I think his invention of Power Girl is his biggest contribution to the Superman line.

He also had a hand in writing Superboy out of the Legion and me dropping the title for nearly two years.

He did write a few good stories over the years, but I can't say I'm a fan.

November 1975



Superman #296: I'm going to discuss this in some length in the notes section, because this is - somewhat unexpectedly, I think, and probably not entirely by design - a watershed issue for Superman and the Superman line of comics. But for now, let's just do the synopsis. Another alien agent shows up on Earth. We see him settle in many years ago, when Clark was still Superboy. Now, in the present, he's finally ready to make his move. He does... something... that causes Superman to develop a strange split personality: He now only has his powers when he's in his Superman costume. If he's wearing anything else at all, he has no powers and is just Clark Kent. He barely survives a few encounters, including an attack by an Intergang robot, and starts to think he might need to make a decision: Either Clark or Superman full time. But both just no longer works. Meanwhile! We learn that the alien has been hired to destroy Earth, and somehow he's planning to use Superman to accomplish this. TO BE CONTINUED!! My Grade: B+. Much more below.

Action Comics #456: A shark turns a kid into goo, then transforms into a weird shark-man. His name: The Shark! No crap. Turns out he's an old Green Lantern villain, which they explain, from issue #23, which they do not explain and which I had to google. Thanks for nothing, Julie Schwartz. Superman realizes that The Shark somehow drained the evolution part of the kid's DNA and used it to evolve himself, so Supes decides to capture The Shark and force him to swap the DNA back. Which Superman does by threatening to murder him! Wow, Supes, that seems a little strong! But it works. THE END! In the backup, Ollie is answering the phones at a telethon when a team of angry clowns whip out guns and take everyone hostage. Black Canary breaks it up, but ends up getting stuck with the bad guys inside a helicopter, along with one of their hostages. To Be Continued! My Grade: B-. Grell art in the backup and a brief appearance by Captain Strong get this a slight grade bump from a C+.

Superman Family #175: Speaking of Gerry Conway! Look who just showed up as writer on Lois Lane. Hmm. I have my doubts that he can keep up the legacy of craziness Lois has developed over the past several years, but we'll see. A building catches fire. A fireman says the towering inferno was caused by a ghostly figure, but Lois pooh-poohs it, because weird thing just never happen in Metropolis. Morgan Edge shows up and foists his obnoxious niece on Lois, setting up a subplot where the niece is trying to discredit Lois. Lois gives her the slip and goes to interview a guy who, as luck would have it, just randomly happens to be the ghostly guy who caused the fire. What fortune. She contacts Superman and Superman battles the dude, but it goes wrong - the guy merges with Superman and takes over his body. Superman manages to free himself, and the guy flies off to attack Washington DC. Lois discovers a tiny flaw in the bad guy's plan: The process that gave him powers is also going to cause him to explode. Whoops! Superman talks the guy into blowing up away from Washington - and we learn that Edge's niece was just pretending to be a biznatch while she was actually working on a puff piece hagiography of Lois. THE END! My Grade: B-. Solid I guess. But kind of boring compared to most Lois stories.


Notes: I was asked a while ago if I am grading these stories on a curve. The answer is yes, but I've realized the curve isn't necessarily about the quality of the stories so much as it is about the ambition of the stories. So few Superman stories during this period show any ambition that any kind of real spark gets a thumbs up from me. For instance, last issue, the Kamandi thing wasn't that great, but it showed a much higher level of ambition than most of these stories, which is enough to feel very refreshing in this watered down, derivative era.

Well, this month's issue has a ton of ambition. It also is a much better crafted story than most. But it does still have a few old school elements clinging to it that hold it back slightly. One is the alien infiltrator bit, which we have seen dozens of times just in the last few years alone. Plus, Julie - and I am going to pin this on editorial, as I think Julie is the genesis of this - has a tendency to recycle ideas. When he has one he likes, he has his guys develop multiple permutations of it. So this issue we get both the "hired alien killer planning to use Superman as his unwitting weapon," which we got previously in Action #444, as well as the "Superman's costume is the key to his powers," which we kinda got just last issue, in a different way.

But those niggling details aside, it's clear that this story - which was co-written by Maggin and Bates - has a bigger scope and broader ambition than any they have attempted before. This is the first part of a saga that will run for four issues, #296-299, ending just in time to clear the decks for the special anniversary story in #300.

It's also the final swan song for the Maggin and Bates era. #300, as it turns out, is their final issue as regular writers on Action and Superman. Though they will return for occasional fill-ins, they're about to be displaced and replaced by Gerry Conway starting with #301. Whether or not they knew this when they were working on this storyline is unclear; Conway was already at DC at this point, so it's possible the wheels had already been put in motion.

Either way, this story is a fitting end to their tenure, while also curiously being a perfect segue into the new, more modern storytelling style that would soon replace the old fashioned style they had been forced to work with. Firstly, it's one of the earliest multi-part sagas in Superman's history. Prior to this, we had the Denny O'Neil Sand Superman saga that kicked off the relaunch. Before that, though, stories lasting even two issues were rare, and story arcs that went longer than two issues were almost unheard of. The only one I know of for sure is the amnesia storyline in Action #371-375.

Starting with this story, though, Superman - along with most DC titles - would be slowly moving towards a more Marvel-ized storytelling paradigm, featuring longer running sagas. And DC would also be moving to an editorially mandated focus on character as the driving force of their stories rather than plot (something I will get into in more detail when we reach 1976). This Clark Kent/Superman story in Superman #296-299 presages both of those changes, setting the stage perfectly for the arrival of a Marvel guy like Conway. Maggin and Bates fell kind of like John the Baptist to me here.

Or perhaps its more fitting to compare them to Moses: They get to see the promised land but never enter it. It's interesting to speculate what the two might have been able to do if they had been allowed to fully write in the Marvel style rather than being stuck in what was basically a Silver Age series simply given a "modern" gloss. It's hard to say, but this saga is the closest thing they ever really got to do.

I'll be doing a bigger post-mortem, of course, on their era once Superman #300 rolls around. But with this seminal story, we're seeing the beginning of the end of an era - and glimpsing a little bit of what the new era has in store.

On a side note, despite the fact that I have had a lot of complaints about the aggressive simplicity of the DC covers, I quite like this one. For once, the empty space feels like an intentional and effective design choice rather than a byproduct of a misguided desire to simply things for an apparently idiotic and blind fanbase. The all-white background helps make this stand out, rather than blend in. The Clark walking away figure also reminds me of X-Men #138, for whatever that's worth.

Speaking of covers, the similarity between the cover of Action #456 and the poster for Jaws is obviously not a coincidence. Given that this came out in November 1975 and required at least a couple months lead time, it would seem DC decided almost immediately in the summer of 1975 to try and cash in on the shark craze spawned by the wild popularity of Jaws. This issue is about as fast as they could have turned something like that around. The cover is also one of the few times, I think, where we see an adult Superman drawn by Mike Grell.

Finally, Gerry Conway's debut on Lois Lane was tame, but there was one part that struck me as bizarre. So, the bad guy is going to blow up in a giant nuclear explosion. Superman's response is to trick the guy into blowing himself up away from Washington in an attempt to kill Superman instead. It works. But... is making the guy commit suicide really Superman's plan? I mean, he makes no attempt to, you know.... help the guy or cure him. Not very super. And in the same month he threatened to murder The Shark. Not a great month for Truth, Justice and the American Way. But the Comedian would love it!

I think I've abandoned more projects due to similar circumstances.

I am so sorry

1976! The bicentennial! And the dawn of an entirely new and very different era for both DC Comics in general and the Superman family specifically, as the year began with a seismic event that would radically reshape the company: The firing of Carmine Infantino and the hiring of Jenette Kahn.

The importance of this cannot be overstated. Nor can the shock of it. Comics were a notorious good ol' boys club, dominated by lifers like Infantino (and at Marvel, Stan Lee) who had been around since the dawn of the genre. In January, 1976, though, Infantino was sacked (though he says he resigned - I don't know which version is true). Even more surprising than Infantino's firing was who they hired to replace him - Kahn, who at the time was 28 and had no experience at all in comics.

That's not to say she didn't know comics; she grew up reading them. But reading them and publishing them are two different things. In the long term, of course, we know she went on to have a huge influence on the comic world, as she helped create the direct market, was at the forefront of granting expanded rights to creators, brought in talents like Frank Miller Alan Moore to reshape DC, and oversaw the creation of Vertigo.

In the short term, though, her arrival had a more subtle but no less important effect, as her first order of business was a new creative direction for the company. She mandated that going forward, DC's stories would be character driven, rather than plot driven. Or, as fans of the time saw it, DC would become Marvelized.

Just how directly this impacted the Superman line of comics is a little hard to say. Kahn came on the job at the end of January. Given the lead time for books, the earliest she possibly could have had an impact would have been maybe - maybe - the April issues. Is it a coincidence that April, 1976 was the first month to feature Gerry Conway as the new writer on Superman?

Well, maybe. I don't know, but my guess is that Conway had already been slated to join Julius Schwartz's stable of writers after the success of Superman Vs. The Amazing Spider-Man. Either way, though, the arrival of a major Marvel writer on DC's flagship book at the same time the company shifted to Marvel style, character driven stories, has to be seen as a watershed moment for the Superman line of comics.

We won't see that change for a few more months, of course, with Superman #301 in April. But the seeds of everything to come from here forward were sewn in January with the arrival of Jenette Kahn and her - thankfully - more modern and more progressive viewpoint.

Change came very, very slowly to DC. But in 1976 it finally arrived for good.

I've always wanted to know more about Kahn. So many pivotal decisions for DC and its characters happened under her watch, yet she doesn't get discussed all that often.

Very glad to see you deciding to shine the spotlight on this critical changing of the guard.

There's an excellent issue of Back Issue magazine that spotlights Jeanette Khan's career and her taking over at DC. She may not have been experienced publishing comics, but she had experience as publisher of a children's magazine-Dynamite I believe if I remember the article correctly, which blossomed under her regime, expanding sales and circulation into educational institutions at a time when other mags of its type were dying on the vine. That was what the higher ups were looking at, someone who new how to rejuvenate the moribund sales at DC and sell things to kids-not sure that's what they got, but Jeanette's impact at DC was profound on so many levels.

-M

Edit to add-here's an online preview of that issue of Back Issue #57

Back Issue 57

Only slightly off topic, because this sounds like the best place to put this: I was legitimately surprised (though i guess I shouldn't have been) when I realized that criticisms regarding rising prices have been around forever. Ideally, prices would only rise due to natural inflation (otherwise we're losing out on production costs), but comics has seen a unique (I think) combination of increasing production quality and decreasing audience numbers. At the end of the day I do think companies are pricing themselves at the most profit-maximizing price points (as such as can exist in a non-perfectly competitive market), but I don't doubt for a second they would lower the prices significantly if they thought it meant the readers would return in equal measure.