Adventures of Superman #445 (October 1988)
Adventures of Superman #445 (October 1988)
Brainiac is trolling the streets of Metropolis dressed in a fancy top hat and tricking hobos into giving him their spinal fluid. Brainiac needs that delicious fluid because the body of the circus psychic he’s possessing is rejecting his alien mind and causing him great pain, and somehow that stuff will make it all better. I… I don’t know, that sounds like he got it from WebMD.
One of the hobos Brainiac murders is Jimmy Olsen’s friend Pete Shoemaker. When Jimmy investigates Pete’s disappearance, he ends up getting captured by Brainiac, too, of course. Rather than killing Jimmy right away, Brainiac decides to call Superman first (using Jimmy’s signal watch) to have a mind battle with him. What Brianiac doesn’t know is that Superman is in a pretty bad place right now, having just killed three dudes (in Superman #22) – the dark side of Superman’s mind is so dark that Brainiac goes catatonic just from peeking into it. We can only guess what dark, twisted thoughts he might have witnessed there.
Character-Watch:
Poor Pete Shoemaker meets his demise, but this won’t be the last time we hear his name. As for Milton Fine/Brainiac, we’re seeing the consequences of Milton’s wife getting run over by a car in Adventures #442: his human side pretty much ceases to exist and Brainiac goes full Jack the Ripper.
Now that Jerry Ordway is the sole writer, Cat Grant gets more character development in a single issue than she did in almost two of years of Marv Wolfman and John Byrne stories: it’s made clear that she has a drinking problem, in part due to the pressure of raising a son she barely knows. Perry White also calls her out for throwing herself at Jimmy and says everyone at the office is creeped out by that shit (I have to wonder if that’s a dig at Byrne).
Plotline-Watch:
Even though the cover triangles won’t appear until much later, you can still consider this the start of the “Triangle Era” and just an amazing issue in general. I’d definitely put this in my top 10 for this era, just for cementing the tone that Ordway had been developing in the previous issues he’d co-written with Byrne.
Six-Fifty: An important running joke is born in this issue: Cat is getting off a cab (and of course getting Jimmy to pay for it) and the driver says it’s $6.50. Every cab ride in Metropolis will mysteriously cost $6.50 for the next few years, until the recession hits the city.
The Misadventures of Jose Delgado: Jose is still crippled for life… or is he?! Jerry White is trying to cheer up Jose and not doing a very good job at it (it’s cool to see Jerry acting mature and Jose getting despondent, a reversal of their interaction the first time we saw them), when Jose gets a phone call about an experimental procedure that could allow him to walk again. However, since this is still Jose Delgado and nothing good can ever happen to him, we then see that the call is secretly from a sinister-looking Lex Luthor.
Inspector Henderson shows up again and we find out that he doesn’t like Captain Maggie Sawyer very much. Probably because she has bigger balls than him.
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