, unbeknownst to himself, during a fugue state. Imagine how you’d view a local police officer who did that – probably not someone whom you’d wish to see remain on the job. In 2021’s context, for his earlier mistakes, he would already have been cancelled. (In fairness, Superman was beset by extraordinary hardship, psychic invasion, and actual voodoo before breaking down in the way that he did.) 1989’s Superman was unsure of himself, what sort of code of conduct he should follow, whether or not he had the needed self control, and moreover was ignorant even of the facts of his Kryptonian upbringing, with those prerecorded messages from Jor-El only going so far. This was a Superman far from the super-capable demigod of the immediately preceding pre-Crisis era. The Superman in Space story of 1989 sought to take that flawed hero and rebuild him, taking him a few steps back towards the demigod Superman of 1985. This was a story of redemption and growth through trial, missteps, and improvement.

In these respects, the 2021 Superman comes to Warworld on completely different terms. He is in some ways even more self-possessed than the 1985 Superman ever was. He knows exactly who he is, and he came to Warworld not by accident but on a mission. He came not alone but with a team. He came not turned inwards on his self but on the needs of others. He may have miscalculated – badly – on the matter of tactics, but he hasn’t wavered for a millisecond on the intentions of his mission. That’s not where the 1989 Superman began. It was where, at the story’s end, he arrived.

To sum up succinctly the 1989’s story on Warworld, Superman was thrown into the arena to fight as a gladiator. He won all his matches, but refused to kill his vanquished opponents. (This marked an evolution from his execution of the Phantom Zoners and a rebuilding of his pre-Crisis vow never to kill.) Finally, he beat Warworld’s previous champion, Draaga (Rocky IV’s Ivan Drago, clearly the name’s inspiration, was then only a few years in the past). When he refused to kill Draaga, Superman drew the wrath of Mongul, who entered the ring to kill Superman, which was a massive political error. By violating the strict rules of the arena, Mongul initiated a campaign of unrest against himself. He also had mixed results in fighting Superman, as their three skirmishes in and out of the ring gave them each a close win over the other, then a result ambiguous to the characters but not to the readers when Mongul attempted to kill Superman with a ray blast from his amulet, but Superman was teleported away at the last instant, thus seeming to have died as far as Mongul knew. The two never met within the story again. Draaga himself fought Mongul and ultimately everyone fled the stage of the story – Mongul, overthrown, left to heal his wounds. Warworld itself teleported to some other part of the universe before Superman could return to enforce a revolution.

And in the story’s significant subplot, Superman learns a great deal of Krypton’s history from a Cleric who was on the planet long before the time of Jor-El. The Cleric was himself not a native of Krypton (enforcing the concept in 1989 that Superman was the last surviving Kryptonian). However, there was substantial backstory about Krypton’s evolution and how it went through dirtier and more sordid eras in its past before becoming the sterile world of Byrne’s – and Donner’s – visions. This also introduced the Eradicator artifact, a sort of power ring with a surly mind of its own, which has become an enduring feature in Superman’s storylines. It is intriguing that Warworld Saga also includes Kryptonians who come from a time before Jor-El, suggesting a role that they may play in changing Superman’s concept of his own origins, like the Cleric did in 1989.

It’s a pleasure and informative to re-read first the 1980 DC Comics Presents story that introduced Mongul and Warworld, and then the 1989 story before picking up Warworld Saga. Seen one way, it is one long ongoing story, representing three of the most essential of many Superman–Mongul stories. In Superman’s current stay on Warworld as in 1989, he is commanded to kill for Mongul’s pleasure, and as in 1989, he refuses. This commonality across the decades is true despite the fact that the continuity has rebooted, with the pre-Crisis Supergirl an essential part of the first story, and the Byrne characterization of Superman being an essential element of the second. There are little winks in Johnson’s writing to the past, such as Mongul declaring that he will go conquering “flying his cape from our spear,” just a little less brutal than the previous Mongul dreaming, in Alan Moore’s “For the Man Who Has Everything,” that he will place Superman’s head “upon a spike and goes out to trample a world, carrying it before him, his hideous standard.” 

But, beyond the shifts in continuity – the tweaks in the biographical details and history of the DC Universe – one sees an incredible increase in sophistication from 1980 to 1989 and from 1989 to 2021. Johnson’s first remarkable innovation in this story was when the Phaelosians conveyed that they saw their chains as an honor – a culture of slavery that runs so deep, is so bleakly enforced, that its own victims embrace their subjugation, calling it “wearing iron.” To the same effect, the refrain, “So say the dead” shows Warworld’s inhabitants perversely celebrating the premature and brutal death that awaits many of them. Johnson writes dialogue to the character’s mental world, with Chaytil referring to Superman as “The master of Starro! The master of Darkseid!” and in so doing says much about how existing DC characters are part of the culture of one another, and makes some interesting choices in doing so (e.g., Darkseid but not Brainiac). Likewise, Johnson’s characterization of Manchester Black, of Mac, of Midnight – these sparkle.

I have often reflected on how so many great works from DC emerged in the years after 1985, and set a high bar of creativity and quality that has not often been matched or exceeded. However, looking at this one story – this one place and setting, comparable situations – across 41 years, it’s clear that the monthlies now are capable of greater things than one of the better innovative stories from those very years just after DKR and Watchmen. Even if we suspect that we know where the plot may be going – that Superman will end Mongul’s rule – everything we’ve read so far suggests that the way Johnson gets his story gets to its end will be a pleasure to read.

Batman and The Case of the Stolen Story

 The Shadow of the Bat

Before Batman, before Superman, before comic books at all, there was The Shadow. And there were many pulp series, comprising text without illustration, publishing stories quite similar to those also heard on the radio. Some years back, the revelation broke that the very first Batman story, from Detective #27, borrowed – heavily, it turns out – from an earlier story featuring The Shadow. This was revealed by brief comments from the Batman story’s writer, Bill Finger, and then explored more deeply by Will Murray and Anthony Tollin in a special issue, The Shadow #9, back in 2008.

It’s worth beginning by making a careful distinction: Certainly many prior stories and ongoing serials helped inspire Batman as a character, as a concept. In the aforementioned issue of The Shadow, Murray and Tollin, in two separate essays, break this history down in impressive fashion, naming some obscure pulp stories that were available to Bill Finger and Bob Kane when Batman was being formulated as an idea. Murray and Tollin identify about six possible connections between certain 1930s pulp crime dramas and Batman; early Batman writer Jerry Robinson, penning a piece in the same volume, added more based on his in-person experience with the first years of Batman stories, and his knowledge of what he, Kane, and Finger had been reading.

It’s two different matters, though, to say that a character was inspired (or borrowed or stolen) versus to say that a story was inspired (or borrowed or stolen). In terms of defining the character either as we know him now, or even as readers knew him in the early 1940s, that first story isn’t particularly significant; it’s simply one story of many, and it easily could be shuffled into some other location in the first year’s worth of Batman stories, or omitted entirely, and the character doesn’t come across any differently. Without that first six-page story in 1939, Batman would still be Batman. So, we are not discussing here whether that story by itself robbed the entire idea of Batman from the creators behind The Shadow. The point under discussion here is if that particular story was lifted from an earlier story, and there is no need for the “if” – it certainly was.

Anyone who reads both of the stories will see the similarity; Murray and Tollin spend, combined, little more than a paragraph discussing the point. My ambition here is to flesh out the details and itemize exactly what was borrowed and what wasn’t. In doing so, we will find out, first, why the first Batman story creates such a strange and relatively insubstantial impression and, second, that perhaps the greatest thing borrowed from that Shadow story was not a few pages of Batman plot but some compelling details crucial in defining the Joker, who did not appear until nearly a year later.

A Tale of Two Tales

To lay out the basic facts, the 1939 Batman story “The Case of the Chemical Syndicate” (CCS, for short) obviously borrows from Theodore Tinsley’s 1936 The Shadow story “Partners of Peril” (POP); nobody could read both and fail to see the strong similarity. As Murray and Tollin note, POP even likens The Shadow – twice – to a bat. However, CCS is not simply a retelling of the entirely of POP, because that is not possible: POP is much longer than CCS, at about 60 pages of text as opposed to 6 of comic panels. POP has far more plot and detail than could conceivably be packed into the shorter format; POP has many more characters, many more scenes, and much more intricacy than CCS. And so, it’s not the case that CCS does or could contain all of the plot of POP; rather, essentially all of CCS is selected from the details of POP. Moreover, the selection of which details are borrowed and which are not was not very carefully made, and the comprehensibility CCS suffers considerably as a result.

That said, we may construct a breakdown of how closely CCS is borrowed from POP. CCS has a total of eight named characters, while five others (presuming that several brief appearances of a policeman represent the same policeman) have an extremely minimal quantity of dialogue. The eight with substantial presence are the following:

• Four businessmen

• Batman, appearing both in costume and as Bruce Wayne

• Commissioner Gordon

• The son of one businessman

• The assistant of one other businessman

This cast corresponds fairly well to the most prominent characters in POP, with some modifications: The “son” character in CCS belongs to the first businessman in the story, whereas the “son” in POP belongs to the third businessman we see. And, Gordon in CCS is a sort of amalgam of POP’s Commissioner Weston and a separate character, an ace detective of the police department named Joe Cardona. Some of the many additional characters in POP include a niece of one businessman, many faithful assistants to The Shadow, and an entire gang of armed thugs who participate in several action scenes that as part of a massive red herring of a side plot corresponding to nothing whatsoever found in CCS.

The plot of CCS boils down to this: Four businessmen are partners in the ownership of a chemical company. One of them decides that he can profit by killing the other three, eventually owning the entire company without needing to pay for the other three-quarter shares. In his effort to kill them one by one, he succeeds in killing the first two before Batman intercedes. In the end, Batman spares the life of the third partner, subdues the evil businessman’s assistant and a final struggle claims the life of the villain, who falls into a tank of acid. As far as that goes, it’s a simple plot, and a sensible one, as far as people who are willing to kill for large sums of money go. Nearly everything in this paragraph describes, equally well, POP, except that in POP, the assistant is killed, the evil businessman is arrested, and the hero is The Shadow rather than Batman. Moreover, the “son” in CCS is the son of the first businessman and is briefly put forth as a suspect for his father’s murder; the son in POP is the son of the third businessman and appears throughout the story, sometimes as a possible culprit and nearly becomes, more than once, a victim of the killers.

Batman explains the plot of Tinsley's story

Now, with the greater length of POP, we can imagine adding in the other elements of the plot, primarily the involvement of a gang who is trying to steal one of the products of the chemical company. While the story unfolds, the reader is uncertain if the murders were committed by the gang, who are in fact willing to kill if that helps them achieve their ends, but as it happens, they did not commit the two murders. The uncertainty the reader has throughout the story regarding the role of the gang, the involvement of one businessman’s niece, and many action sequences in which The Shadow and his helpers cross paths with the fourth businessman’s thugs and/or the gang is what makes POP a story that engages the reader for over an hour while CCS is a trifle that flits by in a few minutes.

This is the relationship between the two: A long story published in 1936 has a central plot and some side plots; a shorter story published in 1939 keeps the central plot, changing it only slightly, while eliminating the side plots. Case closed?

Left in the Shadow…

Around 2008, I read many comic book stories that had been published between 1935 and 1942. The first stories featuring Superman, Batman, and various members of the Justice Society were of great interest to me, and as “The Case of the Chemical Syndicate” is such a quick read, and has such a central place in comics history, I read it many times. These readings left me with a minor but general sense of befuddlement that I might never have expressed if it weren’t for the fact that Grant Morrison put the same idea into writing. In their book Supergods, Morrison says of CCS that it has “a bizarrely complex plot…” “It’s not a great story, and no matter how often I read it, I’m still left slightly in the dark as to what it was about.”

Several Golden Age stories give me a similar impression, that the logic doesn’t quite hold up, and I suppose that when it comes down to brass tacks, the writers were poorly paid, probably hustling through a chore to get their rent money, and had a juvenile readership to entertain. With the artwork providing more of the entertainment than in all-text adventure stories, the comic book plots didn’t need to stand up to the scrutiny of academics with advanced degrees, so we can explain the confusion, perhaps, on writers who were simply careless and had no great incentive to be otherwise.

There are indeed gaping plot holes in CCS, as there are in other Golden Age comic book stories. That said, the extent of the plot holes and illogic in “The Case of the Chemical Syndicate” exceed even that which was normal at the time. To list just a few:

• The killer warns each victim, before the attempt on his life, with threats. There is no apparent reason to do this. The killer simply needs for the three men to be dead, and that could only be easier if there were no advance warning. Without such threats, the plan probably would have succeeded.

• Ordinarily, a series of murders that result in one person profiting would make the killer’s identity obvious, so the story asserts that the partnership was in fact secret, but offers no reason why it would have been secret.

• When Batman bursts into the lab where the third businessman is nearly killed, he enters a glass dome where the man is trapped, then plugs a vent through which gas escapes, then breaks the glass to free them. This is a strangely complicated death trap and it’s even stranger that Batman, who enters the room at the last moment, would understand the mechanism and how to defeat it.

• When the villain’s assistant subdues the third businessman, the assistant announces, “Soon, I’ll control everything!” It is unexplained why an assistant would believe that he would control everything, and this is at odds with the subsequent exposition indicating that the fourth businessman, the assistant’s boss, is the one who would control everything.

When one reads POP, one finds explanations for most of these plot holes.

Gas as a weapon doesn't even make sense here

• The contracts, in POP, stipulate that the fourth partner is buying the company from the other three over a period of ten years, but must pay the same total sum even if one or two of the three die during that time. Therefore, when there is a threat to any of the three, it makes the others who are being bought out the likely suspects. The fourth ends up expecting to profit only because all of the other three are to be killed. [Why anyone would agree to such a contract, that robs one’s heirs of the payments, is never explained in POP, and is seemingly present only to drive the plot forward.] Therefore, the death threats towards the first two businessmen direct suspicion, at least temporarily, to the third victim rather than to the actual killer. In POP, then, the death threats serve a purpose. In CCS, they are counterproductive.

• In POP, The Shadow is present, but hidden, during a very lengthy scene in which the assistant explains how the death trap works. This scene, and the poison gas in general, drive an aforementioned side plot involving poison gas being developed as a weapon for the military and a gang that wishes to steal its formula. Therefore, in POP, there is a reason for this complex apparatus to exist, and the Shadow knows how to deactivate it. Batman, barging in suddenly from outdoors, should not have that information. A fragmented description of the death trap is just a weird digression from the plot and the whole story would make more sense if the assistant or the fourth businessman simply tried to kill the third businessman by more conventional means.

• In POP, the assistant is for many pages offered as the most likely identity of the killer, and the reader is given reason to believe that the fourth businessman – the assistant’s boss – is to be yet another victim after the first three are killed. It’s a plot twist that comes after the assistant is dead when The Shadow reveals that the fourth businessman sought to frame his assistant as the killer of the other three. Therefore, the assistant has an important role in the narrative of POP, but in CCS is just a bizarre distraction.

Bill Finger not only took his plot from POP, but also took details indiscriminately from the longer story, which had lengthy exposition explaining some of its stranger aspects, such that Finger’s story, which includes certain details but no explanations, ends up almost nonsensical. In a better and tighter story, Finger could have kept the details of the contracts that offered a reason for the killer to issue threats to the businessmen. Further, he could have simplified the death threat to the third man from poison gas to something more conventional, and eliminated the assistant, who plays no useful purpose in the story that the villainous businessman himself couldn’t have performed. The haphazard inclusion of certain details from POP is precisely what makes the story, as Morrison notes, bizarrely complex, and hard to absorb. It certainly would be a better and tighter story with a few simplifications. We can say now with confidence that the eventual success of Batman was not hindered by the weakness of his first story, but this helps explain why that first story did not go on to become a staple for later writers to reference in loving homage.

Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One Before

While the above lays out the relationship between POP and CCS, it was another observation, coming as early as POP’s first page, which struck me earlier, and has perhaps never been noted before. Perhaps the most vivid match between POP and a Batman story is not with May 1939’s Detective #27, but with 1940’s Batman #1, and this detail does not reside only in a Golden Age comic book, but was also adapted, as a significant piece of Batman lore, into a memorable scene in 2008’s The Dark Knight. In fact, the character whose schtick is most directly borrowed from POP is not Batman but the Joker.  While Anthony Tollin states, “there is no concrete evidence to suggest that Tinsley’s stories influenced the development of DC Comics’ Joker,” there is overwhelming evidence that the same story already discussed here influenced the first Joker story, if not the character’s overall concept. Less than a year after Finger borrowed extensively from Tinsley’s POP for the plot and many story elements for the first Batman story, he went on to borrow many plot elements for the first Joker story – more than could conceivably be a coincidence.

While Jerry Robinson was the creator of the Joker, and his comments printed in The Shadow #9 go into some detail about previous pulp stories that may have provided inspiration for Robinson, his own reflections indicate that he did not write the first Joker story. Instead, he conceived of the character, and then, to his disappointment, Bill Finger was given scripting duties for the first Joker story, which opened the series of stories that appeared in Batman #1. And we already know that Finger read POP and felt free to borrow from it without limitation.

Batman #1 contains both the first and second Joker stories, which also happen to be the second and fourth stories with Dick Grayson. (Hugo Strange and Catwoman serve as the villains in two stories that appear between the two Joker stories.) The first of those untitled Joker stories has the following plot: On three separate occasions, the Joker breaks into a public radio broadcast to issue a threat against a prominent man. In each case, the Joker names an exact time later the same evening at which the man will be killed. In the first two instances, the victim is a wealthy man and the threat also specifies a robbery that will take place; in the third case, the threat is leveled at a judge who had previously sent the Joker to prison. All three of these attacks proceed exactly as the Joker predicts, but he is followed by Batman and Robin after killing the judge. After tussles between the heroes and the villain prove inconclusive, the Joker heads off the same night to commit another robbery (apparently, he made this threat to Robin off-camera). During this fourth attempted crime, he is stopped and apprehended by Batman.

In its overarching structure, this story is only a little like POP: There are four prominent men, threats, and killings, but the main plot is different. Unlike in POP, there is no mystery regarding the identity of the culprit, and no major mystery regarding motive, as the robberies serve as their own motivation, and the Joker has a grievance against the judge. (There is no apparent motive for the Joker to kill the first two men aside from his twisted desire to kill.)

However, the first crime in the first Joker story is quite specifically similar to the first murder in POP. All of the following similarities apply:

1) The crime is threatened in advance.

2) The time named in the threat is midnight.

3) The victim is a wealthy man.

4) The victim goes to the police for protection.

5) The police go to the man’s home and provide what seems like overwhelming protection.

6) Nonetheless, the crime is committed at the threatened time.

7) The cause of death is poisoning, but there is no apparent source of poison.

8) In both cases, the poison was introduced to the home long in advance.

9) The poison causes the dead man’s face to contort horribly.

10) After the man is dead, the police open a safe in the room and find that something was stolen.

To be thorough, there are some differences between the two scenes.

1) POP is a whodunit; the Joker identifies himself (though with that alias) before the crime.

2) In POP, the weapon is a poisoned cigar which the killer is confident will be smoked just before midnight; the Joker poisoned the man directly (somehow) long before the threat and the poison (implausibly) acts only very suddenly after a delay with pinpoint precision.

3) In POP, the death is threatened by midnight and occurs two minutes beforehand.

4) The man’s disfigurement in POP is withered and grotesque; the Joker’s poison creates – here, for the absolute first time – a ghastly smile.

5) The motive for the killing is unclear in POP, which is essential to the criminal’s hope of evading suspicion. The Joker robs the man’s safe, and that also had been performed before the threat was made.

To put the whole matter in contrast, take a look at the first Sandman story from Adventure Comics #40, scripted by Gardner Fox in 1939. In this story, the Tarantula threatens to kidnap a wealthy actress, and her home receives heavy police protection, and yet the kidnapping takes place anyway, baffling the investigators. (Besides Wesley Dodds, who comes up with the correct explanation in a few seconds.) This story may also have been advised by knowledge of POP, as it matches similarities 1, 4, 5, and 6 from the above list. Then again, maybe some of those plot elements were tropes that had been floated about in the noir world of the time. It would take a lot more research to work that out. However, ten similarities are a lot more than four, and in my mind there’s no doubt that Finger lifted from Tinsley’s story again, when we already know that the author of the later story had previously done exactly that on another occasion.

In the initial Joker story, the similarities wane, though don’t end, after the first crime. One more detail perhaps also taken from POP, in that the weapons used in the Joker’s second crime included “a strange gas,” which is how the villains attempt the third murder in POP (after the second involves electrocution).

What binds the first Joker story and POP is not the overall structure so much as the motif presented during that first crime – a threat is made in advance, giving the villain an air of invincibility when the police are unable to prevent it despite the advance warning. Continuing throughout Finger’s first Joker story and into the second, this motif is repeated again and again, with the threat occurring in all nine of the Joker attacks in those two stories, and poisons leading to the distorted face occurring in all but the two of them that Batman prevents. These two motifs become almost definitional of the Joker not only in 1940 but to the present day, from the most obscure monthly comics of decades past to the global prominence of The Dark Knight movie and its billion-dollar earnings.

So, I would suggest that the most significant legacy of Bill Finger’s casual approach to lifting details from Theodore Tinsley’s "Partners of Peril" was in the creation of the Joker’s modus operandi, which established comics and movies created over the years right up to the present, and sure to continue onward, and not the previously-revealed theft of the threadbare plot of the six pages of CCS. A bit over a decade ago, comics historians and creators lobbied for Bill Finger to receive credit as at least a co-creator of Batman; however much this may be true for the concept of Batman, some stories themselves and the concept of the Joker owe more than a little to the ideas of Theodore Tinsley. And this closes the case of the stolen story.

Jon Kent: Man of Tomorrow?

They married 58 years after they first met. Superman and Lois Lane certainly had a long courtship, so it’s not surprising that they took another 19 years before having their first child.

For decades and decades, the status quo of Superman and Lois Lane turned so slowly you might have thought it was going backwards, and in fact, sometimes it did go backwards. They had fake weddings, imaginary story weddings, weddings on alternate Earths. In one line of stories, Superman had a son whom we saw and a wife who seemed to be Lois but whose back was always to the camera. They had a son on the last page of a famous imaginary story, an adopted son who was written out of history, had Jon Kent in a reality that was written out of history, and there were so many stories whose reality was considered to be imaginary or not, or hinted to be imaginary or not that even a DC editor couldn’t possibly keep track of which stories were asserted when to be real.

For over half a century, writers made Superman into the ultimate bachelor wary of commitment, and even now that he’s definitely married with a son, if you wanted to collect the issues where revealing his identity to Lois, the engagement, marriage, and birth occurred, you’d end up with a curiously thick stack where those events happened, then were altered or revised. However, if you want a quick summary of the lifetime that never actually unfolded in a single version of continuity, there’s an 11-panel spread in Action Comics #976 that gives you the latest story of how Clark and Lois met, married, and had a child. Then the way that their son grew up in space, on an alternate Earth, and in the future is another story or two.

Then, suddenly, in four years, Jon Kent was born, grew up, and became Superman, sort of replacing Chris Kent, sort of replacing Connor Kent, sort of replacing both teenage and then adult Clark Kent.

I establish all of this curious timeline to set the context for today’s big news regarding Jon Kent’s one-panel kiss, which has been and will be variously portrayed as either the biggest cultural change in comics or no big deal at all, and for those seeing a cultural earthquake in it, will be variously portrayed as a very good thing or a very bad thing.

And given the shifting pace of change over Superman’s 83 years, I see it as a very precarious thing. What happens now has an undeniable tendency to unhappen or rehappen. Just as DC was for decades extremely reluctant to allow Clark to commit to Lois, DC is now extremely reluctant to allow anything to happen without a high chance of unhappening. And they have, I believe, creatively painted themselves into a corner. One way or another they have to change their ways, and I’m not sure that decision makers inside the company see that yet.

When the news about Jon Kent’s orientation broke last month, I thought of Sam Zhao as a cautionary tale. Do you remember the name Sam Zhao? Does anyone?

In 2012, the New 52 version of Earth 2 introduced an old-yet-new version of Alan Scott, young and in his prime like the original was back in 1940. Very soon, we learned that Alan Scott was a gay man with a partner and fiancé named Sam Zhao, who promptly died (one issue after his introduction!), then was resurrected as a sort of elemental spirit. Sam Zhao’s last appearance was in 2015, Sam having lost, in rapid fashion, his life, his planet (literally destroyed), and then their entire plane of reality. The 2012 Alan Scott was erased. The previous Alan Scott (it becomes tedious even to enumerate all the previous Alan Scotts, who were variously discontinued, killed, resurrected, renamed, banished to Valhalla, and so on) then became a sort of symbol for the destructive retcons of the DC Multiverse, with Dr. Manhattan’s erasure of Alan Scott’s life as Green Lantern becoming retroactively the single symbolic act of creating the pre-Doomsday Clock timeline. Dr. Manhattan brought that timeline back. But then even Doomsday Clock didn’t happen, and even the timeline after Doomsday Clock has now unhappened, and that was only 2019! Then for good measure, the current version of Alan Scott (who closely resembles the post-Infinite Crisis Alan Scott) earlier this year came out as gay like it was new (because in a sense it was). Sam Zhao and his version of Alan Scott are buried deep behind multiple numbers of destroyed past realities, like a sheet on a bulletin board papered over by newer announcements many times. And so I say, beware to Jon Kent, or to Jon Kent’s creators.

Sam Zhao was [that specific] Alan Scott’s Lois Lane, but Lois Lane remained Superman’s love interest for decades and Sam Zhao appeared alive on only three pages of one issue. And in various ways, Sam Zhao is a Lois Lane for our times, while Jon Kent is a [2012] Alan Scott for our times. DC’s creators want to do something momentous and meaningful with Jon Kent as they did with Alan Scott, but the persistence in sticking out creative decisions is a proclivity or capacity that DC has perhaps lost.

Let’s look at the timelines again. DC took 77 years from the introduction of Superman to the introduction of Jon Kent as his then-infant son, but only 6 years from the introduction of Jon Kent to his succession as the Earth’s primary Superman (and, making more headlines, as a bisexual young man). That’s a remarkable acceleration, and in the new, accelerated DC, a “Lois Lane” might only survive three pages. Sam Zhao’s entire planet was destroyed within two years, and his timeline gone soon after that. To turn this pragmatic, let us identify, finally, what caused this acceleration, from Superman revealing his identity to Lois back in 1991, through Superman’s death, resurrection, their marriage, and all the many reboots that made Lois and Clark’s marriage and Chris Kent and Sam Zhao come and go – big events drive sales.

This is the corner into which DC has painted itself. They, and many readers, celebrate the ascension of Jon Kent, and his identity, and what that means for representing so much of humanity on the stage of DC’s historical flagship property. This is the gesture made halfheartedly nine years ago with the immediately-doomed Sam Zhao. This gesture is at odds with the reality (or metareality) within DC since about 2006, that accelerated and increasingly accelerating change is a booster shot needed for keeping the readership reading. If DC now shuffles Jon Kent off to the limbo where Chris Kent, Sam Zhao, and the 1978 marriage of Earth Two Superman and Lois dwell, they retract a major statement of representation. If they lock Jon Kent in as he is today, they lose the creative strategy that has defined the last 15 or so years of DC, to reinvent constantly. One of these has to go.

There is, perhaps, another way. To consider yet another major DC brand’s invention and reinvention, the main Flash in DC Comics was Barry Allen for thirty years, but then changed hands four times in three years, when in 2006’s Infinite Crisis Wally gave way to a brief interlude with Jay Garrick, then Bart Allen, then Bart to Wally, and Wally back to Barry. But then Barry stuck around for a while. Let’s forget for a moment that along the way, Wally switched dimensions, Bart died and was resurrected (along with his friend Connor Kent, who is another character coming and going through a wildly-revolving door), and then “Wally” was reintroduced as a boy with the same name but another race, came back to our reality, became a tormented and possibly homicidal cinder of his former self, but then became a healthy and happy superhero and the main Flash again… Yes, there is another way, a return to stable timelines and realities, but as the case of the Flashes demonstrates, DC has neither the proclivity nor capacity to take it.

Let us add one more undeniably true observation of pragmatics: Nobody planned any of this mad scramble of timelines and characters and lives and deaths. A writer may have a year or two planned, but that writer moves on, and the juice that has kept sales up necessitates 180° turns when the next writer comes along. This isn’t any one writer’s or editor’s decision. Continuity has become a blender set to “liquify” and perhaps nothing can survive it for long, though every now and a second 180° turn undoes a previous one and we end up, for a while, back where we were, and so Alan Scott is re-introduced to us as gay – twice.

Jon Kent’s orientation is too important of a statement for DC to erase the way they annihilated Sam Zhao, but the blender’s slicing and dicing blades haven’t stopped for anyone. Jon Kent’s timeline or reality or status will change, and there’ll be 180° turns – plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. In 2031, DC Comics will most likely still have a Jon Kent, and he’ll most likely “still” be LGBTQ, but will he be in the main Superman title? Will his life be rebooted back to conception and birth and start up from scratch again? Will he, like Alan Scott, come out twice? And will anyone, in 2031, be able to tell you who Jay Nakamura was?

Superman & The Authority 4

Grant Morrison’s last monthly comic for DC Comics (for now, anyways) begins with a walk down memory lane as the Ultra Humanite asks Superman, “Remember the first time?” I doubt if any of us were reading back then, but it’s in the archives. The first – the very first – superhero–supervillain matchup was between these two, in Action

2021: Ultra-Humanite, Superman, and a Saw

#13, a story that began remarkably ordinary, with a taxi racket (a gang taking out competing taxis and their drivers with violence and other dirty tricks) that surprisingly and strangely ended up being the brainchild of a mad scientist with superhuman intelligence bestowed upon him by “an experiment.” In that story, Ultra strapped Superman to a table and attempted to kill him with a metal saw to the head – the first time that anyone (other than foolish, frustrated gunmen) tried to kill Superman. Morrison lovingly takes us back to 1939, and once again, Ultra’s attempt to saw Superman’s head open fails. Some things never change, hmm? In the present story, Ultra waxes nostalgic over his/her/its other schemes, with references to a purple plague, invisible car, and atomic disintegrator, all stories from the first year of showdowns between Superman and his first supervillain. Remember the “her” I just mentioned? Well, Ultra’s first brain-body swap was with a Hollywood actress, and eighty years before Mac gives us his pronouns in this issue, the Ultra-Humanite was referred to as “she” in a little bit of sci fi gender nonbinary identity.

Soon enough, the homages switch from the Golden Age to the Silver, as Superman and Lois tag-team and provide a shout-out to white kryptonite (the perfect weapon to use against Solomon Grundy’s swamp body). Lois shoots it out of a K-rifle with variant settings and makes a red kryptonite joke when she says that she’s glad she didn’t accidentally use the wrong setting and turn Ultra into something ludicrous and more dangerous. It’s a symphony of old classics – Superman winning a fight with his magnificent strength after not having really lost his powers (not in the same way that I predicted after issue #1, but to the same effect). Then, after Superman brutally wrenches off his enemy’s head (but nobody really dies), he discovers the real mastermind whom we saw speaking in computer-font green speech balloons last issue – Brainiac.

1940: Ultra-Humanite, Superman, and a Saw

A devilish-looking red Brainiac (inexplicably but marvelously in suit and tie, space-monkey on shoulder) and Superman then battle by… talking. All the issue’s main action shows Superman’s superior squad, the new Authority, taking down all the villains  with perfect mismatches (light vs. darkness, magic vs. science, compassion vs. cruelty, and expanded social consciousness vs. a literal Nazi). During a string of wins that eventually becomes as tiresome for Superman as it is noxious to his foes, Superman verbally whips the villains with quips and smirks.

The issue’s – and the series’s – key word occurs after those battles are over: “convince.” For all of the dynamic action with punches, kicks, magic spells, floods of subatomic particles, and flashes of light, from the first pages to the last, the good side ultimately wins more often than not by convincing someone – not necessarily a bad person – of something. Superman convinces Manchester Black to join him. Manchester Black convinces the team to join them. The team convinces Enchantress to save herself. Superman convinces D’z’amor of a contradiction. Apollo convinces Mac that they’re on the same side. Manchester Black convinces Coldcast that he doesn’t want to be on the same side as a Nazi. And ultimately, Superman convinces Brainiac that he is quitting the field of battle, thereby ending the conflict for now. Along the way, Superman becomes convinced that Manchester Black is redeemable, that Siv has good reason to be frustrated with her people’s treatment. The Ultra-Humanite, despite his rage, and Brainiac, despite his predatory goals, both speak of their lofty aspirations to save the planet better than an international council is managing to, and even the villains try to convince humanity of something. With the exception of the aforementioned Nazi, virtually every character in this story exists somewhere on the spectrum between good and evil, including the binary characters of Eclipso and Enchantress and a Superman who is not quite as much of a Boy Scout (ripping the head off his defeated foe) as he once was. This series from the start is about reconciliation, and that’s not just a way to make this four-issue miniseries work: Morrison articulates a vision here of how DC’s future might look thematically, and it’s an important parting message for a DC that has increasingly headlined super-evil versions of its heroes as their marquee titles each month.

And in a world where the characters are trying to convince someone of something, rather than (or in addition to) delivering a beat-down, the battleground becomes one of words, message, and communication, and this is explicit throughout the series and the final issue. It moreover becomes clear that this theme is a comment – an explicit one – on discourse in the real world, on the Internet. Iron Cross whines that his Nazi ideology doesn’t get a fair shake from those who celebrate “free speech.” Manchester Black warns Coldcast that for siding with a Nazi, he might end up “canceled.” Lightray decides to leave social media. Eclipso tries pathetically to convince her that he is famous, and includes “the dark web” among his passions. Can you picture Silver Age Eclipso sitting at a desk looking at a computer screen? Throughout the miniseries, Morrison calls out the toxicity of discourse on the Internet, and it’s a kind of toxin that the superheroes aren’t particularly equipped to solve.

Many of the battles end with reconciliation. with Natasha Irons and Superman offering sympathy for Siv and the Haven, with Midnighter and Fleur de Lis joking about pride parades and financial advice. Only the most evil are beaten down physically, both literally (Ultra-Humanite, Iron Cross) and symbolically (Brainiac) decapitated.

And on that final point, Superman’s declaration to Brainiac, is quite a stunner if we can believe it. Superman tells Brainiac that he doesn’t believe that the two of them will likely cross paths ever again, then ends both the battle and the conversation. Brainiac is confused though Ultra-Humanite seems not to be. Superman wins a point in a battle of minds with this move, but leaving Earth is something that he apparently has to do anyway. And then, in one of the series’s several endings, Ultra-Humanite declares that he will continue the battle against Superman’s son. This is reminiscent of Morrison’s final pages of Batman, Inc. with R’as al Ghul ranting to the camera about his next big plan to attack Batman. That’s a Batman plot that subsequent writers didn’t pick up, nor, likely, was Morrison expecting them to. The point wasn’t that Morrison was to choose the continued direction of Batman as they stepped away from their years of writing, but that the genre does that itself. There’s always a big villain plan coming next; back then, why not R’as and now why not Ultra-Humanite? This is Morrison putting the toys back in the toy box so the next creators can start fresh.

However, like Batman, R.I.P., this story has multiple ending scenes, one after another. And, one of the series’s other endings does tie in with what’s coming next, as Superman’s upcoming mission to Warworld in Action will be scripted by Phillip Kennedy Johnson and that is coordinated with Superman and The Authority… but loosely. Some of the details of the two series don’t quite mesh, but that’s nothing new for Morrison events – think of Aquaman returning in Final Crisis then not really being returned after that event ended. We can look past such tiny details as Superman’s graying temples and the timeline running from Superman’s meeting with JFK up to the story’s present, its hints that the vintage lineup of the JLA had left in defeat, and with the two works being written years apart, acknowledge that the plots match up well enough. At the very least, this issue explicitly mentions the correct issue number of the next Action issue, and the scene where Superman changes back into his classic uniform might be the last detail added – note that the dialogue makes no reference to the costume change while we see it take place in the artwork – that makes this work transition into what’s coming.

Two other plot points may – or very well may not at all – lead into the future of Superman comics. One, the repeated, murky, and in the end never resolved comments about kryptonite may mean that Superman’s departure from Earth has a motive pertaining to kryptonite, even though other titles’ discussion of Superman’s departure don’t include this… or do they? If Superman is gradually weakening, is this perhaps tied to some circumstance on Earth – and might we hope, potentially a reversible one – involving kryptonite specifically on Earth? I don’t think we should be surprised if we eventually get an explanation like that, or on the other hand if we don’t. Plans shift, creators add their own creative details, and the odds are fair that this detail is up in the air rather than being predetermined.

Finally, the issue’s final ending, with Superman revealing a message from the Source Wall’s Uni-Friend (a floating hand of fire, going back to the first issues of Kirby’s New Gods) telling us “Lightray Is.” This is, perhaps, just an extra looming plot, as if Morrison had ended their run with Batman by showing us a big, shadowy plot by R’as and then one by Two Face. The implication is that Lightray, obscure but glamorous character whom Morrison borrowed and then largely reinvented, could have a future role comparable to that of Darkseid. But here we have to remember the original Kirby Lightray, a male New God wearing white. Are the two linked by some sort of cosmic reincarnation? Is this a bigger DC plan that we’ll see in the future, relating, perhaps to all of the references to Great Darkness in Bendis’s LSH? Time will tell. It is a resounding connection with the comics’ past (Kirby dots in the artwork, recycled character name, and all), but may not show up again in the future.

And that’s the same note on which we say goodbye to Grant Morrison. Their goodbye to us was on the last page of The Green Lantern, with Hal’s zooming off into deep space, uncertain destination, symbolic of Morrison’s. Superman and The Authority was written first, but published afterwards, but however you want to think of the sequence of these two stories, whichever is really last, both of these two final Morrison works for DC ends with the superhero taking off into space for a new adventure. This one, like Superman Beyond, ends with the words “To be continued.”

I first picked up a Morrison story in the pages of Legends of the Dark Knight #6, cover date of April 1990. Here we are 31 and a half years later. Morrison will undoubtedly be asked to write some of those features that you see in big anniversary issues, where writers from the past, or even other genres jot off a story some four to eight pages long, something cute and out-of-continuity, and perhaps those will be coming down the road. Perhaps in a few years there’ll be a big rapprochement and DC will get Morrison back for some other “last” major commitment, say, a twelve-issue series about Barry Allen, or Ray Palmer. You can’t predict these things, and retirement announcements, even definitive declarations, have a way of being mutable over time. One way or another, for Superman, for Grant Morrison, for you, and for me: To be continued…

Retro Review: The Sand Superman Saga

Imagine that Superman begins to lose his powers. A new Superman is on the scene and we’re not sure if the original, Kal-El, will ever be the same. That’s the situation in 2021, but what goes around comes around, and it also was true in 1971, half a century ago. Dennis O’Neil’s Sand Superman Saga, perhaps Superman’s first great alteration – at least, one that was written into the plot of a story – has just passed its silver anniversary.

Before there were cosmic reboots, when creative minds wanted to change a detail about a comic book character they just changed them. Sometimes they didn’t even seem to do so on purpose. If the readers noticed when the Daily Star suddenly became the Daily Planet, or when Superman could fly instead of merely jumping high, there was no Internet or even letter column to leave a record of reactions to those retcons. But another way to revamp a character is to write a change into the plot of the story, and and that’s what O’Neil did, changing Superman in unprecedented fashion.

This saga unrolled over the span of ten issues in 1971, but two of the issues in the middle – one written by O’Neil, one not – were not part of the larger plot. Thus, in eight issues, O’Neil, under the direction of editor Julius Schwartz, made bold and “permanent” changes to Superman, but most of the literal ones occurred, or began to occur, in the very first of those, Superman #233. In that one, bold issue, an experimental test of a new energy generation system destroyed all green kryptonite on Earth, Clark Kent became a reporter working on television rather than writing for a newspaper, and an epilogue teased the introduction of the nameless guest character who would do, basically accidentally, what hundreds of villains had attempted but failed – the permanent powering-down of the Man of Steel. However, the story did not fully culminate in one issue, nor could it have and been effective. Instead, O’Neil took Superman’s powers away, then gave them back, then took them again. In repetition that almost wears down the reader’s ability to keep track, Superman lost his powers partially or completely, sometimes one at a time, over and over, and in response became unsure whether he wanted them in full or at all. And keep in mind that two of these plot changes worked in nearly opposite directions: The elimination of kryptonite made Superman more potent than ever, while the varying loss of his powers and other injuries made him quite easy to defeat – and, moreover, to dislike.

Lest there be any confusion, this wasn’t simply Superman being written in a new style to the tastes of a new writer. This was a deliberate plan, with a flashy cover somewhat deceptively proclaiming “1” on issue #233, the first issue of the story arc: The amazing “NEW” adventures of Superman. The captions on the first page announced, “Beginning… a return to greatness!” and a subsequent caption called what was to follow “stunningly new.” Then, an extradiagetic splash page showed three panels of Superman flashily displaying his super powers while a suffering Superman in silhouette served as the black background for more introductory text, teasing that Superman has “a dark side” – a mention of his dark side on text written visually on his literal dark side! But as for style changes, there were those, too – beginning in this issue, Clark Kent’s previously-universally blue suit became brown.

But there’s real substance behind the style, so much so that a reader familiar with the series as it had been wouldn’t have been ready to read it the way O’Neil allows to unfold. After all the kryptonite on Earth is destroyed, Morgan Edge memorably questions whether the removal of Superman’s primary weakness is a good thing: “Power corrupts… and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” But Morgan Edge was a pawn of Darkseid, and thoroughly unlikable in his best scenes; for Edge to say this begged for the reader to conclude the opposite, a sentiment which Superman soon enough articulated, saying that the destruction of kryptonite freed him up to do more good that ever. A reader who set down #233 for the first time would have to conclude that Superman was the moral compass to follow on this, or any other point. But by the last page of #242, that perspective had been definitively defeated.

Does absolute power corrupt Superman? In the scenes following the elimination of kryptonite, he casually knocks three criminals unconscious with blows to the head, when there’s seemingly no need for him to do so. His mental narration is full of hubris and self-celebration which is immediately followed by harsh contradiction from reality: twice, after Superman mentally celebrates his near-invincibility, he suddenly experiences the failure of his powers. This creates drama, but also makes the saga into a morality tale about pride coming before the fall. But after he loses those powers he regains them, then loses them again, for a total of four times in only the story’s first two issues. What this repetitive and disorienting gyrating accomplishes is to create dialectic and dialogue where previously Superman’s story was one of simple, fairy-tale moral certainties.

As Superman’s problems deepen, three issues – the saga’s second, third, and fifth – build up an impending sense of doom as Superman keeps losing his powers – one power or another, or all of them partially – as the mysterious Sand Superman flies by, with an origin, purpose, and even name unknown to Superman. In these three issues, Superman takes on the challenge of an erupting volcano, a callous business magnate, a vengeful and bitter man named Ferlin Nyxly who uses a (perhaps magical) device to steal Superman’s powers one by one, and eco-terrorists who try to use a seized geothermal power plant to bargain their way into greater power. By and large, the Sand Superman looms nearby as a mysterious added conundrum, though for some uncanny reason, he helps Superman defeat Nyxly (who was later referenced in Grant Morrison’s Action run). Throughout this string of predicaments, Superman suffers the consequences of lost power, as the Sand Superman – initially made of sand – slowly becomes more visibly his duplicate, costume and all. But while the plot and the action move along in these issues, the theme that was initially invoked with Morgan Edge’s “power corrupts” line goes largely unaddressed.

That changes in the saga’s fourth issue, #237. After Superman rescues the pilot of an experimental rocket plane, he finds that the pilot has been transformed horribly by germs originating in space. (Recall that this story was published less than two years after the first lunar landing.) Contemplating that he himself may have the same germs on himself after exposure to the pilot, Superman takes the step of flying up into Earth’s natural radiation belts in order to cleanse himself, thinking, “NO bug could survive exposure to these radioactive waves!” However, Superman is simply and smugly mistaken, and when he returns to Earth, the germs that he has carried back on his body infect an entire room of staffers at the Daily Planet. Moments later, he learns that Lois Lane, investigating a swarm of killer ants in Latin America, is in unrelated danger, and Superman becomes stricken with angst that he is unable to act normally to save her without spreading the infection to her and others, like those in the Daily Planet building behind him. Then the Sand Superman follows him on his way to try to save Lois, draining his speed and power. Superman tries to act from a distance, stopping a swarm of jungle ants but infects two of them, which makes them grow to the size of elephants.

Now the array of problems facing Superman – the worst of which appears to be his own fault –fills him with helplessness, guilt, and despair. He declares to himself, “I’m the worst enemy the planet has! … Should I fly away… lose myself in the vastness between the stars… and never return?” How the mighty have fallen! Only a few issues back, Superman exulted in being truly, absolutely invincible, with no weaknesses, free to solve any problem, and here, he finds himself worse than helpless, unable to save Lois, losing his own powers to a nameless doppelgänger who follows him around, and having spread a plague in Metropolis. However, as he floats in space despairingly, he carefully thinks over the day’s events, and decides that, in a twist, contact with the Sand Superman seems to have sterilized his right hand of the germs that he’s carrying. He deliberately seeks full contact with his erstwhile antagonist, and an explosion occurs, after which – he decides – he is now free of the germs. Superman saves Lois with a hint of anger in his tone, “I’m doing the same as I’ve always done – saving your silly, precious life!” Unable to fly, Superman holds Lois and the pilot of her plane and leaps with them to a place of safety, then with noticeable difficulty defeats a gang of bandits who had earlier menaced Lois. Then he confronts the Sand Superman (who was following close behind) and unleashes a verbal tirade at his unnamed nemesis and for the first time, the Sand Superman, who has now almost become identical to Superman in appearance, speaks, telling Superman in a cliffhanger that he is a being woven from Superman’s own mind, heart, and soul, that he is going to continue to drain Superman’s powers until he has half, until they are exactly equal, and that the process might kill one of them.

Superman’s hubris in viewing himself as invincible has at this point been well-developed. He tries to hide his loss of power from the world, telling himself that this it to avoid emboldening criminals, but he hides it also from Lois Lane, and he seems to be full of shame as well as self doubt, which escalates heading into the saga’s final three issues. This is introduced by the cover of Superman #240 where an angry crowd lambastes Superman, who holds a Daily Planet proclaiming, “SUPERMAN FAILS!” and the titular hero tells the Earth’s people, “You miserable ingrates – I’m through with you!” This foreshadows the issue’s first sequence in which a weakened Superman is no longer able to disguise his relative loss of power: While saving people from a burning building, he tries to support the skyscraper from structural collapse but visibly fails while the fire department and crowds watch. With the building now too heavy for him, Superman is knocked to the ground by the falling structure, and is photographed walking away in shame. In the following day, as his enemies conspire to take advantage of his weakened state, crowds mock his loss of strength, and Superman stews with antagonism, bitterly thinking of the public as “ingrates” who don’t appreciate his “years of service… of sacrifice” in which he “denied [himself] the comforts of home… family” while helping people. In a true turning point, Superman has not merely lost his physical power (which is, after all, as old a plot point as kryptonite itself) but has begun to lose the will to continue on his mission, turning his back on a bank robbery with the thought, “it’s no concern of mine! The smug citizens can solve their own problems!” Moments later, he relents and engages the bank robbers, but is momentarily struck down and humiliated by their military weapons. After he succeeds partially in defeating them (their leaders escape), he privately reflects, “as a Superman, I’m a wash-out!”

At this point, and for the remaining duration of the saga, I-Ching enters the story. An O’Neil invention from his concurrent run on Wonder Woman, the Chinese sage and mystic arrives to counsel Superman on the loss of his powers and how he can and should regain them. By unhappy coincidence, just as I-Ching places Superman under a trance, criminals who had surveilled Clark Kent arrive and strike at the unconscious Superman as well as I-Ching. A nearly fully depowered Superman wins a fistfight with the criminals after taking painful blows to the head and chest, which concludes with Superman deciding that perhaps, if he can win a fight without powers, he’s not sure that he cares if he ever regains them. At the beginning of issue #241, Superman shares this thought with I-Ching that he would like to remain powerless, and rid himself of the “responsibilities… the loneliness… of Superman.” The mystic man, however, talks Superman into reluctantly accepting his help in regaining his lost powers, and after a brief ceremony in which an astral form of Superman finds and power-drains the Sand Superman, the titular hero awakens with his full powers intact… seemingly the end of his troubles, but here things soon reach their darkest and strangest point.

As the issue continues, Superman finds that his physical powers are at their usual, maximum state, but his behavior, a reader can’t help but notice, is increasingly erratic, egotistical, and hostile to others. As I-Ching and Diana Prince notice from the news, Superman makes destructive mistakes in the use of his powers, and moreover makes reckless decisions that inconvenience good people while punishing evil doers. I-Ching determines that the cause is the blow that Superman earlier took to the head while depowered. Here, the story becomes a curious sort of sci fi / fantasy parable about mental health, with Superman angrily denying that he has a problem while his friends – Diana Prince and I-Ching – try to get him to accept help. Here, for the first time, the reader receives an explanation of what has been going on, as I-Ching’s magic reveals the nature of the Sand Superman.

Here, O’Neil introduces us, through I-Ching and the Sand Superman, to a dimension called the Realm of Quarrm, a “state of alternate possibilities, a place where neither men nor things exist, only unformed, shapeless beings” – sounding a bit like Plato’s conception of forms, superior to the things in our real world. We learn that the explosion at the outset of the saga created a rift between Superman’s world and the Realm of Quarrm, bringing one nameless creature through who assumed, through proximity to Superman, a link to him that caused the creature to take his form and begin to drain his essence and powers.

In performing a ceremony that procured this information, I-Ching, however, has made a serious mistake, opening a new rift between the DC Universe and Quarrm and allowing a second spirit to enter our world. This one animates the statue of a Chinese war demon, which then begins wreaking havoc in Metropolis. As the saga’s penultimate issue concludes, the odd trio of I-Ching, an unpowered Diana Prince, and the Sand Superman hope to cure Superman of his mental impairment, while the real but ill Superman is knocked out in battle by the War Demon, which drains most of his powers into itself.

As the finale begins in Superman #242, a pair of malevolent street criminals find that the War Demon will follow their orders and, after beating a now-depowered Superman mercilessly, they utilize the War Demon as a sort of evil genie on a rampage of crime. Doctors operate to repair the brain damage suffered by the fully-depowered Superman while the Sand Superman, possessing by its own calculation just a third of Superman’s original powers, fails to vanquish the War Demon.

In time, the War Demon turns on his masters, killing them, then is drawn to the hospital where Superman is recovering, seeking to kill him, too. But, in the presence of Superman, power flows back from the War Demon into Superman until the two of them are equal, and fight to a stand-off. Then the Sand Superman arrives on the scene and joins the original Superman in battle against the War Demon, which – outnumbered – flees back to Quarrm.

Now that the battle’s three are down to two, the Sand Superman declares that he wishes to take the place of the original Superman. With each possessing half of Superman’s power, they decide to fight a duel to the finish to see which will survive to continue as the only Superman. Over the course of a few pages, their super duel causes devastating damage to the Earth’s interior. Within six minutes, the strain placed on the planet causes massive earthquakes and eruptions that wipe the planet clean of all life… or so we see. I-Ching then reveals that he has simulated the battle in the minds of Superman and his double, when actually no battle at all has taken place.

Then the saga concludes with stunning suddenness. The Sand Superman decides to return to Quarrm to avoid such a conflict. When I-Ching proposes that he could perhaps return the stolen half of Superman’s power back to him, Superman refuses this, saying, “No! I’ve seen the dangers [of] having too much power… I am human – I can make mistakes! I don’t want – or need – more…” And in a shadowy final panel, Superman stares off into the distance, alone in his thoughts, with half the power he had when the saga began.

The sense behind having Superman renounce half his powers doesn’t quite add up. When he makes mistakes in this story, none of those would be avoided by reducing his powers by half. If Superman decides to leave a car atop the Empire State Building, or if he accidentally infects people with an extraterrestrial germ, those things occur just as easily with half his powers as full. Moreover, in a DC Universe with many highly-powered beings, Superman just demoted himself relative to many villains such as the Phantom Zone inmates, Solomon Grundy, Bizarro, and others. In fact, in the series’s next issue (scripted by Cary Bates), Superman notes that “it would take a hundred Supermen many life-times to solve all [Earth’s] problems.” In the subsequent issue, again penned by O’Neil, Superman is knocked down by an energy monster and declares, “I’ve never been hit that hard…” Well, it would have been nice to have the other half of your powers back, then, wouldn’t it, Supes?

Numbers aside, O’Neil’s saga injected some thoughtful characterization to DC’s flagship hero, and measurably powered up the maturity of the title. First, it shifted the black-and-white morality of the series to add some shades of gray. Superman could be wrong, not only about matters of fact (that the elimination of kryptonite made him invincible), not only making serious mistakes in the use of his powers (that a particular radiation exposure would kill the alien germs on his body), but it also showed that he was fallible in tone, aggrieved and bitter, subject to humiliation – in other words, human. This was a far bigger change to the character than twiddling his power levels in some meaningless way. And, for all the story’s quirks, it brought Superman down to our level – in character as well as sometimes in power level – by showing the folly of the sin of pride, a story arc right out of Greek mythology.

An irreplaceable way to gauge the impact of story is to look at what came before it, and what after. Twelve issues before the Sand Superman saga began, the cover of Superman showed a morbidly obese Superman bursting out of a telephone booth and calling himself, in language that is shockingly insensitive, “a super-fatso” with the story title, “The Two-Ton Superman.” Five issues after the saga ended, Elliot S. Maggin’s highly-regarded “Must There Be A Superman?” story ran in issue #247, elaborating on the saga’s themes, as Superman must decide for himself when to intervene in human affairs and when not to intervene. That is quite a “before and after” comparison, showing a 1970 title with nothing of value to say and a 1972 title that was, if not high literature, at least asking questions with some relevance to real-world society, morality, and personal responsibility. We might gauge the impact of the story – both O’Neil’s capacity as writer and Schwartz’s as editor– in the increasing years in the age of the target reader rather than in how much Superman could lift or how fast he could fly. The Sand Superman story was part of the character maturing, and gave the series a creative direction it followed for nearly 15 years before its next big transformation.

Fifty years later, while the character, and DC superhero comics as a whole, have been through numerous alterations, and the plot points of the Sand Superman saga are entirely unrelated to current continuity, it may be argued that the Superman title never took a bigger step up in maturity than it did in and around that story. Indeed, remembering that it appeared at the same time as a pivotally thoughtful story about control and rebellion in Teen Titans #31 and during O’Neil’s monumental Green Lantern/Green Arrow run – the story about Roy Harper’s drug addiction appeared just after the Sand Superman saga ended – 1971 might be the year in which DC Comics grew up the most. In the fifty years since, have they grown up any more?