#amalak

[desperatecheesecubes]

Crying and sobbing because Chris was Clark's son

[doctorslippery]

[gotham-at-nightfall]

Power Girl #1

[crisisofinfinitemultiverses]

Power Girl 2 (2023) by Gary Frank

[thechronologicalsuperman]

The Chronological Superman 1967: 

Amalak the Space Pirate returns in Superman vol.1 No.195, bearing a deadly hatred for the Man of Steel. There won’t be too many more appearances of the villain, which is a shame. Owing to a tenuous-at-best connection, Amalak seemed to me to be that he might be one of Superman’s last connections to his Jewish heritage. 

Sharing most of the letters in his name with the Amalek, Amalak recalls the ferocity and viciousness of the enemy nation of the Jewish people. As an implacable foe avenging a long-simmering familial feud, Amalak had the makings of a dire foe for the Superman Family ...

[brevoorthistoryofcomics]

Part three of this formative four-part story by writer Marty Pasko dropped next in the pages of SUPERMAN, and I dutifully picked it up, wanting to find out what would happen wit the mysterious plague, Amalak, Supergirl and all of the hanging business from the preceding issues. I quite enjoyed Pasko’s tenure as the regular SUPERMAN writer, at least partly because his stories were as grounded in emotion as they were in derring-do or pyrotechnics. They were all about how Superman felt, which is the secret to most of the best Superman stories. And I hadn’t realized until looking back at it that Neal Adams had inked this Dick Dillin cover.

For this particular installment, Dan Adkins inked the always-reliable Curt Swan, rather than the stalwart and ever-welcome Bob Oksner. I don’t think it was an improvement. Adkins inks tended towards the clinical to my eye--his line lacked some intangible element of life.  There’s enough going on here that following the symbolic splash page introducing the story, there’s a two-page recap of all of the essential events. While necessary, in this era of diminishing page counts, this severely curtailed the amount of forward movement we were going to be able to experience in this chapter.

But eventually, we do get back to Amalak and Supergirl. Amalak tells the foredoomed Girl of Steel that, having realized that he can’t beat Superman physically, he intends to crush him psychologically by forcing him into a situation where he has to take a life. Then Amalak moves to execute Supergirl--and his Star-Cannon doesn’t respond. Before taking off with Nam-Ek last issue, Superman surreptitiously used his heat vision to seal its firing chamber. No longer under the gun, it takes Supergirl thirty seconds to knock the Kryptonian Killer out.

Meanwhile, Superman takes Nam-Ek back with him to Central City, where Nam-Ek’s healing horn can aid those stricken with the mysterious plague. While he’s doing that, though, Supergirl grows overconfident, allowing Amalak to get back up and get to his controls, activating an energy warrior to combat her and keep her out of his stringy hair. But as Amalak tells Supergirl that Superman is about to encounter his secret agent in Central City, the one who’s been infecting the populace with the plague (including Lois Lane) and that this will trigger the endgame of his plan, his fused-shut Star-Cannon explodes, detonating the entire ship they’re in.

Having dropped off Nam-Ek, Superman needs to put in an appearance at the Reporter’s Convention again as Clark Kent. But as he encounters young Jamie, more people in the crowd begin to experience symptoms of the virus. Clark once again uses Jamie’s dog as a distraction so that he can get away and become Superman--and then he’s attacked in mid-air by a mysterious flying orange-skinned foe.

The creature introduces itself in spotty English as Jevik, and tells the Man of Steel that he’s only doing what he’s been told to do. The two superhumans battle it out across the resort where the Convention is being held. At one point, Superman loses sight of Jevik, and is then surprised to see Supergirl waiting for him in the hotel lobby. Sucker! It’s really Jevik, who can change his shape and appearance, and he cold-cocks Superman.

As they battle, Superman discovers that Jevik has the watch that Jamie Lombard’s dog stole from Clark Kent earlier. That means that Jevik has been posing as the dog--and he’s Patient Zero for the spread of the virus! Unfortunately for Superman, just before he can demolish Jevik, Jamie comes upon them and Jevik resumes his dog form--and the confused boy doesn’t understand why Superman is trying to kill his pet, and gets between the Man of Steel and his prey. And at that relatively-passive stand-off point, we To Be Continued out of the issue, with a big blurb promising that next issue, Superman is going to have to kill somebody!

In the back of the issue, after the letters page, there’s a particularly bizarre installment of publisher Jenette Khan’s regular column, in which she seems confused about whether or not the DC books were going to be taking a price hike (they had, shortly before). It certainly feels like it was written in one draft, stream-of-consciousness, without any editing--it’s a messy mess. But she does remember to plug her Dollar Comics initiative some more, so there’s that.(To say nothing about touting how much Gerry Conway and Paul Levitz are adding to and improving Jack Kirby’s NEW GODS saga in the newly-returned series. Spoiler: they didn’t.)

[travisellisor]

the cover to Superman (1939) #314 by Curt Swan and Neal Adams

[brevoorthistoryofcomics]

Another comic book that was bought for my brother Ken, but which eventually ended up with me. This issue of SUPERMAN was the concluding chapter to a then-unprecedented four-part epic storyline, one that would be collected a couple of times in the intervening years. In addition, it wrapped up a subplot that had ben brewing in the Superman titles since the early 1970s. Of course, I didn’t know any of this when the book first showed up.

Such a novelty was a long serial of this sort in the DC books that, as he had done previously with the “Bat-Murderer” plotline in DETECTIVE COMICS, editor Julie Schwartz added a note to the first page indicating that this running serial took place after the Superman stories appearing concurrently in other titles. This was also still an era in which DC was a bit corporately embarrassed to be a comic book publisher, and so had adopted the unwieldy name National Periodical Publications. This splash page is one of the relatively few instances where that name was given prominence

The issue opens with the mysterious Mister Xavier, Clark Kent’s neighbor, recapping recent events for his alien masters, and in reality the readers. Xavier is the long-running plotline I mentioned earlier. He had been introduced several years beforehand as a reclusive figure with a mysterious and somewhat shady background, but while hints had been dropped over the years, his secrets hadn’t been revealed before now.

Turns out that--and I believe this story was written before the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy--Xavier works for an interplanetary organization that wants to build a teleportation route through our solar system--and to do so, the Earth must be destroyed. This project is so urgent and important that Xavier was placed down on Earth 30 years ago to figure out a way to do it, and he has--by harnessing the destructive powers of Superman.

But because this is a Superman story, that plot must be byzantine. So what Xavier has first done is to use his technology to affect Superman such that, when he is in his Clark Kent persona, he no longer possesses any of his super-powers. Thinking that this is being caused by the psychological strain of living a double life, Superman has spent the previous three issues experimenting--living solely as Clark Kent for a week, then solely as Superman, and discovering the benefits and drawbacks to each identity. 

What this has to do with Xavier’s ultimate plan is vague, but in any case, he’s ready to make his move. Using contrivance crystals, he teleports 9 of the Man of Steel’s greatest enemies first into Clark’s apartment, then across the globe, and when Superman arrives, Xavier charges him with energy, turning him into a living bomb. As Superman expends his energy battling his enemies, he’s burning through the fuse and coming closer to exploding and taking the Earth with him.

As Superman races from fight to fight, he’s got another worry--Clark Kent is desperately needed to testify in a court case to convict an Inter-Gang bigwig. So Clark takes time out from his marathon of villain-bashing to appear as Kent and make his testimony. But this time, he finds that he still possesses his super-powers in his civilian identity! This is a vital clue for him--but he can’t wait, there are still a half-dozen villains at large!

Three villains later, and Superman has enough of a breather to check back in at his apartment. And sure enough, he discovers that his regular Clark Kent wardrobe has all be treated to repel the yellow sun energies that give him his powers. (For his court appearance, Superman borrowed a suit from the WGBS wardrobe, rather than his own clothes--hence, his powers were unaffected this time.) Still, there are three more foes to contend with, and as Superman races off to combat them, Xavier makes his final preparations.

Two more enemies later, and Superman has a moment to use his super-senses to divine the brain-beam that’s beaming him the location of his enemies and follow it back to Xavier’s apartment, where the alien appears to be in a state of hibernation. Superman goes off to face his final foe, the Kryptonite Man and dispatches him with one blow. yet the Earth still lives, because Superman was wearing one of his doctored Clark Kent suits underneath his uniform, and struck the Kryptonite Man with only his regular human strength.

In the wrap-up, Superman captures Xavier, who has pulled a swap with the Kryptonian’s enemy Amalak to affect his escape. But given Xavier’s failure to eliminate the Earth, his people aren’t likely to rescue him. And in a nice epilog, we get the wrap-up to the larger story question of whether Clark Kent or Superman is the more important identity, in which Superman reveals that he’d already decided that, regardless of whatever psychological difficulties it might have caused, he intended to continue to live as both Kent and Superman.

And, like with other titles this month, the Metropolis Mailbag letters page includes the Statement of Ownership, which indicates that SUPERMAN at this point was selling 221,348 copies a month on a print run of 578,311. That’s a 38% efficiency, which is pretty miserable, even with that many copies being sold. I’d imagine that the print run was scaled back for future issues in an attempt to get that percentage number up and not be generating so much waste. This need to print three copies in order to sell one was what had the comic book industry on the ropes for most of the 1970s, and it was only the advent of the Direct Sales network of comic book specialty shops that bought books on a non-returnable basis that saved the industry.