Adventures of Superman #425 (February 1987)

More like Adventures of Professor Hamilton, because he’s the real protagonist of this issue. Also, he’s insane, and tries to kill Superman and a lady of the streets. Unironically, the beginning of a beautiful friendship!

We start with Hamilton trying to convince Lex Luthor of the importance of his latest invention, a force field powerful enough to contain, say, a superpowered alien from planet Krypton who wears his undies on the outside. However, Luthor already knows about the force field – because he owns it, since Hamilton worked for a LexCorp subsidiary and doesn’t read contracts very carefully.

Luthor kicks Hamilton out of his office and then has his goons beat him up for good measure. Ham seems to get a break when a company shows interest in the force field and finances its construction, and the Professor is so thankful that he… pulls a gun and shoots at one the executives?! You know, after trapping him in a force field, to demonstrate its effectiveness! This completely sane demonstration shockingly backfires when someone sabotages the machine, killing the executive and making Hamilton look like he’s dangerously irresponsible and a murderer. Only one of those things is true. (So far.)

This is when the story picks up from the end of Adventures #424, with Superman still fighting those terrorist robots from Qurac, which have combined to form a larger robot, like Voltron. Superman is about to win when Hamilton butts in and traps him and the terrorist Megazord in a force field, desperate to prove the effectiveness of his machine. Superman beats the robot despite that annoying interference and everyone cheers him, but no one gives a shit about Hamilton.

Dejected, Hamilton goes (even more) nuts: he kidnaps a “strumpet” at gunpoint, lays traps for Superman in the street, and tells him he’ll let his busty friend live if Superman dies by his inventions. That’ll get him the love and recognition he craves. Great plan!

When Superman manages to elude the traps, Hamilton decides to blow up his machine and kill all three of them. Superman jumps on top of the machine to save Hamilton from the explosion and collapses, which is the point when Hamilton realizes that, you know what, this Superman fellow is alright. 

Hamilton gives up and goes to jail, and the issue ends when we see that he’d been narrating his entire story to a cop outside his cell… who, naturally, wasn’t even listening and doesn’t give a shit either. (But Jerry Ordway did, so Hamilton will be back in the future.)

Plotline-Watch:

• Qurac My Love: The Middle-Eastern country of Qurac had been mentioned in an issue of New Teen Titans before, but they definitely didn’t have giant killer robots back then. Superman would pay them a visit in a few issues and go all Desert Storm on them. After that, they became the DC Universe’s go-to location for when they needed a terrorist nation but didn’t feel like being sued by Iraq or something.

• When Superman enters the robot, he finds out the terrorists had been powering it with their life forces and they use up all their remaining juice to blow themselves up in Superman’s face. That’s sad, but also, gotta admit that’s some impressive tech, especially for a country like Qurac. We’ll find out where they got it from in a couple of issues, which will open a whole other can of worms.

WTF-Watch:

More of a WTF in hindsight: in a few years Professor Hamilton would become Superman’s comically absent-minded scientific advisor, but in this issue he’s a fucking nutjob. He starts out with good intentions but by the end of the issue he flat-out tries to blow up a perfectly innocent prostitute. On the other hand, I can see why Superman would want to keep a close eye on the guy.

Art-Watch (by @donsparrow):

We start with the cover, and it’s a stunner from Jerry Ordway, who seems to be working as hard as he can to match John Byrne’s marquee status on this title.  Best of all, it actually appears in the issue.  In these early issues, Ordway’s Superman can veer into Stallone territory, but for the most part, he looks a lot like the more realistic version of The Mighty Hercules (which also inspired Bruce Timm’s take on the character).

The art throughout this issue is a treat, as it’s a rare time when Ordway inks himself.  Ordway later divulged (in TwoMorrow’s Modern Masters book) that Marv Wolfman’s scripts for these issues were frequently late or last minute, so the self-inking wasn’t an aesthetic choice, it was one based on deadlines.  But as a lover of Ordway’s hatch-y, zip-a-tone-y inkwork, it’s a joy.  The opening splash of Professor Hamilton is so well drawn that I don’t care that it’s a man in his late fifties holding a cane.

Inside the book we get more of that dissonance between the superbooks that defines these early, less connected issues.  I can’t see John Byrne’s Luthor wearing a green, three-piece suit, nor can I imagine him saying “everything in moderation” even ironically.  However, his coldness as he takes away everything Hamilton has created with a single sentence is pretty on-model.  The early section of Hamilton’s woes are all well-drawn, with Ordway bringing as much action and dynamism as he can to a story about a mostly unknown older man dealing with patent litigation.  

The story kicks into another gear when Superman is battling the scorpion robot, which looks completely consistent and realistic throughout the story.   Wolfman is working overtime to establish that this post-Crisis Superman isn’t the old version that could snuff out suns with a sneeze (the electrocution looks particularly painful) but the cumulative effect of it is that we’re mostly seeing Superman get his butt kicked.

It’s a small panel, but the image of Superman snapping his restraints is a great one.   Though Ordway is credited as the only artist on this issue, not every page looks like he was inking himself.  The page featuring the moment Superman shouts at Professor Hamilton bears the thick outlining I’d associate with Terry Beatty, who inks some of these early issues.   Ordway does a more than capable job of illustrating the blast by blast progress Superman makes against the robot, but the script is so dense and thought bubble heavy you almost get a sense these panels are serving the heavy dialogue rather than what would work best visually.

Beside the slightly sexy glimpse of Lois Lane in sleepwear, is that a gentleman caller with Alice from the Daily Planet?  It sure looks like her! [Max: I’m just happy to see her sleeping on a bed.]

SPEEDING BULLETS:

• I’m a big fan of Marv Wolfman, but re-reading these issues, I have to say this doesn’t seem like his best plotting, but there sure is a lot of it.  We get Emil Hamilton’s entire backstory with Lex Luthor, plus Superman fighting the Transformer-like Quaraci robots, and then Superman running Hamilton’s gauntlet, all with the bookended prison framing.

• I’m not fully clear on who it was that sabotaged Hamilton’s demonstration by snipping the power cords at crucial moments.  The cuffs appear brown, so maybe it was the guy accusing him of blowing the money, but he doesn’t get a name.  We can assume Luthor’s behind it all, but again, it isn’t stated outright in the moment, only in the captions over the gauntlet section, which could easily be missed.  

• GODWATCH: Lots here.  As Superman is blasted by a plasma cannon, he thinks “Lord, my bones feel like they’ve been squeezed into a vise” in pain.  Later, as he realizes the fanaticism of the Quraci splinter cell, he twice invokes God in his shock at the lengths they’ll go to and what a waste of life this battle was.

• A nice callback to the first Reeve Superman film, as Superman reminisces about Pa Kent having declared that Clark was “here for a reason”, though Pa said a lot of similar things in the Man of Steel mini as well.

• The big weapon being secretly powered by human energy is a motif John Byrne will later use in the Earth Stealers graphic novel.

• As Max stated, lots of craziness from Hamilton throughout, but calling a prostitute a “strumpet” and asserting that no one will miss her if he kills her is particularly over the line, but also a nice “I do not condemn you either” moment as Superman says he cares for her, and that he’ll save her no matter what.

• Wolfman’s Superman lives in a very adult world, filled with prostitutes, as established, but also cigarette advertising on taxis (Marbles Cigarettes likely a play on Marlboro, and perhaps a reference to DC’s Marvellous competition) and Burger Kings on every corner (this was before Big Belly Burger was established as the in-universe beloved burger joint).

• As crazy as Hamilton is in this story, there is a glimmer of hope/explanation for his turnaround, as he sees the lengths Superman would go to protect him, and get him help, so perhaps that (and mental health care in prison?) could inspire him to turn over a new leaf?

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