Comic Book Review: The Best of DC #38: Superman Vs. the Supernatural edited by Nicola Cuti
As I’ve mentioned before, Superman’s impressive array of powers at the top of the super-scale make him a hard character to write challenges for. This led to the invention of Kryptonite and its subsequent overuse as a plot device. But at some point in the early Silver Age, it was also established that Superman is able to be affected by magic, and that became another of his standard weaknesses. This reprint digest features several stories where Superman or his supporting cast encounter what appears to be the supernatural.
“The Eliminator!” (no credits listed) has Clark Kent invited as the sole member of the press at the funeral of a Dr. Phantas, notorious occultist. Phantas’ recorded will demands that no one opens his coffin on pain of horrible curse. Clark, who for purposes of this story is a total non-believer in the supernatural, “summons his friend Superman” to open the casket. Dr. Phantas’ corpse sits up and declares doom upon Clark Kent–he will have to watch his fellow reporters die one by one. Then the corpse vanishes, leaving only his clothes.
Superman isn’t impressed. There’s no such thing as curses in 1969! (Leaving aside all the times he or someone he knows has been cursed before.) But then Clark learns that his fellow reporter Ed Carver died in a freak whirlpool accident. Probably coincidence. Until Steve Fallon, also a reporter Clark Kent is acquainted with, is frozen to death by a liquid oxygen leak.
One by one, reporters are dying in bizarre ways, and Clark Kent is now shunned by his colleagues as he might actually be cursed. Even Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen are a bit nervous. Superman thinks over the deaths, and suddenly recognizes a pattern.
Turns out that “Dr. Phantas” was actually an alien executioner sent to carry out death sentences on a group of shape-shifting alien criminals who had stolen the identities of the reporters who’d been with Clark Kent on a particular assignment. The Eliminator had set up this elaborate hoax, he claims, to avoid having the Earthlings panic that an alien law enforcer was on their planet. I think he wanted to avoid having to deal with extradition laws and other legalities.
The criminals dead and the real reporters restored to their lives, the Eliminator leaves.
“The Truth Mirror!” story by Jerry Siegel, art by Curt Swan & George Klein, starts with Superman saving an explosives truck from crashing into a cargo train. What he doesn’t know is that the train is carrying a present for Lois Lane. Her Uncle Ned in England is a noted Arthurian scholar, and he’s sent her a mirror that supposedly belonged to Merlin.
While speaking to a charity organizer in her apartment, Lois notes that his reflection in the mirror shows him as a scarred gangster. Doing her research (she is after all a crack reporter), Miss Lane discovers the man is actually a notorious charity scammer who’s had plastic surgery. This allows her to alert Superman, who captures the crook.
After a couple more incidents, Lois realizes that the mirror shows the true nature of anyone it reflects. (Notably she doesn’t look at her own reflection.) She tricks Superman into standing in front of the mirror, revealing his secret identity of Clark Kent. Uh-oh!
Superman must then come up with an elaborate hoax to make Lois think the Mirror of Truth sometimes lies and he’s not actually Clark Kent. Then he dumps the mirror in a volcano. Status quo restored! Yeah. Needing the status quo restored at the end of each story hurts a lot of Silver Age stories.
“The Demons from Pandora’s Box!” art by Kurt Schaffenberger, has Jimmy Olsen participating in a Greek expedition with Lana Lang and her father, Professor Lang. They’ve discovered what appears to be a replica of Pandora’s Box, which according to the local inscriptions, also contains horrible demons which will cause misery to humanity. Jimmy, certified dumbass, scoffs and opens the chest. There’s nothing inside but a glowing rock.
Except that when the trio are driving away from the expedition site, spectral demons appear out of thin air. Startled, Jimmy crashes the truck, killing Professor Lang. At the funeral, Jimmy is still not able to cope with his guilt, and Superman takes the lad to his Fortress of Solitude to chill while the Man of Steel is off-planet.
The demons appear again and trick Jimmy into destroying the bottle city of Kandor. The scientists of Atlantis try to treat Jimmy, but the demons compel the boy into murdering everyone in Atlantis and then helping them turn Superman evil.
Just as Super-Demon is about to kill Jimmy, the boy awakes. It turns out the glowing rock subjects those who open the chest to horrible demon-related hallucinations. Nothing since page one was real. Jimmy summons Superman for real, and our hero throws the evil box into the sun.
“The Enchanted Mountain” (no credits) is the earliest tale in this collection. In the southeastern Europe village of Morabia, they are ready to celebrate the harvest festival. Alas, the castle of the Wizard of Wokit has appeared atop the nearby mountain for the first time in decades. The Wizard turns himself into a giant falcon and snatches a boy from the village to use as a statue decoration for the blue castle.
The villagers are helpless against the wizard’s mighty magic, so plead to the empty sky for a champion, a superman if you will, to defend them. Sure enough, a man in a red and blue costume with a big “S” emblazoned on his chest arrives, having taken a notion to check out some old legends.
Superman battles the wizard, struggling against the fantastic spells cast against him. But then he realizes that the wizard’s magic is largely illusion. If you are firm in your belief that his magic can’t hurt you, it can’t, and is easily disrupted. Superman gets the villagers to disbelieve in the wizard’s power, and the collective power of their will is sufficient to make the castle crumble as if it had never existed. And the Wizard of Wokit was never seen again.
The canonicity of this tale is immediately called into question, as we learn this story was one Lois Lane was reading in a book of old legends, and she’s been casting Superman in the role of the hero because he’s the only one who could accomplish those feats. It’s left ambiguous if this is somehow a time travel thing so Superman actually went through those events, or it’s just Lois’ imagination.
“The Spectre Suitor!” script by Cary Bates, pencils by Werner Roth and inks by Vince Colletta, is a Lois Lane story. The expatriate Englishman she’s interviewing, Sir Nigel Tate, has several interesting souvenirs that he has agreed to show her. As it happens, the room they are stored in is being robbed at that very moment. Somehow the ensuing fight awakens a supernatural entity that forces the burglars away.
Sir Nigel fears that a family ghost has taken a fancy to Lois, but she laughs off the idea of ghosts. Sir Nigel is correct, and this particular restless spirit is especially tricksy. Soon, the ghost of Jack the Ripper is trying to unite himself with the living reporter by making her not living with his haunted dirk.
This, however, creates a time loop where he can’t kill Lois because she’s not one of his historical victims, and the dirk is rendered useless for him to return.
“Spell of the Shandu Clock” (no credits) looks to be from the early 1950s. Stage magician Shandu (who dresses in vaguely Arabic robes) departs from his normal routine to declare that he has now gained actual magical abilities. Superman flies in and exposes the tricks Shandu is using. Shandu then declares that he was using fakery to raise money for his actual supernatural research, and will curse Superman from beyond the grave.
Several days later, Shandu is reported dead at sea, and supposedly had built a supernatural clock before his death to prove that magic is real. Superman flies Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen to the deceased magician’s house to check out the story. Sure enough, there is a decidedly odd-looking giant clock there. Just look at it.
One of the clock’s unusual features is that at the top of the hour, a Superman figurine appears and uses one of his many powers to strike the gong. Each time this happens, Superman goes into a trance for twenty minutes, flies off, and uses that power to smash something. Also, Superman is somehow unable to harm the clock in any way.
The Fallon gang decides to take advantage of the twenty-minute trances to use a vibration ray and rob a bank. Oops, Superman isn’t in a trance, and the criminals are captured! Turns out the feud between Superman and Shandu, and Shandu’s apparent death, were part of an elaborate hoax to lure science crime boss Fallon into the open.
The elaborate hoax plotline would swiftly become overused in the Superman comics, but points for the clock design.
“The Ghost of Lois Lane” (no credits) shows its age by having an electric typewriter be a new hot gadget that Jimmy Olsen buys (and then has to tinker with to make work properly.) The main story begins with Lois going to interview Professor Grail, a mostly sane scientist who is working on a teleportation device. He has to leave for an important conference, which gives Lois the chance to poke around the lab.
Meanwhile, Lois has forgotten something back at the office, and Superman has volunteered to bring it to her. He uses his X-ray vision to look for her, and somehow this causes an explosion in the lab. When the smoke clears, Lois and the chair she was sitting in have vanished, apparently blown to bits!
Superman feels guilt about dooming Lois, so he’s not too surprised when he sees her ghost popping up in various places. (Interestingly, he doesn’t tell anyone about Lois apparently being dead, and tries to work normally as Clark Kent.) Eventually, it is revealed that the experimental teleporter just threw Lois into a limbo dimension. She uses her mind to type out a message on the electric typewriter so that Superman can rescue her.
Lois’ big regret from this experience is that her vision of the real world was blurred from the fourth dimension, so she could tell that Superman was changing into and out of his secret identity, but not who that identity was. Another opportunity missed!
“The Black Magic of Supergirl!” (no credits) begins in “the Orient” as the Maid of Steel witnesses a magic act by fakir Abdul. Her super-senses are unable to detect any trickery. But then Abdul is bitten by a cobra, and starts dying. He reveals that he has demonic horns, and asks that Supergirl not reveal it to anyone lest he be denied the sacred cremation of the local funeral rites. In exchange, he gives her a ring that grants magical powers, and the scroll that explains its function. (A piece of the scroll falls off while they’re distracted.)
Per the scroll, the Satan Ring can be used three times to call upon the powers of darkness, but the third time you will grow horns and become a demon. Good thing Supergirl has her own superpowers and will never need to use the ring!
You guessed it, three emergencies come up that absolutely require Supergirl to use the ring’s powers to save lives, though each time the special effects are horrific in nature. Horns grow in, and Supergirl discovers that she now has magical abilities in addition to her normal powers. However, she is compelled to use those abilities for evil. Kara gives a bank robber wings to escape the police, and blinds Superman.
She returns to the bazaar where she met Abdul in hopes of finding some clue as what to do next. There she meets the merchant Abdul, who is clearly the same person, but is perfectly normal and has no memory of having been a fakir or meeting Supergirl. Then Kara catches sight of the remaining scroll fragment. It reveals that the only way to be released from being a demon is to be purified by fire. Abdul’s cremation not only did that, but returned him from the dead somehow.
Then it’s a matter of finding a fire hot enough to burn the evil out of a Kryptonian (which also destroys the ring) and explaining what happened to her cousin (the blindness wore off.)
“The Ghost That Haunted Clark Kent” art by Swan and Anderson, story by Leo Dorfman, takes place at the Tower of London. Clark Kent is there to do a television feature (for a while in the Bronze Age, he was a television news anchor rather than a newspaper reporter.) A headless ghost is spotted on the parapet. To Clark’s shock, the ghost appears to be Superman!
Clark runs off terrified (to throw off the guards’ suspicions) and switches to Superman. With his X-ray vision, Superman sees the ghost going into a sealed-off room and reattaching its head. He bursts in to follow.
The ghost greets both Superman and Clark Kent by name, turns out appearing in Superman’s form was a deliberate lure. His actual face is aged and wrinkled as though he had been mummified.
Also, he’s not actually a ghost. Dr. Troy Magnus was a court physician some three centuries ago during a time of plague. His research led him to an elixir that would theoretically make him immune to pestilence. After quaffing it, he went back to treating the sick. The elixir did not prevent Dr. Magnus from being infected with the plague, but as he was about to die, he turned into a desolid form like a ghost, and when he became solid again, he was cured!
Which sounds great, but then he discovered that anyone he touched died of the plague even if they’d previously been undiseased. Worse, any attempt by himself or others to kill him automatically triggered his ghost form, making him effectively immortal. He asked to be sealed up with his scientific apparatus and writings inside the Tower.
Over the centuries, he’s been researching ways to cure himself, and learned how to consciously assume ghost form so that he could safely leave his chamber for brief periods. He also spent time on his other favorite project, transmuting lead to gold, but has had little success with that. Tired of his living death, Dr. Magnus begs Superman to help find a way to kill him.
Superman has sworn never to use his powers to kill (and Dr. Magnus is still too human for any exceptions to apply) so he has to refuse. Dr. Magnus reluctantly accepts this as he knows the importance of moral vows. But to protect everyone else, it’s important that Superman repair the wall he came in through so no contamination gets out.
Superman starts the process by sealing smaller cracks with his heat vision, but one of the beams ricochets off a parabolic mirror Dr. Magnus was using in his transmutation experiments. This strikes the immortal, and his spectral form begins to trigger–but the specific frequency of heat vision turns out to be something the elixir can’t handle and Dr. Magnus is granted a merciful death. He’s okay with this and points out to Superman that this is an accident and should not count as a breaking of his oath.
Superman seals the chamber back up, so that it may be the doctor’s tomb forever. The disappointment in this story is that it’s labeled as a Clark Kent tale, but he’s barely in it as Clark.
My favorite story in this digest is the Shandu clock for its general weird vibe. Least favorite is the “all just a dream” Jimmy Olsen tale. This is an interesting look at the different ways the supernatural has been handled in Superman stories over the decades. Of note is how often the characters scoff at the existence of the supernatural despite running into it in many previous adventures.
Most of these stories have been reprinted elsewhere, but recommended to Superman collectors.
