Super Titles Round-Up (September 1994)
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Super Titles Round-Up (September 1994)
This month: Zero Hour! ZERO HOUR! Oh, and Superman gets possessed by Hitler.
Superboy #8
Superboy vs. Superboy! You know, the other Superboy who is 100 times less cool but 1000 times more powerful. Superboy (the '90s one) and his mutant chaperone Dubbilex are flying back to Hawaii after their little Metropolis vacation when a freak storm causes their plane to go down right near Smallville. What they don't realize is that the storm also makes Superboy (the '40s-'80s one) appear in the present. While Modern Superboy shows off in front of the Smallvillians ("Bet they've never seen anyone like me before!" he says, wrongly), Retro Superboy changes into Young Clark Kent and runs into Old Lana Lang.
Clarkie is increasingly distressed by the many changes he notices in this timeline: not only is his sweetheart, Lana, married to his best friend, Pete Ross, but she doesn't even remember that time she turned into an Insect Queen or the fact that he used to own five robots and a super-dog called Krypto. Modern Superboy, having recently been saddled with a non-super-mutt also called Krypto (Bibbo asked Dubbilex to take him to Hawaii since Metropolis is in ruins right now), overhears and steps in to offer the dog to Clark, who doesn't appreciate seeing a jacket-wearing punk using his name and logo. This is when we find out that a cool haircut is no match against Pre-Crisis Kryptonian physiology.
The fight moves to the Kent farm, where Retro Superboy accuses Modern Superboy of being the time anomaly that's causing all the weirdness he's seen so far. However, it soon becomes clear to both that Clark is the anomaly and his mere presence is causing chaos in Smallville. Before Clark lets himself fade away into the timestream for everyone's safety, there's a nice moment where the Superboys bond over the pressure that comes with one day being Superman (something that apparently hadn't occurred to our Superboy yet).
As the OG Superboy disappears in a flash of light, he asks his successor to never let people forget what he stood for. After briefly meeting the Kents (who invite him to come back for some rhubarb pie any time), our Superboy sees the hologram that Superman sent to all the heroes of the world in Zero Hour #4 and rushes off to help with the time crisis, which Dubbilex interprets as the Kid living up to the name "Superboy." Awww.
I know Man of Steel #37 is generally accepted as the best Zero Hour crossover, but I think I like this one a tiny bit more. One of the things that endear me to it, as a continuity nerd, are the little references to past Smallville stories: Lana talks about Clark telling her the secret in Superman: The Man of Steel #6, Pete mentions getting wedding gifts from the Oto tribe seen in Superman #45, and someone tells Modern Superboy they saw him years ago "near Simonson's Quarry" -- the place where Superman fought Retro Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes in the classic Superman #8, which has a lot in common with this issue (starting with its inker being this one's writer, Karl Kesel). Another classic, right here.
Steel #8
This picks up from the end of "Worlds Collide," with Superman thanking Steel for helping out during that whole mess. Steel returns to Washington and joins his family on a trip to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, which is where we learn that he had a brother who died in 'Nam. Unfortunately, Hazard (this series' current big bad) has no respect for fallen troops and sends three generic '90s supervillains to kill Steel there. They're called Flatline, Hotspot, and Quake, and they have "never showed up again" written all over them -- but, to my surprise, the DC wiki claims they'll return a whole bunch of times.
(It might have been interesting if Louise Simonson had reused those Nuclear Waste guys from Man of Steel #28 instead of making up more disposable baddies, but I guess she liked making up disposable baddies.)
Meanwhile, Steel's family has met a nice young man in extremely '70s clothes who reminds Grandma Bess of a grandson of hers. Coincidentally, she also reminds him of a grandma of his. When Steel gets double-teamed by two of the villains, the mysterious young man uses his fantastic rock-throwing expertise to help him out.
Thanks to one of the villains getting conked in the head, Steel is able to take on the others one by one and win. The young man fades away into the past, but not before revealing that he's... no, not Steel's dead brother as I'd guessed, but Steel himself when he was not-quite-as-buff and had hair. Even though there's no Zero Hour logo in this issue's cover, '70s John's appearance is obviously a side-effect of the time crisis. This makes this issue more of a Zero Hour crossover than some "official" Zero Hour crossovers, like...
Outsiders #11
As part of the Outsiders' underground vampire adventure (continued from last issue), the Eradicator runs into a room full of people who are used as literal blood banks by the vamps. When he sees how much they're suffering, we get a rare moment of empathy from the Eradicator... which leads to him killing all those poor people to put them out of their misery. But hey, he's trying!
Through a series of circumstances I don't fully understand (because to be honest I'm mostly just skimming the pages without the Eradicator in them), the Outsiders defeat the evil vampires and clear their names from the murder that had them on the run since issue #1 of this series. Woo-hoo! Too bad they all hate each other and the group breaks up anyway. A blurb in the final page informs us that Geo-Force and Katana will appear in Zero Hour, which DC probably thought justified slapping that logo on the cover. It really doesn't.
The Spectre #22
This one doesn't have anything to do with Zero Hour either, but at least it doesn't pretend it does. President Clinton (wrongly) believes that The Spectre has drowned hundreds of people in Japan, so he asks Superman to take him down using the Spear of Destiny, a.k.a. "that spear that once struck Jesus and gained magic powers." What they don't know is that the Spear has been corrupted by the bad vibes of one of its former owners: Adolf Hitler. This means that the longer Superman holds it, the more Hitler-ish he becomes.
Armed with the Spear, Superman kills not only The Spectre but also the entire Justice League, as the world (including his fiancée and parents) watches in horror. In the end, the only hero left is Batman, armed with that kryptonite Superman gave him for this exact type of situation. Superman's like "What the hell took you so long?" and gives up the Spear so Batman can kill him... at which point everything in this paragraph so far is revealed to be a vision by The Spectre.
The part about Superman renouncing the Spear was real, though, which means that the entire Super-Hitler problem has been solved before it could even happen. The Spectre traps the Spear in a giant skull-shaped rock and throws it into space, a method of dangerous item disposal that we already know Superman approves of. Before parting ways, Superman is like "Hey, uh, so you're not gonna wipe out any more countries including all the children, right?" (which seriously happened in The Spectre #13) and is satisfied by The Spectre's assurance that, nah, he's over that. A happy ending!
Zero Hour Crossovers Round-Up!
Because of Zero Hour, the Superman family made way too many appearances in September '94 to go into all of them in detail, so here's a quick round-up instead:
The Superman hologram also appears in Darkstars #24, Legionnaires #18 (while some Legionnaires are briefly displaced to the 20th century), and… that's it? Really? I always figured it must have been in like every DC title that month, but nope, I looked all over and it's just those two and Superboy.
Speaking of which, before dropping into Superboy #8, Retro Superboy was in Valor #23, where he tried to rally his old Legion teammates together before being suddenly whisked away into another comic. Retro Superboy then has a cameo in Legion of Super-Heroes #61, during a montage of moments from the Legion's history before their (confusing, in great part because of him) continuity got rebooted.
Superman makes a flashback appearance in Justice League America #92, which reveals that he helped a guy named Triumph stop an alien invasion and start the JLA before Triumph fell into a time hole and everyone forgot he existed. No big loss there.
Supergirl and Steel co-star in Guy Gardner: Warrior #24, where they join Guy on a bogus journey across time to undo Coast City's destruction (the Eradicator and Cyborg Superman also appear there, as tiny figures in the sky). I wrote about that issue, plus the aforementioned Darkstars and JLA ones, at greenlantern94to04.
And we've already mentioned Superman's short appearances in Batman #511 and Green Lantern #55, both of which set up scenes in Zero Hour #4, on top of him being all over the ZH series itself. Phew, busy month for Supes.
NEXT: A whole bunch of zeroes!
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