Superman #48 (October 1990)
Superman #48 (October 1990)
The Sinbad Contract, Part 1: Superman gets beaten up by a 14-year-old! Not even some tough gangbanger 14-year-old. This one:
That’s Davood Nassur, who was a regular kid living in Metropolis’ Little Qurac sector until that alien invasion last year, when the invaders dropped a “meta-bomb” that gave superpowers to random people. In Davood’s case, right now he can levitate a little and deflect 50% of baseballs thrown at his face, but he’s still young so his powers are still developing. One night, Davood is visiting his sister Soraya who works as a secretary at LexCorp (and is a big fan of Lex himself), when they’re accosted by a bleeding guy who hands them a package meant for Luthor and immediately dies. Davood and Soraya are still trying to process that when a bunch of ‘50s B-movie-looking flying robot guys start shooting at them with super-weapons.
As they’re running away from the robots, Davood decides to open Luthor’s mystery package and finds a weird-looking belt inside, which of course he takes the time to try on, because it’s not like they have an army of death machines at their heels or anything. This turns out to be a good decision, though, because the belt amplifies Davood’s powers and allows him to fight off the robots (who are just guys in armors) and fly away with Soraya.
Where the hell is Superman during all this? He’s in this paragraph, duh. Superman had fought the same robot guys the previous night until they escaped in a big ball of light. When he sees the robots are at it again, Superman tries to save Soraya from them, only for Davood to do this:
He knocks Superman out without even touching him. Holy crap, why didn’t they let this kid fight Doomsday instead of Superman?
Anyway, CONTINUED!
Plotline-Watch:
This three-part story guest-written by the great William Messner-Loebs is part of the special “Curt Swan month” in the Superman titles, which also included that month’s issue of the Superboy series (but I’m not covering that here, since it’s based on the late '80s TV show and thus not in continuity). This was also a way to give the regular Super-Teams a break before jumping into the next big storyline. In my memory this issue didn’t have many links to the regular comics, since it’s by a different creative team and all, but there’s actually a lot of relevant stuff:
This is the issue that reveals that Lex Luthor is terminally ill and has a year to live. Before he goes, however, he wants the satisfaction of killing Superman at least once, but we’ve yet to find out his plan.
Davood attacks Superman like that because he still remembers that time Supes singlehandedly destroyed his home country’s entire army (Adventures #427). Of course, said home country is Qurac, a terrorist nation, but Davood doesn’t know that.
We previously found out Metropolis has a Little Qurac sector back in the Action Comics Weekly serial, which was also drawn by Curt Swan.
Clark Kent has a nice elevator chat with another Daily Planet reporter called Keith, who also appeared recently in Action #656 (he’s the one who first found out about Jimmy and Jerry getting shot and called Perry White). Keith looked like a nice dude in that other issue – too bad he’s actually racist:
And finally, DC made a big deal out the meta-bomb that awakened superpowers in normal people back at the end of the Invasion! crossover, but unless I’m mistaken, Davood and one other dude were pretty much the only ones we ever found out about. I guess all those other metahumans just kept living normal lives and only used their powers to prank people at the office. Hey, maybe Keith is one but his power is racism.