Action Comics #585 (February 1987)

Superman (and guest-star the Phantom Stranger, who is a phantom and likes hats) vs. a graveyard. Not the bodies in the cemetery turned into ghosts and zombies singing jazz, but the actual physical land where they’re buried. But before that: Superman vs. Arathaza, the sensational character find of 1987! She’s a magic lady who drains Superman’s life force and makes him look so old, he was instantly appointed for an important position in the US government.

Superman defeats her by playing dead (not terribly difficult in his present condition), which means Arathaza’s magic staff can’t drain power from him anymore, so he’s able to destroy it with those feeble Mr. Burns muscles of his. Without the staff, Arathaza turns into regular secretary Barb Kowaleski, Superman returns to normal, and the giant city she’d conjured up in the sky is destroyed. What Superman doesn’t notice (but we do, because the Phantom Stranger is narrating everything that happens in this issue in John Byrne-ian detail) is that as the debris from the castle evaporates, all that’s left is an evil-looking gem, which falls in the middle of a graveyard that, we’re told, is exclusively populated by the corpses of shitty people. Eh, it’ll probably be fine.

As Superman arrives in Clark Kent’s apartment, he finds the Stranger chilling on his office chair. He’s here to recruit Superman for an important “task,” but Superman points out that 1) he’s not very effective against non-punch-based problems (and especially magic-based ones), and 2) he’s super tired right now, so he invites the Stranger to go bug Dr. Fate or someone like that. The Stranger isn’t swayed by Superman’s arguments and transports him to the site of the “task,” which turns out to be “fighting a huge tornado made of graveyard dirt and evilness.” Like, full-page huge.

Gotta admit that does sound like a job for Superman.

While Superman figures out how to keep the tornado away from Metropolis (spoilers: via punching), the Stranger goes into the mystical realm inside it and faces the evil ghosts causing all this trouble. They claim they’re the victims of this whole situation, even though they’re the ones who killed and terrorized a bunch of innocent people, got themselves buried in the worst graveyard in the world, and are now about to destroy a city. I hope no one minds me saying this, but these evil graveyard ghosts kinda suck.

In the end, the Stranger finds that evil crystal and defeats the ghosts with the help of the spirits of the innocents they murdered, causing the tornado to come to a dead stop. Superman, following the Stranger’s instructions, grabs that giant chunk of dirt and throws it into space. When the heroes are back on Earth, Superman destroys the gem and asks the Stranger to tell him what the hell just happened. Phantom Stranger: “No, I don’t think I will.”

(But only because they’re on the last page; you know Byrne would have added two more pages of explanations if they’d let him.)

Plotline-Watch:

• They’re Called Illusions: This is the first issue that mentions the fact that Superman’s second biggest weakness is magic, though Superman is already aware of that at this time (presumably there was an earlier adventure where he was defeated by an assortment of little fairies and forest dwarfs). This would later be chalked up to his Kryptonian ancestors being so into technology that they never even knew what magic was.

• Is Arathaza our first Gal Who Never Showed Up Again? I think she is. Don Sparrow sez: “We don’t get any information on what happened to Barb Kowaleski after her powers are stripped from her, though DC.fandom.com asserts she was able to get away with her crimes, blaming the stone for her actions, something I don’t see within the actual issue. Just another untouched character for Max and I to bring back once DC comes to their senses and puts us in charge of the Superman mythos.” Yes, please. I wanna write the scene where Barb comes back to her secretary job acting like she didn’t just try to kill everyone with a magic staff the day before.

• This is also our second instance of Superman Throwing His Problems Into Orbit, after Professor Vale’s lab in Superman #1. And just like the lab, this decision’s gonna come back to bite him in the ass (though it was the Stranger’s decision this time, not Superman’s).

• Death-Watch: I’m gonna start keeping track of all the (fake) clues that foreshadow the Death of Superman storyline, which I see as the culmination of many running plotlines. The first one was Luthor saying “One day you’re going to die” to Superman after their first meeting in MoS #4. At the end of this one, Phantom Stranger says “Death isn’t as definitive as we tend to think” and Superman replies “Really?”. Ironically, the same Kryptonian science that made Superman vulnerable to the flying graveyard monster will bring him back to life.

WTF-Watch:

In this issue we clearly see the Twin Towers in Metropolis, which is sometimes based on New York City. However, on the previous month Superman fought the Teen Titans, who live in the real New York. Does that mean there are four Twin Towers in the DC Universe? Or two now, I guess? Did they take down the Metropolis pair after 2001 because they were in bad taste? And finally, why am I still single?

Art-Watch (by @donsparrow):

We start with the cover, and it’s Ok—certainly representative of the story within, but not a lot of pizzazz, so it feels a little like a strange decision—though I suppose they couldn’t really put the decaying dead from inside the story on the cover.  Even choosing a more obscure character like the Phantom Stranger in such an early issue of a run is a bold choice—starting with a then-hot-seller like the Teen Titans I get, but pretty early on we’re seeing John Byrne just following his bliss.   Not a complain, really, just an observation.  Though it sounds like it could be from the book of Revelation, the quote on the cover is actually from an 1837 Thomas Ingoldsby poem called “The Ghost”.  Adding to the lore is that there was no Thomas Ingoldsby, he was instead a pen name of Richard Harris Barham, a cleric of the Church of England. And now you know the rest of the story!

We’re greeted with a first page splash that reads like something out of the Twilight Zone, with the usually inscrutable Phantom Stranger playing host to us, the audience, like a superheroic Rod Serling.  But it’s an extremely clever way of visually handling the credits for the comic.

Throughout this issue, Byrne seems to favour using completely black inks to render the Phantom Stranger’s suit.  I always think of him wearing all navy, but it’s one of those colouring questions from the four-colour era—is it blue, or is it a way of rendering black?  Like Superman’s hair—we know it’s black, but until the Ordway era of using mainly gray to shade it, blue is the standard.  Or the similarly dressed character The Spirit—the wonderful Darwyn Cooke would have characters refer to his blue suit thoughout his all-too-brief, satisfying DC run on the character (characters referring to him as “mister blue” or often “Gainsborough”), but then in the abominable film directed by Frank Miller, his understanding was that the Spirit’s costume was always black.  I tend to favour the idea that the Stranger wears a suit of navy that matches his cloak, but sound off in the comments about how you imagine the character, if he really were to exist.

From there we’re thrown in pretty quickly to the climax of a battle between Superman and Arathaza, who is certainly in the mold of a John Byrne female villain design—lots of skin, improbable hair, and a mix of drapery and technology. There are two observations I’d make about this character: one, her gauntlet predates Image’s Witchblade by some years, but sure looks similar to me, and when we get a close up shot of the character, she reminded me of rubber-faced comedic actress Melanie Chartoff, who I’d know best as Principal Musso from Parker Lewis Can’t Lose.

[Max: Does this mark the first Parker Lewis Can’t Lose reference in this blog’s existence? Hard to believe.]

Seeing Superman so completely drained he stumbles as a wizened old man is pretty hard to take in, but this entire chapter only serves as prelude to the rest of the story, the further adventures of the Sherabite Stone.

The shot of Superman arriving home to his Clark Kent apartment, and finding the Phantom Stranger waiting for him is a good one, and again, a trope Byrne seems to like (as we’ll see in a few months when Scott Free comes home to Darkseid seated on his couch). [Max: He’s not just seated, Don. He’s chilling.]

The three-panel sequence of Superman facing the living graveyard, switching from fear, to resolve, to bravery is a great one, even with the over-the-top narration from Phantom Stranger.

As the monster’s path continues, Byrne does a good job of creating a sense of hurricane-like motion, while still making it clear that the mass isn’t exactly solid, which is tough line to straddle.  

The Phantom Stranger’s collection of random innocents manages to show different walks of life without veering too far into caricature (though the farmer is awful close).  The panel of the Phantom Stranger reaching out of the ground to grasp Superman’s arm is a dramatic one.  Lastly, there’s something pleasingly unnerving about seeing the Phantom Stranger smile, even if he’s not as serious as the Spectre most of the time.  

SPEEDING BULLETS:

• Dowdy bored secretary Barb Kowaleski becoming formidably attractive and powerful Arathaza is very much from the 80s playbook. John Byrne did the same, randomly, in his run on Sensational She-Hulk, with the dowdy, middle-aged Louise Mason character (herself once the golden age heroine the Blonde Phantom) getting rejuvenated in the Mole Man’s vat of chemicals (in Sensational She-Hulk #33, and I won’t bore you with how long it took me to find that particular story) before reverting by choice, or the Outsiders’ Looker, who was originally mousy bank teller Emily Briggs, until a transformative encounter with Halley’s Comet (no, really).  It was such a trope that Louise Mason herself comments on it in a typical fourth wall She-Hulk gag.

• I do like that Superman initially resists the Phantom Stranger, and his “oh, for Pete’s sake!” is a pretty wholesome reaction to being drafted, magically, for this task.

• GODWATCH: depending which multiple choice origin you adhere to, the Phantom Stranger of this era might be Isaac, a character who paid a Roman soldier to allow him to scourge Jesus Christ (the idea of the Stranger being Judas Iscariot himself came much later, in the New 52 era, and goes a bit too far for my tastes) so his very presence as “the wandering Jew” is something of a Godwatch, but Superman also lets out a “Good Lord!” when he realizes the mass of earth he’s been fighting has a mind.   Stranger also refers to the ghosts running the clump of ground as “unholy”, and finally, Stranger’s explanation that there are many forces that can be stronger that death, Superman, love can be one…” feels like theology 101 to me.  

• Readers should note that Superman only shoves this chunk of earth into orbit around the sun, rather than into the sun itself.  This will matter in future issues.

• The black diamond reminds me of Eclipso’s similarly magic jewel, but the the Sherabite Stone’s function seems a lot more like the pure evil green orb from the uneven Heavy Metal animated movie.

And, just for fun, to spice up these Retro Reviews, I’m thinking that I’ll try to do a drawing for the ones with guest stars, or something else I feel like drawing.  So for this week, here’s my version of the Phantom Stranger.  I opted for the traditional navy look, but I wanted to reference the haunting smile from this issue as well.

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