Action Comics #596 (January 1988)
Action Comics #596 (January 1988)
After Superman accidentally kills half the city of Smallville by defeating a Manhunter robot called Dr. Whitney who was secretly controlling them (in Adventures #436), the supernatural entity known as The Spectre shows up to help rescue the souls of all those people. Spectre sends Superman to a limbo dimension where the ghosts of the Smallvillians are trapped, but then he comes across the ghost of Dr. Whitney as well. The robot says something like, “What’s the matter, Superman? You didn’t know machines could have souls, too?”
It then turns out that, no, machines can’t have souls, because that’s silly. This wasn’t a limbo dimension and the people weren’t really dead – the Manhunters created this illusion to keep Superman entertained while the rest of the Millennium crossover unfolds in other comics. With this information in hand, The Spectre manages to kill Dr. Whitney and the “dead” people wake up from their slumber, with no memory of what happened.
Character-Watch:
The Spectre is another Jerry Siegel creation (the man loved underpants) whose shtick is that in every issue he kills the villain in some fittingly gruesome way. In this case, he just makes Dr. Whitney explode into a heap of garbage. Not his most creative kill, I gotta say.
Plotline-Watch:
That’s pretty much the end of the “Manhunters in Smallville” storyline, though the Millennium tie-in issues continue. Also, it’s been barely a year since the new continuity began and there are already a couple of retcons:
In Man of Steel #1 we’re told that a freak storm kept Ma and Pa Kent stranded in their farm for months right after they found Superman’s spaceship, so that’s why no one thought it was weird that they suddenly had a baby (there isn’t much to do when you’re trapped in a farm for nearly a year). Now it turns out the Manhunters created that convenient storm in an attempt to trap Superman’s ship.
In MoS #6 Lana tells Superman she spent ten years following him around the world, obsessed with him after learning his secret. Now we find out that was actually part of her subliminal Manhunter programming – so it was the robots who made her a stalker, you see.
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