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…