Superman #6 (June 1987)
Superman #6 (June 1987)
“Superman vs. The Huge-Ass Robot Mummy,” Part 2 of 2. Back in Part 1, Superman got knocked out by a giant robot discovered in an excavation in South America. Turns out the robot contains the souls of 500 members of an advanced race that lived here half a million years ago, every single one of which is a jerk. Most of the jerks left the planet when germs started killing them, but a bunch stuck around by putting their souls inside the robot and burying it deep. Isn’t that the plot of a John Travolta film or something?
Anyway, Superman wakes up two days after getting KO’d to find that everyone in the excavation camp, including intrepid visiting reporter Lois Lane, has been possessed by some of the souls living in the robot, and they’re planning to body-snatch even more people and take over the world. Superman fights the robot in an undetermined South American city for a while until he figures out how to beat it: Superman plays dead and lets the souls inside the robot try to posses him, but since they’re all jerks they start arguing over who gets Superman’s splendid body and the robot explodes. It literally overdosed on assholery and died. Another happy ending!
Plotline-Watch:
Not much to talk about in this issue, so I’ll just mention that I like how the Lois/Clark dynamic is shaping up. Lois supposedly hates Clark because he stole the Superman scoop from her back in MoS #2 and is furious to see him show up at the site of the excavation, but she’s really worried when Clark seems to get lost inside the catacombs. Meanwhile, Clark is openly flirting with Cat Grant and having wet dreams about Wonder Woman, but the moment he finds out Lois might be in trouble he drops everything and flies to South America. The Moonlighting-esque love/hate thing they have going is infinitely more interesting than fixating on Lois’ crush on Superman like the old comics did. Somehow, this makes the eventual relationship and marriage a lot more believable.
As for the other two million space jerks who left the planet years ago, they were never mentioned again. Presumably Lobo killed them.
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