1976: Clark Kent, Get Out of My Life

It’s a lovely day in Metropolis as Clark Kent and Lois Lane enjoy a relaxing stroll, marred only slightly when a fellow pedestrian is fatally struck by a car mere feet away from them.  Lois wonders if the unfortunate fellow might require aid, but Clark reasons, “He’s beyond help now, Lois.  Say, I wonder if it’s going to rain?”

Proceeding contentedly to the park, the couple witnesses another distressing sight as a crashing airplane strikes a nearby foot bridge, annihilating a kite-flying youngster. Looking on the bright side, Clark notes, “At least the kite got away.”

Suddenly a terrified man runs up, desperately pleading for protection from mob enforcers.  For Pete’s sake, will our favorite couple never get a moment’s peace?

And then Clark wakes up.  Naturally, this has all been a dream, fueled by Clark’s guilt at having abandoned his superhero duties for a solid week.  In case you missed the previous two issues, an unexplained phenomenon has left our hero super-powerful only while dressed in his red-and-blue super suit, and powerless when dressed in civilian garb.  Reasoning (?) that this makes it too darned difficult to maintain a double life, he’s decided to spend the remainder of his existence in only one of his two identities.  For the past week, he’s lived exclusively as Clark Kent, mere mortal (if no longer mild-mannered) reporter.  But now it’s time to focus on being Superman full-time.

Lois has other plans; she’s outside Clark’s door even now, having arrived for a promised day of canoeing with her coworker turned boyfriend. “I know you’re in there,” she says. “You told the doorman to let me come up.”  Since we’ve seen everything Clark’s done since waking and we know he has NOT had a conversation with the doorman in that time, we’ll assume he left these instructions the night before.  In any event, Superman makes a hasty exit out the window, so when Lois has the doorman let her in, they find the place empty.  “I don’t know,” the doorman says. “I *thought* that was Mr. Kent’s voice on the building intercom just now…”  So I guess they did talk, even though there’s been no time for it to happen while we’ve been watching?  Maybe Clark had the conversation with the doorman in his sleep?  Whatever the case, he’s gone now, leaving Lois to wonder if maybe Clark isn’t paying her back for all the mean things she’s done to him over the years. 

Meanwhile next door, the mysterious “Mr. Xavier” — aka “Xviar” from an unnamed alien planet — waits until Clark’s apartment is empty and sneaks in for the third time in three issues, looking to steal certain articles of high-tech gear from Superman’s secret storage area.  Why this guy has to keep pilfering gadgets one at a time over the course of weeks instead of grabbing everything all at once is anyone’s guess, but anyway we need to check in on this sub-plot as a reminder of Xviar’s existence.  (We know it’s him because he’s still wearing the same lemon yellow suit he’s had on since landing on Earth twenty years ago.)

Oblivious to all this skullduggery, Superman is settling in at his arctic Fortress of Solitude, where he intends to while away any downtime in his shift as a 24/7 superhero.  “Chess with my super-computers…collecting animals from all over the galaxy…space exploration – the life for a full-time Superman!” 

First, however, he needs to check his “World Crisis Monitor System” to make sure no situation requires his intervention. Unfortunately, it’s on the fritz.  He quickly concludes this is due to a solar flare and flies to the sun to resolve the issue, coincidentally also solving the problem of a new-on-the-scene costumed character who’s designed a solar-powered costume to collect the rays of the sun and give himself Superman-like powers. But is he friend or foe?

Meanwhile in a Metropolis courthouse, the legal team prosecuting Intergang is at a loss to explain the absence of their star witness Clark Kent.  Superman knows this but is unconcerned, vowing “I’ll only show up there as Clark Kent if I’m certain there’s not sufficient evidence to convict!”  This seems a fairly callous attitude given how important busting up Intergang was to him a mere week ago, not to mention the fact that Superman is supposedly dedicated to the cause of justice.  We can only assume he’s keeping open the possibility that Clark Kent will never reappear *at all* given the legal ramifications the reporter could face for blowing off a court-ordered appearance.  Also, note this means that Superman not only scheduled a canoeing date with Lois on a day he *knew* he’d no longer be Clark Kent, but he also scheduled it on a day he was supposed to appear in court.  Obviously effective time management is not one of his super powers.

Resuming his patrol, Superman foils a bank robbery by grabbing the getaway car and shaking out the crooks and their loot, but the latter flies up, up and away into the pockets of that mysterious costumed character we saw earlier, now revealed as a villain who calls himself “Solarman,” and who teleports (or super-speeds?) from the scene.  No matter; the villain will meet his comeuppance in good time, reasons Superman, and until then there’s no shortage of tasks to keep a superhero busy.  Indeed, when he craves a moment of downtime with his friends, their attitude is basically, “Shouldn’t you be working?”

At last comes the inevitable showdown with Solarman, and for a while the neophyte villain seems to be on the winning side of things, until his sun-powered suit suddenly malfunctions and nearly roasts him alive.  It turns out Superman has deliberately taken a beating to prolong the fight and give the suit time to overload with energy. Now he strips it off his foe and hurls it into space, where it explodes. 

“If there’s one thing my encounter today proved,” muses Superman, “it’s that as long as there are power-mad men like this clown around, this world will always need a Superman! And now…I have concluded whose life is more important to me…that of Superman or Clark Kent!  I’ll do what I must!”

Which identity has he chosen?  You’ll have return for next month’s conclusion to find out.

This was another fun chapter in an enjoyable storyline, but honestly there’s a sense of “business as usual” to the super-feats that’s a bit of a comedown from last month’s thrills of seeing Clark Kent stand up for himself at the office or make out with Lois Lane.  In a strange twist for some of us young readers who always wished for “more Superman,” it turns out maybe Clark is the more interesting guy after all, at least when allowed room to breathe.  The highlight of the issue is clearly the comical opening dream sequence, which indeed takes “cover image” honors instead of the climactic battle with the nominal “villain of the piece.” (As far as I know, this is the one and only appearance of Solarman.)

Things move along at a rapid clip, with Maggin and Bates exhibiting a mastery of clever dialog that makes for fun reading. Jimmy’s callous disregard for Superman’s feelings admittedly seems a bit out of character, given how much importance he’s placed on their friendship in the past, but it’s necessary to drive home the point of the story.  It also echoes an earlier scene where Superman finds himself lost in Lois’ beauty even though her heart and mind are 100% focused on the fate of the missing Clark Kent, accentuating the fact that romance as well as friendship is perhaps not a realistic option for a full-time Superman.

Over 20 years into the job, Curt Swan is still at the top of his game here, with Bob Oksner adding a polish and glamour to faces and figures as well as a sharp precision to background architecture, furniture and vehicles.

The only real damper on all this fun is that the cover price has quietly (sneakily?)  swelled a full nickel from the month before to reach the princely sum of 30 cents.  By this point, DC and I were well into a vicious cycle where they’d raise prices and I’d threaten to abandon the hobby before giving in and plunking down the extra change anyway.  We’d been through this already with the hike from 20 cents to a quarter and will all too soon repeat the process when the price climbs to 35 cents.  Part of me always wondered if they hadn’t timed this four-part saga (a fairly rare occurrence for the super-books of the day) to perfectly overlap the price hike, making it that much harder for me to walk away. Anyway, in retrospect it seems silly to quibble over a nickel given that I could’ve bought four Doc Savage novels in 1976 for what a single issue of Superman costs today, but as a 10-year-old, the struggle was real.