Comic Book Review: Best of DC #20: World’s Finest Art by Dick Dillin & Joe Giella
For a few decades, World’s Finest Comics was by default the Superman/Batman team-up book, featuring DC Comics’ two top characters working together to handle various cases and crises. This 1982 reprint digest presents three of these stories from 1971-1972, plus a rare story of Superman teaming up with someone else.
“Vengeance of the Tomb-Thing!” written by Denny O’Neil has a familiar-looking figure in a blue uniform and red cape get struck by lightning over a part of the Middle East that isn’t currently owned by any country. Amnesiac, the stranger is befriended by “Bedouin” Brakh, a local bandit.
Nearby, Lois Lane is covering an archeological dig searching for the lost tomb of King Malis, a ruler shrouded in mystery. Just as the scientists have located the tomb, the bandits attack. Lois is dismayed to learn that one of them is Superman, who now follows every command he receives from Brakh. The flying being also scares off a supply helicopter.
This last bit makes the news in Gotham City, and Batman decides to head to the last known location of the expedition to investigate. He is also startled to discover that Superman has become a murderous bandit and is easily captured.
Except that it turns out the real Superman has been locked up in his Arctic Fortress of Solitude all this time, working on his robot doubles. They’ve been malfunctioning lately, and Kal-El decides that Earth’s environment is now hostile to their delicate circuitry so he will have to retire them. Oh, and one’s missing.
Returning to the outside world, Superman discovers Lois is in trouble and flies off to the now open tomb of King Malis. The “Superman” we’d previously seen turns out to be “Robot #15” and seeing the real Superman restores its memory. Unfortunately, it’s not a happy memory. Superman has always treated #15 as a disposable piece of equipment with no will or emotions of its own. However exploitative Brakh’s “friendship” towards #15 was, it was the first time anyone has ever treated #15 as a person, the first time it was ever shown kindness. It refuses to go back to being a slave or decommissioned. Even if it has to kill Superman to ensure that.
To make matters worse, King Malis is awake now, and ready to bring doom to all living things!
Honestly, I had more sympathy for #15 than I think the story meant me to have. Neither Superman nor Batman have a moment’s qualm about turning sentient robots into scrap.
“A Matter of Light and Death!” written by Len Wein has Clark Kent hire three hitmen to murder Superman(?!) At this point in the continuity, all the Kryptonite on Earth had been turned to “harmless” lead, and the criminals point this out. Clark replies that Superman’s still vulnerable to magic, and he will give them a magical weapon with the power to destroy the Kryptonian.
Superman’s noticed that he has missing time, and asks Batman to tail him to find out what’s going on. Nothing happens all day, and Batman lets down his guard just enough to be surprised when Clark Kent suddenly flies off. By the time he tracks down the reporter, Clark’s already given the hitmen the Satanstaff, a powerful magitech artifact with various nifty effects. Batman is overcome, but the hitmen don’t kill him.
Yet. They only kill for money, so are going to auction his death off to the highest bidder. They also manage to temporarily overcome Superman.
But it’s at this point that the real villain of the piece steps out into the open. They came up with a clever plan, but revealed themself too soon. The hitmen betray their patron, and this allows Batman and Superman to get the upper hand.
Naturally, the villain never uses the new technology they came up with for this plan ever again.
“Fugitive from the Stars!” written by Denny O’Neil begins with a Bob Dylan quote that inspired the plotline. An alien starship arrives that looks a lot like a warship. The two aliens inside point out that the Earthlings attacked them first (true) and they were just defending themselves. They’re law enforcement officers from the planet Krash, and have superpowers in Earth’s environment similar to but a bit weaker than Superman’s. And they’re in search of an escaped criminal from their planet.
An informant had sent information that the criminal had somehow wound up in prison on Earth, but had a fatal accident before revealing which prison. They ask, not very politely, that the Earth heroes turn over the fugitive.
Superman and Batman contact every prison on Earth, and begin to sort through the information to find leads. The Krash kops quickly grow impatient and take Superman hostage using gravitic superscience to “encourage” Batman to speed things up. Then they produce a cobalt bomb that they will use to destroy both Superman and Earth if a deadline is not met.
Batman eliminates every other possibility and finds the fugitive in the last prison he looks in–how precisely the young woman managed to get in there is never addressed. It turns out that the men from Krash actually are the equivalent of police officers, and she actually is a criminal. In their war-obsessed culture, pacifism is illegal, and carries the death penalty.
Batman decides not to turn the fugitive over, and has an “unexpected” ally assist him in tricking the aliens into a fight to determine the fate of the world. But is using violence to save a pacifist really what she would have wanted?
This is a mildly unusual story for the time period, as the Comics Code Authority rules of the time prohibited the negative portrayal of police officers. Thus the narrative is careful to state they’re only “the equivalent” of police, and have the Krash men act in ways that make it clear they’re not actually interested in legalities–discarding the pretense as soon as they’re offered the chance to make war instead.
“Peril of the Planet-Smashers!” written by Len Wein is a direct sequel to “A Matter of Light and Death!” Superman’s a bit down about being vulnerable to magic, and decides to eliminate this weakness. He first approaches his sometime ally Zatanna, who has word-based magic she accesses by speaking backwards. She has no known way of making someone invulnerable to magic, and her father Zatara warned her that inquiring too closely into the “why” and “how” of magic will cause it to stop functioning for that mage.
Not deterred, Superman decides to cross the dimensional barrier to Earth-Two (where DC’s Golden Age characters resided at the time) and consult with more experienced wizard Doctor Fate.
Quick sidebar: Doctor Fate was created by Gardner Fox and Howard Sherman in More Fun Comics #55 (May 1940). His civilian identity is Kent Nelson, and he was trained in the use of magic by the ancient being Nabu, who inhabits his helmet. In the Golden Age, he was an archaeologist and occultist, operating out of a doorless and windowless tower in Salem, Massachusetts. By the time of this story, he had added a medical degree, and worked as a physician who was pledged to not use magic during his regular doctor work.
Dr. Fate foils the theft of a high-tech thermal ray, then rushes to the free hospital where he works as a surgeon. The patient turns out to be an alien who is barely conscious and warns telepathically that Earth is doomed.
So when Superman shows up, Dr. Fate immediately asks him to help save Earth-Two. The alien is now fully comatose, but yields up images of a Mayan temple in the Yucatan and Stonehenge. The heroes split up and encounter two more aliens of the same type who ward them off with mystical attacks.
Earth begins to have a series of “natural” disasters, caused by the continents being drawn together to re-form Pangaea, the primordial land mass. The alien high lamas had discovered that Earth was about to experience a conjunction of mystic forces that, if it were altered just enough, would allow the aliens to move to a higher plane of existence. Of course, this would also destroy Earth, but omelets, eggs.
Superman and Doctor Fate manage to stop the destruction of Earth and put the continents back in place. Superman decides not to become invulnerable to magic after all as magic temporarily empowering him was the key to victory.
This story turns out to have been chosen to lead into an advertisement for a short series of Dr. Fate solo stories in 1982.
The stories are okay, and the art is decent. Since they had to follow the solo series continuity for Superman and Batman, no real changes to the status quo were allowed, and these tales are not otherwise important. The digest may be a bit hard to find, but you can track down collected editions of World’s Finest Comics if you have a hankering.
