Superman #29 (March 1989)
Superman #29 (March 1989)
Everyone’s favorite villain is back: yes, Hfuhruhurr, the alien who turned an entire city in South Dakota into a gelatinous monster back in Adventures Annual #1! And yes, I’m still copying and pasting his name from the old post so that I don’t have to spell it again!
Last issue, our space-roaming Superman visited a planet of cute ET people who immediately hailed him as their hero. This freaked Superman out and he went off to look for another place to be alone, but then at the end of Adventures #551, he decided the ET people were actually kinda cool and headed back to their planet. In this issue, Superman comes across a spaceship with a few horrified ET folks escaping from something and helps them not suffocate in space. Upon arriving on the planet, Superman finds it completely deserted and immediately recognizes this as the handiwork of Hfuhruhurr, the intergalactic brain-stealer.
Superman easily finds and infiltrates Hfuhruhurr’s massive ship, and is creeped out to realize the whole thing is just stuffed with brains of every shape and size. CONTINUED!
Beard-Watch:
As you can see on the cover, it’s getting scruffy.
Plotline-Watch:
Back on Earth (I should probably just rename this section “Earth-Watch”), most people still think Clark Kent is dead after that charred corpse was found in his apartment the other day. Lois Lane is feeling pretty down about the sudden passing of the dude she specifically said she hated a lot, and asks Perry White to send her anywhere in the world to take her mind off of it. Because this is a comic book, Perry just happens to choose the city in South Dakota that got Hfuhruhurr’d some months ago.
Lois arrives in South Dakota, where the military is somewhat clumsily trying to cover up what really happened by claiming everyone died from a chemical spill (which is only slightly less terrifying than “they got their brains stolen by an alien”). Lois still manages to sneak around the place and discovers the awful truth, because she’s the best reporter ever.
WTF-Watch:
Or not:
HE EVEN HAS THE S-CURL ON THAT PICTURE!
Creator-Watch:
This issue is like a portal into the future: it’s a Superman issue written/drawn by Dan Jurgens and inked by Brett Breeding, two years before Jurgens and Breeding took over this comic and became the most iconic Superman team of the ‘90s (mainly thanks to Death of Superman). The pairing is purely accidental, though. Jurgens was the artist of the original Hfuhruhurr story, so they invited him back for this two-part sequel while the regular Superman creators took a break. Breeding was the regular inker for Kerry Gammill on this title, and apparently inkers don’t deserve vacations so he got to ink Jurgens for one issue.
Someone at DC must have thought “Hey, these two work great together and should get their own comic – let’s not do that for two years.”
Plug-Watch:
Someone asked me to make a Twitter for this blog so that he could be notified of new posts. Here you go, person who asked: http://twitter.com/Superman86to99
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