Adventures of Superman #454 (May 1989)
Adventures of Superman #454 (May 1989)
Superman is sold into slavery… in space! Space slavery! Spacevery! I’ll shut up now.
When we last saw Superman in Adventures #453 (Superman #31 was an all-Luthor issue), he was about to asphyxiate in space but at the last moment he was picked up by a kind passing spaceship. Unfortunately, this was actually a slave ship, and Superman’s unconscious body is tossed into a cell with a bunch of other weird captive aliens. The aliens try to steal Superman’s clothes, but they only get as far as his boots before he wakes up and tells them to cut that out (by punching them). The slavers notice that Superman is a feisty one and take him to another cell reserved for the rowdier prisoners, who will be taken to something called “the games.”
Unfortunately, “the games” doesn’t mean they’re going to Chuck E. Cheese’s as Superman secretly hoped, but to Warworld, a massive technological planet (I believe the scientific term is “Death Star”). Superman is taken to Warworld’s tyrant ruler, Mongul, who seems quite pleased with his new acquisition. Even if it has no shoes.
Bonus Story!
Fourth and last part of Lex Luthor’s “Hostile Takeover!” Luthor’s master plan is revealed: he only convinced everyone that LexCorp was going to buy S.T.A.R. Labs to make S.T.A.R. panic and sell their psionics lab to another company, which happened to be owned by Luthor. Now that he owns the one lab he wanted, Luthor pulls out of the S.T.A.R. deal and makes a bunch of stockholders lose millions of dollars. This act of supreme dickery isn’t enough for him, though, because at the end of the story he looks all sad and wishes Superman was still around to mess with.
“And will I ever find true love?”
Character-Watch:
First appearance of Mongul, who will play a huge role in the Death of Superman saga! Also, the guy to his left (our right) is Draaga, Mongul’s favorite gladiator and Superman’s future sparring partner. He has one of the coolest character arcs in the entire 1986-1999 period, if you ask me.
Plotline-Watch:
There are developments in the Clark Kent “murder” case: Captain Maggie Sawyer gets a call from Amanda McCoy (the former LexCorp employee who knows Superman’s identity). After weeks of letting everyone think Clark is dead, McCoy finally gets around to confessing that the dead dude found in Clark’s apartment is not him, but a private investigator she hired to stalk Clark/Superman. The confession turns out to be pointless, though, because just at that moment, Clark Kent returns to Metropolis.
…of course, that’s not really Clark but Matrix/Supergirl, who changed shape to look like Clark last issue, and then escaped Smallville to go to Metropolis. The innocent Matrix runs into some hoodlums who try to assault her/him, but then Bibbo shows up and scares them away by having an uncommonly tough skull – Bibbo lets them hit him in the head with a baseball bat, and when he doesn’t die they run away in fear.
The news that Clark isn’t really dead upsets the guy who ordered his murder, Intergang’s Morgan Edge (who’s had a crappy day in general, since he was also a big S.T.A.R. Labs stockholder). Morgan persuades his new girlfriend, Cat Grant, to snoop around at the Daily Planet and find out where Clark got all the information for his Intergang expose story. Maybe it’s from the new girlfriend of some Intergang leader?
WTF-Watch:
Bibbo sees Matrix/Clark’s face without glasses for two seconds and immediately realizes that it’s the same face as Superman. Yes, this means that a drunk named Bibbo Bibbowski is a better reporter than Lois Lane.
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