Adventures of Superman #456 (July 1989)
Adventures of Superman #456 (July 1989)
Last chapter of Superman’s Exile in Space! While wandering around in other galaxies, Superman came across an artifact from Krypton’s past called the Eradicator, which is like a cosmic switchblade: you can use it to shave your beard, to have spiritual journeys, to keep a guy alive for 200,000 years and, as Superman finds out in this issue, to teleport anywhere in the universe. All Superman had to do was tell the Eradicator to send him home, so it kinda works like Dorothy’s slippers. Unfortunately, the teleportation isn’t instantaneous, so Superman won’t appear at all for the rest of the comic.
Meanwhile, in Metropolis, TV executive/crimelord Morgan Edge gets an angry Skype call from his boss Darkseid, who is upset about the Daily Planet running all those articles about their criminal enterprise, Intergang (yes, apparently, Darkseid reads the Planet when he’s chilling in the toilet). Darkseid sends Edge a giant robot called Turmoil which is programmed to kill the reporters writing those articles, meaning Clark Kent and Lois Lane. Edge then finds out that his girlfriend/employee Cat Grant is also involved in the articles – heartbroken, he tells Darkseid to make his robot kill her too, but Darkseid is like “Bitch, where do you get off telling me what to do? Just for that I’m letting her live.”
Turmoil seemingly kills Clark Kent who, of course, is not the real Kent but Supergirl, who is now mentally challenged and looks Clark (since Adventures #453). The killbot then goes off to kill Lois, but runs into her ex-boyfriend: good ol’ Jose Delgado, aka Gangbuster, in his first outing after having recovered the use of his legs. Naturally, Jose tries to fight the robot and ends up buried under a pile of rubble, as Lois approaches a certain death. And then… TO BE CONTINUED!
Plotline-Watch:
Yeah, the end of the Exile saga is kind of anticlimactic: there’s a couple of pages of Superman talking to Blurpy in the asteroid where he buried Cleric (in Superman #33), and then it’s “Whelp, it’s getting late, guess I should head back to Earth.”
Brainiac’s last words before slipping into a coma were that he couldn’t feel Superman’s mind anymore (since he’d just left Earth). At the end of this issue he finally wakes up again, only to say “Heeeee’s baaaaaaack…” His Superman obsession is almost as big as Luthor’s.
Jose is with Emil Hamilton when Cat Grant calls them to let them know Lois is in danger, and Professor Hamilton actually remembers Cat from way back in Adventures #424. That pleases me.
WTF-Watch:
How irresponsible is Perry White? He knows that Intergang once sent hitmen to murder Clark Kent because he wrote an article about them, and he knows that Clark suddenly has the mental age of an elementary schooler (presumably due to the same attack), but he still lets him go off into the street unsupervised and unprotected. Then Perry tells Lois to write another article about Intergang using Cat Grant as a source, and lets them go off into the street unprotected. It’s like he wants all his reporters to get killed and publish an all-Jimmy Olsen version of the Planet.