ACTION COMICS #398 March 1971
"Come on you cats!" cries Superman, smashing the corner of a building to pieces, "The University is next!" Behind him is a scene of utter carnage as club-wielding youths rampage through flaming buildings and wrecked vehicles. 'Superman himself calls the evil tune as THE PIED PIPER OF STEEL' reads the caption on this dynamic Neal Adams cover.
ACTION COMICS #398 features a pair of stories written by Leo Dorfman with artwork from the team of Curt Swan and Murph Anderson. The first story, THE PIED PIPER OF STEEL, replays the reassignment of Clark Kent from Daily Planet writer to "the first roving TV reporter in Metropolis".
Readers of SUPERMAN will have already seen Kent's new boss, Morgan Edge, abrasively instructing his employee to take on this new role in January 1971's #233, as Denny O'Neil's KRYPTONITE NEVERMORE storyline began to unfold--
But readers only buying ACTION COMICS in 1971 might have been unaware of such developments in its sister-title. Instead they were presented, for instance in the February issue, with an underwater monster-of-the-month yarn and endured yet another 'Imaginary Story' concerning a fanciful hypothesis about how the 'once mighty Superman' would be redundant in the future (the 1990s), confined to begging from a wheelchair--
The stories in the March issue offer a little more substance, the opening tale seeing Kent being given "a freaky set of wheels", a mobile TV studio from which he can transmit his reports--
"Times change," muses Kent, "and even Superman has to change along with them", the old square-bread electing to cover "the big thing now", a rock festival--
And so, eighteen months after the event itself, we find our hero invoking the name of Woodstock as he reports on "our nation's youth" attending the event-- I'm never too sure at moments like this whether the writers of such sequences expect their readership to identify themselves more with the attitudes of the stereotypical youths depicted or the starchy older generation, here characterised by Clark Kent, who inevitably disapprove of or even oppose them.
Kent interviews the festival's organiser, Cy Horkin, clearly intended as something of an absurd figure, an older man dressed in a younger man's clothes. And, we're also clued in to the fact this guy might be up to no good when we learn he left his former job as a "Science Professor at Central University" under a cloud-- recalling of course the cover image of Superman urging the mob to destroy a University building--
I'm also amused at Kent's attempts to speak like a younger person as he reports on the event, telling his viewers that the music is "really turning those youngsters on", before things take a more sinister turn and the audience starts becoming destructive--
Having saved the day, our hero shows up to cover another Festival a week later, announcing hilariously that the event is "out of sight!" as this time the audience seems compelled by the music to start "gulping everything in sight!"
"They've blown their minds!" he ponders to himself, observing once again bizarre behaviour seemingly in tune to the music's lyrics, before soaring to the rescue--
Of course, it's soon revealed that Horkin is indeed engaged in nefarious activities, using the music as a means of controlling the audience's minds with an "electronic brain" linked to the sound system to use what he calls "the lemming effect", in preparation for "the crime of the century"--
And sure enough, a few days later we find Kent covering a Festival being held at Horkin's former workplace--
"Break it up! Tear it down! Wipe it out!" chant the rock band calling themselves 'Satan's Angels', causing the brainwashed crowd to erupt immediately into violence--
But this time, the man from Krypton finds he too is 'gripped by an eerie compulsion', joining the mob in their destruction--
It's one of those popular scenarios in which the hero is temporarily transformed into a villain himself, so beloved of cover artists as a sure-fire way of attracting readers to a title, some other examples of which I looked at recently here--
Of course, things turn out all right by the end, and the story concludes (spoiler alert!) with Horkin locked up.
Curiously Superman exhibits a perverse alignment with the methods of psychological torture employed at Guantanamo Bay, chuckling at the sight of Horkin pleading for the loud rock music being blasted out over the public address system to be turned off, the prisoner even using the word "torture" to describe his ordeal--
The second story in #398 is a curious tale titled ominously SPAWN OF THE UNKNOWN. Again written by Dorfman under the pseudonym 'Geoff Brown' and illustrated by Swan and Anderson, this 'Untold Tale of the Fortress' begins with our hero coming face to face with 'an eerie menace, whose unspeakable power the Man of Steel has never faced before'.
Superman learns that the "plague which turns beasts into plants" is the result of a scientific experiment which Gamekeeper Ituru informs him was being carried out by a Professor Bruno. Confident that his efforts will "create life-forms such as the world has never seen", Bruno is typical of the kind of hubristic scientist so beloved of storytellers who find themselves "tampering with secrets no man should meddle with"--
Indeed, as is also so commonplace with such experiments, things don't go quite according to plan, an explosion causing Bruno's "hormone powder (to be) scattered everywhere", Ituru explains, asserting that "it was the cursed hormone that transmuted those beasts"--
And now it's time for Superman to be guilty of a touch of hubris himself, boasting that his "invulnerable body is immune to those hormone effects!" But Ituru warns him that he might not be correct in his assumption, directing him to a strange shape--
At which point we are forced to encounter what I genuinely feel is one of the most disturbing sights I've ever seen in comics, the sight of Supergirl herself "turned into a monstrosity"--
Even though I am reading this story for the first time fifty years after the date, in the knowledge that Supergirl will of course turn out to be fine by the end of the story, I can't help but feel a shiver of dread at this shocking sight-- The thought of the beautiful Linda Danvers transformed into this twisted shape, her body gnarled and elongated is troubling enough, but the way her face is rendered is truly nightmarish--
After the shock of this revelation we are given a reprieve of a couple of pages as Superman is called away temporarily to foil some looters in an Egyptian pyramid. Though this might be seen as little more than a meaningless distraction, it does allow sensitive readers like myself an opportunity to settle their nerves somewhat--
However, we cannot bury our heads in the sands of Egypt for too long, and must face up to the reality of Supergirl's fate, as indeed must the Man of Steel himself, racing back to try to help his "one super-companion in the world"--
Desperately Superman elects to uproot his fellow-Kryptonian, the action producing a disturbing "KREEEEEAAKKKK"--
And then what I find to be the most upsetting moment of all in this story-- Supergirl's arms break off with a "CRRRRACK" and a "SNAPPP"-- I've got to say that, despite all rationalthought, at this point I was genuinely worried-- how on earth could such a thing ever be resolved??
Imagine my relief then as the next page does indeed resolve matters, revealing that Supergirl was never actually in any danger, that the twisted shape wasn't her at all but a mutated plant which copies other lifeforms, imitating its surroundings as a means of "protective camouflage". After the Morlock-faced atrocity we've witnessed over the last few pages, Supergirl's radiant beauty shines out even more brightly here than usual, courtesy of Swan and Anderson's sensitive depiction--
And discovering that another plant has copied Superman himself, we find all's well that ends well, with "two new trophies" being added to the collection in the Secret Citadel--
And Superman's comment that he's glad his cousin is "alive and well" resounds with the reader too, for despite having never been in danger any actual danger whatsoever, we can't help but feel that on a more symbolic level she has survived a great ordeal, transformed figuratively into a hideous travesty of herself.
My thoughts on the first 2 parts of the SUPERMAN story arc KRYPTONITE NEVERMORE and on Kirby's JIMMY OLSEN #136 and FOREVER PEOPLE #1 can be found by clicking the covers below--
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