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This month, I decided to dig back to my early days of collecting comics. Once I got into the Legion of Super-Heroes, I began spreading my interests further into the DC universe. I delved into Superman and the Justice League, mainly. For a time, I was reading Detective Comics, during the era of Steve Englehard and Marshall Rodgers. Those were good times.
In Superman, I found the kind of stories I liked. For a short time, they did story arcs in Action or Superman, long before story arcs became the norm. One of these is a three-issue arc that I go back to, from time to time. It's themes are dated and some of the dialogue is laughable, but the idea, with all its flaws, still draws me back. It covers Superman 307-309, written by Gerry Conway and pencils by one of DC's best, Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez. The art stood out, with Garcia-Lopez's command of human figures and storytelling. His Superman had presence, his musculature was athletic, powerful. It made an impression on me.
The story involves Superman's growing obsession with protecting Earth, fearing that Earth will follow Krypton's fate, through man's follies. It's an early story involving environmentalism, with a fair amount of hystrionics, but also with a few good points.
But, this is not the interesting bit, not by half.
You see, the citizens of Kandor have been following Superman's behavior and their psychologists devised a "cure". To this end, they enlist Supergirl's aid (and don't you know Jose draws a great Supergirl-in my favorite costume, by the way) in administering the "cure". According to this story, Kryptonian psychology embraces the concept of replacing a painful truth with a comforting lie.
When Superman gets out of hand at a plastics plant, he is confronted by a costumed villain who calls himself the Protector. Superman and the Protector fight to a draw and Protector escapes.
The Protector is a villain in the sense that he opposes Superman, but his mission is to protect polluting industries, even from Superman. It turns out that he's a mutant, and he believes that polluting industries are driving human mutations and he wants to encourage the trend. He wears a costume that looks like it came from Adam Strange's closet.
I always thought the thigh pads were a little odd, myself. He's got to be one of the few non-ghostly villains to wear white.
His powers are broadly defined, he can control his molecular structure, changing to any material, chemical, etc. form he can conceive. Pretty powerful.
When he next shows up, Superman is grabbing an oil tanker, with the intent of destroying it, I suppose. Protector stops him and they fight under water for a while. Protector escapes again, and when Superman surfaces, he finds Supergirl waiting for him. She tells him it's time to reveal the truth about their origins and they fly off to the Fortress of Solitude. Supergirl reveals that they are the children of nuclear scientists, who were exposed to mutagenic radiations. She shows him that the bottle-city of Kandor is actually a model, that all the relics of Krypton are nothing more than the product of Superman's delusion and he and Supergirl are both human mutants.
I know, it seems ridiculous, especially when there's an actual bottle-city hidden away somewhere, full of Kryptonians. Plus, how could an advanced culture develop such a flawed psychological treatment? But, it makes a pretty good story.
In Superman 308 the Protector returns, but this time he's brought backup. It seems that, some years earlier, Protector had been a college student, when a stranger had tapped him on the shoulder and revealed to him that he was a mutant. He trained Protector in the use of his powers and swore him to secrecy.
This man, it is revealed, was a nuclear scientist who was the only survivor of a nuclear accident. The radiation had changed him, giving him the power to project radiation and control nuclear reactions. The accident has also driven him to the edge of madness.
This is Radion.
Radion has a great name and a costume that can be made to work, but the stripey shorts are just wrong. Only a stripper or a porn star should wear shorts with arrows pointing toward their crotch.
Radion and Protector attack a nuclear power plant, to draw Superman out. They fight and Superman tricks Protector into changing into a reflective material and draws Radion's fire so that his shoots himself with his own reflected blast.
From there, Superman embraces his "humanity", even joining in with the Galaxy Broadcasting football team (remember, this was back in the ancient days when Clark was a TV anchor). Unfortunately, living as a regular guy isn't in the cards for Supes. An alien race called the J'ai is attacking the planet Xonn and Supergirl comes by to get some help defending Xonn. Clark declines, citing his new earth-centered priorities. Kara comes close to actually cursing, then, inviting her cousin to stick his priorities in a certain sunless orifice. Pretty saucy for comics in the 70s.
Supergirl and Krypto prove insufficient to the task of protecting Xonn and, Clark sees them drifting in space, with his FTL telescopic vision. Realizing he can't deny his own nature, he flies off to help them and runs into yet another problem, Xonn has an orange sun and shortly after arrival, Supes went blind. Yellow suns give Kryptonians fantastic powers, other colors do stranger things.
After they are captured, Superman confronts Supergirl over the scheme to make him believe Krypton was a myth. She explains how the Kandorians treat emotional problems by removing the problem. They have a meeting of the minds and Supes breaks out of their crystal prison, he finds a way to defeat the J'ai and liberates Xonn.
In the end, Superman explains to his cousin that he feels this obsession to protect the Earth, not because of Krypton, but because Earth is his adopted home. Like I say, it's a good story.
Now, on to the characters.
One of the things that has bothered me for years is how the characters introduced in this story arc were ignored during the production of DC's Who's Who. The Protector appeared in two issues and Radion in only one, but that didn't keep other characters out of Who's Who. These were powerful enough characters to make things rough for Superman and would have allowed writers to use them in place of over-used villains.
Not only did the villains of the story vanish, but the themes and consequences of the story were ignored. It's something that bugged me, over the years.
I know that they've recently introduced a new Radion, but I think the old one was better, just needs a little work on the outfit.
The Protector, well, I like a white suit, in theory, but in practice, ugh. The flaming sword emblem was a little too un-villainlike for me, so I made it a flaming skull and crossed swords. I lost the thigh pads and made the top a kind of jacket. The head-crest I expanded to make it less like a 1950s space-man suit.
Radion just needed a little editing. I made the suit a darker orange, and worked on the gloved and boots. Not much, but I think it makes a better costume.
Well, that's about it, for now.
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