Action Comics #656 (August 1990)
Action Comics #656 (August 1990)
Soul Search, Part 1: SUPERMAN GOES TO HELL! Or, like, to a place with fire and demons and stuff, because they don’t specifically call it the H-word. But you get the idea.
On Adventures #469’s cliffhanger, Jerry White and Jimmy Olsen got shot: Jerry for pissing off some drug dealers and Jimmy just for being there, being Jimmy. The doctors say the kids should be getting better since no major organs were damaged, but instead they’re mysteriously getting worse. Clark Kent is consoling Perry White and his wife at the hospital when a black man in a knight armor and skis walks through the wall and talks to him.
“Shouldn’t have taken that mescaline before coming here.”
That, of course, is none other than the Black Racer (last seen in Superman #35), who is also the cousin of Jerry’s ex-girlfriend, but that coincidence is irrelevant to the story and not mentioned here. Anyway, the Racer tells Superman that Jimmy and Jerry’s souls have been stolen and taken to another plane of existence (the non-Hell mentioned above) – Superman is transported there through the Black Racer’s black powers, but then the Black Racer has to go run some black errands or something, so Supes is on his own.
Once he’s in sorta-Hell, Superman saves a sexy woman from a big satanic dog… a favor she repays by betraying Superman and spitting lava on him, because it turns out she’s Blaze, the lady who runs this dimension. Superman emerges from a river of lava even more pissed off than he was before, swearing that he won’t leave this place until he has kicked Blaze’s butt and saved Jimmy and Jerry.
…well, one of them, anyway.
Character-Watch:
This is Blaze’s first appearance in her demonic form, but she appeared before as Angelica Blaze, Jerry’s boss and the one who caused him to get shot. However, that’s not exactly her first appearance either: not only will we find out that Blaze was responsible for another villain that goes back to the Byrne era, but we’ve also seen the human form of her brother in these pages recently.
Plotline-Watch:
This storyline has an interesting pedigree: Alan Moore was the one who originally suggested that Superman should visit Hell back in the mid-‘80s (before he decided that all of DC should go there instead), and Neil Gaiman actually wrote a script about it in 1989, for the last issue of Action Comics Weekly, but it wasn’t published because of a continuity problem (it eventually came out in 2000 as Green Lantern/Superman: Legend of the Green Flame, when DC was desperate for more Gaiman material to print).
Also, isn’t it weird that a story about Superman and demons started on Action #656? I have a theory that they wanted to start it in #666, but they pushed it ahead because the events here will trigger an important plotline about Luthor, and they didn’t wanna wait for that. More plots:
Clark Kent only finds out Jimmy got shot after he arrives from his Smallville smooching trip with Lois, because they didn’t have Facebook back then (though I’m pretty sure Clark would have blocked Jimmy by now). I do like the slow process of how everyone finds out the bad news: it kinda reminds me of the better parts of “Funeral for a Friend.”
The Misadventures of Jose Delgado: Jose is taking this pretty badly, since he and Jerry have been pals since they both debuted on this comic in the same issue, back in 1987. Jose unhangs his old nunchakus and goes out as Gangbuster to find out who shot Jerry and punch his face in. As he investigates, he sees Angelica Blaze being interrogated by Detective Slam Bradley and gets a bad feeling about her.
Someone else who’s bummed out about Jerry: Lex Luthor? Lex is yelling at Dr. Kelley for giving him some bad news (we’ll find out soon what they are), when he hears about Jerry on TV and gets all sad. What could Luthor possibly have to do with the son of Perry White? You know, the guy whose wife he had an affair with right before Jerry was born? Pretty weird.
Meanwhile, no one cares about Jimmy. Just as it should be.