Adventures of Superman #431 (August 1987)
Adventures of Superman #431 (August 1987)
A dude named Doctor Stratos blackmails the governments of the world with his weather-controlling machine. Stratos, by the way, is convinced that he’s a powerful Greek god, but he still needs machines to do anything because he has no powers. Superman goes around the planet fighting the freaky weather until he figures out that a better strategy would be to just punch the guy causing said weather problems. Just as Superman is about to reach Stratos, the criminal genius decides to attack Supes with a bolt of lightning – since Stratos was standing right fucking there, the bolt hits him and his flaming corpse falls into the sea.
Then, on the last page and after Superman has left, Stratos emerges from the sea transformed into a massive, muscly pink giant. Turns out he WAS a god after all! The issue ends with this powerful creature the size of a mountain standing in the middle of the sea and vowing to kill Superman.
Character-Watch:
That guy never appeared again. I guess he couldn’t swim.
Plotline-Watch:
Seriously, after being painted as a huge threat to Superman’s continued existence, Doctor Stratos literally didn’t appear in a single other comic. Why would he make such a big deal about killing Superman and then not follow up on it? Unless, that is, he ascended to Mount Olympus and from there manipulated the events that eventually led to the Death of Superman saga. Yes, let’s go with that.
Years later, Marv Wolfman recycled the character’s look, his personality, his Greek god theme and his everything for an unrelated New Teen Titans villain called Lord Chaos (in this issue, Stratos’ hideout is called Castle Chaos). The explanation for the uncanny resemblance was there’s no explanation, this is a comic.
WTF-Watch:
There’s a “comical” scene where President Reagan is talking on the phone with Premier Gorbachev about the weather problems when he gets another call from Doctor Stratos. Reagan is kinda dumb and absent minded, also ugly. That’s some scathing political commentary right there.
By the way, everything about this issue stinks of “last minute fill-in”: it’s not drawn by the usual artist (it’s by a young Erik Larsen instead of Jerry Ordway), the cover has little relation to the actual content of the comic, and it’s pretty shitty.
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