My Back Pages, by Thomas Aylesworth
As I discussed in the last issue, Superman went through some major changes in the early 1970s. Editor Julius Schwartz took away the gimmicks and campiness that had plagued Superman stories for the previous twenty years. He also brought his personal life back into the play and made Clark Kent a real person with real problems people could relate to. This week, I'm going to look at the best issues of Action Comics during the DC Implosion years of 1978 and 1979.
Cary Bates had been writing Superman stories since the mid 1960s but really hit his stride in the late 1970s. Marty Pasko was writing the stories in Superman's self-titled comic. It was Pasko who brought back Lana Lang in 1977. In general, the stories in Superman dealt with Clark Kent's personal life and on-going love triangle, while Bates's stories in Action Comics lived up to the title's name.
Outside of the comics, the biggest Superman news in 1978 was the release of Superman: The Movie shortly before Christmas. Inside the comics, the biggest Superman news occurred six months earlier in Action Comics 484. For his 40th anniversary in Action Comics, Superman married Lois Lane. Of course, the catch is that it's the Earth-2 Superman rather than the one who normally appeared in Action Comics.
Predictably, the story received more fan letters than usual with the printed letters running 50-50 between pro and con. The story itself was ok. Not the best of the year, in my opinion, but it contained some nice nostalgia elements for fans of the earlier Superman stories. Curt Swan even drew the story with less detail in the panels for a retro look that perfectly captured the Siegel and Shuster era of the 1940s. It's also the only Superman story from the late 1970s that's been reprinted in graphic novel form. If you don't want to track down the original comic, you can read the story in Superman In The Seventies.
The DC Explosion kicked off in Action Comics with a two-part story in Action Comics 487 and 488 that combined Superman's frequent battling of aliens with the 1970s obsession with Close Encounters. It featured a crook called the Microwave Man who had been kidnapped by aliens before Superman had arrived on Earth. The story opens with the aliens returning him to Earth as an old man. As he learns about Superman, he decides to reprise his criminal identity in order to challenge Superman.
My favorite stories from this time period, though, were the ones that followed. Action Comics 489 through 491 featured the return of Brainiac. Even better, they also included appearances by the Justice League, Supergirl, and the bottled city of Kandor. Brainiac drives Superman mad by forcing him to stare into the explosion of Krypton, whose light is just now reaching our solar system. These stories were my introduction to Brainiac, who quickly became my favorite Superman villain, and are well worth tracking down.
The final issue of 1978, Action Comics 492, featured the Phantom Zone villains. While Superman is trapped by a parasite in outer space, General Zod makes him believe he is still on Earth and going crazy. Not my favorite Phantom Zone story, but worth reading if you're a fan. A nice touch are the various hallucinations they plant in Superman's mind to keep him occupied, including his marriage to Lana Lang and their resulting children. You would have thought that would have been enough to make Superman realize these thoughts weren't real!
Action Comics 493, sadly, did not live up to the exciting stories that preceded it. A fairly typical alien invasion story, the only thing to recommend it is that, in the wake of the Superman movie, Clark Kent returns to his job at the Daily Planet. I suppose the powers-that-be at DC/Time Warner were worried that new readers who picked up the comic after seeing the movie would be confused about why Clark Kent was not a reporter.
Action Comics 494 and 495 take a break from the outer space stories. Clark Kent returns to Smallville to investigate a story from Superman's past, and Lois convinces Perry White to send her along as well. Not as action packed as most of Cary Bates's stories, but a good read if you're a fan of Lois and Clark stories.
I'm going to end with Action Comics 496, once again featuring Kandor. Unlike in the Brainiac story, this time Krandor is the focus as Superman catches a virus while visiting the city in a bottle. The Kryptonian version of a cold, it's not dangerous to the residents of Kandor or to Superman, but it is immensely dangerous to humans. No alien invasions or super-powered crooks, but a clever story all the same.
The next few issues were fairly forgettable but led up to a special 68-page 500th issue. I'll cover that in a later article.
Next issue, I'll look at the issues of Superman during this same time period. In addition to learning a lot more about the drama in his private life, we also see more of Kandor... and see Superman make good on his promise to its citizens.
