Adventures of Superman Annual #1 (1987)
Adventures of Superman Annual #1 (1987)
This is more like a horror/sci-fi story with Superman thrown in the middle, like that time he guest-starred in The X-Files (or was it I Love Lucy?). Every inhabitant of a small city in South Dakota vanishes mysteriously and President Reagan asks Superman to go investigate. Superman eventually finds out that the inhabitants all had their brains extracted by an alien being called Hfuhruhurr, who then merged the mass of their mindless bodies into a big slime monster. Hfuhruhurr channels the psychic power of the thousands of brains (now contained in Futurama-like jars) to attack Superman, but Superman resists and attacks back by channeling the power of his fists.
Hfuhruhurr manages to escape in his spaceship while Superman fights and defeats the slimy corpse monster. The problem now is, what to do with all those brains in jars? They have an idea: they communicate telepathically with Superman and ask him to please kill all of them, if it’s not too much trouble. Superman’s like “No way,” but they take control of his body and force him to do it. So the story ends with the villain at large, thousands dead and Reagan probably wishing he’d called Batman.
Character-Watch:
Superman will run into Hfuhruhurr (yes, of course I’m just copying and pasting that shit instead of typing it) during his upcoming exile in space. I’m actually surprised that story was referenced again, because I believe John Byrne (who didn’t write this) didn’t like the fact that Superman basically committed genocide (even thought it wouldn’t be the first time).
Creator-Watch:
This annual is guest-written by Jim Starlin and guest-drawn by Dan Jurgens, who will go on to become the main Superman artist and writer of the ‘90s. He’s still very green here, though, except when it comes to drawing the slime monster – he really nailed that one. Incidentally, Ron Frenz, the artist who drew the recent annual starring Titano the non-kryptonite shooting giant monkey, will succeed Jurgens as the regular Superman artist in 1995 (Jurgens will stick around as writer until '99).
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