World’s Finest #174 (1968)
by Cary Bates & Pete Costanza
cover by Neal Adams
This is one of the darkest Silver Age stories. The cover scene does happen in the comic, and it’s even more f##ked up than it looks.
We begin with Clark Kent wondering if his next assignment will feature “another” interview with a crackpot. Which checks out, considering the amount of crazy inventors that used to go to the Daily Planet in the mid-60s.
And then he gets a telepathic message warning him that Batman is in danger!
You I just HAD to check if those coordinates were legit, right?
51°N 73°W is in Canada. Specifically in Quebec.
Despite the warning, Bruce Wayne is somewhere else entirely.
And considering how casually he talks about being Batman when he’s in public, sometimes I wonder how he managed to keep his secret identity.
He gets a similar warning to Superman’s as he’s dozing off.
Yes, that massive brown/orange boulder is clearly Kryptonite.
Superman is naturally the first to reach the destination, finding a lead fortress in the middle of nowhere.
Which surprisingly enough kind of checks out: the closest inhabited place to the coordinates given is the town of Mistissini, roughly 50 miles away.
And then the door shuts behind Superman, trapping him inside the indestructible place.
Some of the best Superman stories involve problems that he can’t solve with his strength alone.
How’s he going to get out of this one? Perhaps vibrating so fast he’s intangible, Flash-style?
Perhaps using a combination of heat vision and freeze breath to weaken the material?
Perhaps finding out that the floor is not as tough and burrowing through the ground?
Nope! He just gives up.
Wait… going forward was an option from the beginning? Than what was the rush to get out, considering he got inside to find Batman?
And I know he can’t use X-Ray vision because everything is covered in lead, but… super-hearing, anyone? Heck, probably even super-smell could help him in this situation!
All the hallways are dead ends, and Superman is being watched over by two ominous figures.
Behold, Superman greatest weakness! Not Kryptonite, not magic… hecklers.
Dude, you starred in Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen comics. Your sanity has long gone at this point.
This is when Batman reaches the fortress, and his opponent is… a chair.
The idea that Batman used to be afraid of bats has popped up here and there over the decades, so I guess haunting him with hundreds of those COULD potentially work… but then you throw in the chair and everything becomes WAY too ridiculous.
Things gets progressively worse. First Superman is surrounded by Kryptonite…
…but it turns out it was all just a telepathic illusion.
The greatest threat, however, is just behind the corner: the greatest threat the World’s Finest has ever faced…
…THEIR PARENTS!!!
And I though things couldn’t get worse than the whole “my mother’s name is Martha too” incident.
So let me get this straight: you KNOW they’re not real, but you still can’t fight back?
Sounds legit.
The next trap is to force them to stay completely still!!!
And finally, after being forced to stay still (????) and being blasted repeatedly…
…the duo completely crashes and gives away EVERY secret they know!!!
Told you the cover scene does happen: the two heroes BEG TO BE MURDERED!!!
And in fact they are EXECUTED in cold blood…
…by the REAL Superman and Batman!!!
Yep. These were 100% sentient androids that the heroes purposefully tortured until they begged to be murdered.
There is no indication they wanted to do anything else with the androids, by the way. They didn’t even TRY to teach them to be heroes, they went straight to torturing!!!
Jesus Christ, guys, you are just. The. Worst.
Historical significance: -5/10
Negative scores are reserved for completely breaking the character’s established characterization. As much as I joke about Superman being The Worst, this is FAR from the norm!!!
Silver Age-ness: 7/10
Absolutely out of nowhere androids, questionable continuity and morality? Check, check and check. Reduced by the dark ending, though.
Does it stand the test of time? -75/10
Look, I’m not against heroes doing questionable things if the story warrants it and it makes sense from their point of view. But it’s abundantly clear that the androids are sentient and they are truly suffering, so what the heck guys!?!?
This ties with Metal Men #20 as the lowest score I’ve given so far.
Did Robin actually do anything? He was lucky enough to stay out of this
Did Superman really need Batman? They both need an alibi
Cary Bates must have had a thing for torturing and killing unsuspecting dopplegangers. This plot is eerily similar to that of Superboy #206, featuring the clones of Ferro Lad and Invisible Kid.
Whoa! More evidence that Batman kills? Considering what happened in Batman and Batman Returns, where did his whole “Batman doesn’t kill” motto come from?
From good Batman stories? 🙂
Jokes aside, it’s probably a slow process between the Golden and Silver ages. I’d have to do a deep dive to be precise, but I’m sure one of my readers more knowledgeable than me on early Batman might be able to give more details.
I might be able to shed a little light on that.
It’s true that both Batman and Superman were more bloodthirsty in their early years. There are scenes in which both heroes killed. However, that pretty much ended in 1941. Thanks to some on-line research on the history of censorship in America, some biographic knowledge of National owner Harry Donenfeld, and information provided by Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the American Comic Book, by Gerard Jones (Basic Books, 2004), I can describe why that came about.
Before owning National Comics (the company which would become DC), Harry Donenfeld was one of the largest publishers of “girlie pulps” and “art books” (read: portraits of lots of sexy, naked girls) in New York.
In 1939, a reform movement launched by New York mayor Fiorello LaGuardia joined forces with various public watchdog groups to impose censorship of such “salacious” material, and operations like Donenfeld’s were forced to shut down or scale ‘way back on the overt sexuality.
After Superman became a tremendous hit, Donenfeld became something of a public figure in his role of being National’s owner/publisher. He appeared on radio and in advertisements to promote their Cash-Cow of Steel. That’s when his past as a “smut-peddler” came back to haunt him.
With the girlie-magazine industry shut down, the watchdogs turned their sights on comic books. In May of 1940, Sterling North, the literary editor of the Chicago News wrote a scathing article condeming comic books. North charged that the rampant violence in comics encouraged emulation by the youth of America, by catering to their basic violent instincts. Naturally, the Do-Gooders of Morality jumped on this.
Gerard Jones’s words, from Men of Tomorrow best describes National’s response to this imminent crisis:
Liebowitz [Jack Liebowitz, Donenfeld’s partner and the power behind Donenfeld’s throne] and Ellsworth [Whitney Ellsworth, editor of the Superman magazines] sat down immediately to develop a code of acceptable behavior for superheroes, the first of its kind. The censorship that had killed the girlie pulps and hurt the Spicies was barely a year in the past, and Liebowitz knew that as soon as the protectors of public decency realized that Harry Donenfeld was responsible for Superman, they’d be going over the pages with a magnifying glass. Harry might enjoy baiting censors, but that didn’t fit the Liebowitz plan for building a children’s entertainment empire. In one early episode, Superman had torn the wings off the bad guys’ plane and let it crash in a fireball. Batman, for his part, had jumped in a fighter plane and machine-gunned a Kong-like monster. Liebowitz and Ellsworth decreed that no DC hero would ever knowingly kill anyone again.
It was at that point that Superman and Batman adopted codes against killing and ameliorated their more rough-shod tactics.
Throughout the years, and especially in the Silver Age, DC writers found ways to equivocate that prohibition. When Superboy destroyed the first Bizarro, it was excused by insisting that Bizarros were non-human, unliving beings. (Even as a kid, that label confounded me; if it is sapient, sentient, capable of emotion and abstract thought, then it’s alive, regardless of condition of creation.) Androids pretty much got the same it’s-not-really-alive treatment. (At least, until the second Red Tornado came along.) Aye, those sort of things might not be homicide according to the elements required for the offence, but still . . .
Hope this helps.
It might be ironic since it’s about the history of DC, but for such a detailed answer you definitely deserve a Discount No Prize!
I take that very kindly, sir.