Action Comics #351 (1967)
By Otto Binder & Wayne Boring
cover by Curt Swan
The original Captain Marvel was such a sales rival to Superman that DC Comics basically sued Fawcett Comics into bankruptcy.
DC would later acquire the rights to Captain Marvel and integrate him into their universe in the 70s… but for some reason, they created a cheap imitation to fight Superman.
And if you have any doubts that he’s Discount Shazam… just take a look at the teaser page.
We begin with all the criminals of Metropolis coming together to agree on a Crime Chief.
Given that the “judge” is using a gun as a gavel, you can already tell how serious this story is going to be.
I wonder where those meetings take place.
And then Zha-Vam shows up to nominate himself Crime Chief, because he has all the powers of Olympus.
Sounds legit.
Are those mobsters from Krypton? How are they seeing the arrow hit a meteor and know exactly how fast it’s traveling?
Following a tip, Jimmy Olsen and Clark Kent later visit the place that Zha-Vam wrecked.
That’s a surprisingly off-model Clark, something surprising given that Wayne Boring used to be the main Superman artist.
Zha-Vam is going on a crime spree. Why does he even need to take over the mob if he’s already invincible and does everything by himself?
Once Superman shows up, he finds a very rare Silver Age physical challenge.
Superman’s incredibly random skepticism when it comes to magic never ceases to amaze me.
One of your villains is Circe, you should DEFINITELY know Greek mythology is real in your world!!!
Given that both characters are completely invulnerable, Zha-Vam has to resort to his best Colossal Boy impression.
By the time Superman is back on Earth after Zha-Vam threw him into space, he finds a taunt waiting for him.
Zha-Vam didn’t even steal the gold!
Action Comics #352 (1967)
By Otto Binder & Wayne Boring
cover by Curt Swan
You couldn’t tell by the cover that it’s the follow-up.
It starts with Superman showing off.
This is stated to be “a full-size replica” of the Empire State Building, but I’m guessing they completely botched the proportions.
And if you thought THAT replica wasn’t as big as the original, the Great Pyramid has it even worse.
The exhibition is interrupted by Zha-Vam, who has started to copy the powers from other pantheons.
Awkward to have him with SOME permanent powers while others have to be activated.
WHY WOULD SUPERMAN AGREE???
Come to think of it, shouldn’t Greek gods and creatures be represented with Greek letters?
If I’m not mistaken the Greek word for Gorgon is Γοργόνα, so shouldn’t the G be a Γ instead?
And why am I bothering wasting logic on this story?
Zha-Vam is kind enough to hand Superman the solution on how to break free.
After giving it some thought… after all it’s not like he can do anything else…
…he finds the solution. It’s magnets.
Which give him the power to TELEPATHICALLY USE A TYPEWRITER.
I don’t know what is most insane… the fact that IT WORKED, that saving his secret identity is more important than breaking free from the spell, or that Clark’s story basically boils down to gossip.
Well that was completely pointless. Let’s return to the dumb contest.
Except FOR ONCE Silver Age Superman actually shows HE HAS A WORKING BRAIN and goes for Zha-Vam’s belt instead of indulging in his stupid contest!!!
It doesn’t work, AT ALL, but at least he tried!
I swear Superman must have also pressed K for Koalemos, the Greek god of stupidity.
Credit where it’s due, the effect is graphically interesting.
I don’t care if he’s doing this for the good of humanity. This is SO lame.
If Silver Age Superman were around today, he would 100% follow the most random instructions from the worst AI chatbots.
This is not the last chapter, so Superman’s plan is not going to work.
But to guess why… welcome to a surprise round of Guess The Stupid Twist!
Why can’t Superman defeat Zha-Vam by exploiting the Achilles weakness?
A) the A on the belt refers to a different god
B) Zha-Vam has the power of Achilles but not his weakness… for no reason
C) Zha-Vam has the power of Achilles but not his weakness… for a very dumb reason
D) the heel is randomly covered by Kryptonite
E) Superman is still sleeping from the previous effect of the Morpheus power
I have seen many, MANY stupid Silver Age stories in my reviews.
This one of the extremely rare occasions that made think “oh come on, that’s dumb even for the Silver Age”.
Yeah this storyline REALLY needed three issues.
Those are some weird thought balloons.
Action Comics #353 (1967)
By Otto Binder & Wayne Boring
cover by Wayne Boring
At this point I’m also praying ALL the gods to put an end to this storyline.
We begin with Superman casually doing one of the dumbest sci-fi projects I’ve ever seen.
Just how random are Zha-Vam’s powers???
Sure we have people flying faster than light and building bridges between worlds, but talking in space? That would just be silly.
Unable to get past the shield (!!!), Superman decides to travel to the past and meet the gods of Olympus.
Is it just me or are the Superman stories of this period kind of obsessed with humiliating him as much as possible?
Turns out that the gods of Olympus predicted that they would no longer be worshipped in the 20th century, because everyone will worship Superman.
So Zeus has Prometheus build a new hero, sculpting him from clay.
That’s a reference to Greek myth, where Prometheus created the first humans this way.
At least Superman learned that Zha-Vam does have a weakness.
You’d expect Superman would use that… but instead he challenges Zha-Vam to another fight.
Where we learn that his belt can also copy the powers of mutants, because Cyclops in mythology didn’t shoot eye beams!!!
But Superman ALSO has a belt with random god powers, courtesy of his time trip.
This results into, what else, a Big Dumb God Battle.
This is a comic including the term “Kryptonite Sock”, by the way, so I’m well past trying to understand why SOME letters channel the powers of gods and others just summon them.
And that’s how Zha-Vam is eventually defeated.
Well… Zha-Vam WAS more powerful than Superman, considering he needed outside help to defeat him.
Historical significance: 0/10
Superman will meet Zha-Vam’s ghost in 1969.
If you’re wondering how Zha-Vam could even HAVE a ghost if he was an artificial construct… that’s not really his ghost, it’s a creation of this guy.
That also covers why I’m not going to review that issue.
Silver Age-ness: 1,000,000/10
Does it stand the test of time? 0/10
This was bad. Really, really, REALLY bad.
Zha-Vam is incredibly annoying, and his character is all over the place… if he was created to be worshipped as a better hero, why take over the mob to steal? Especially since that angle is completely dropped after the first issue?
Most of the god powers are uninteresting, Superman is way dumber than usual, and even the artwork is shockingly below standards for 1967.
What else was in Action Comics #351 through #353?
The first two issues reprint (in separate installments) one of the most terrifying horror stories ever conceived: Jimmy Olsen #57, where he marries Supergirl.
Action Comics #353 is already in the period where Supergirl is attending college.
I’ve said many many times that while she graduated before Spider-Man, her series had the opposite direction… it began sucking.
The story ends with Supergirl being kidnapped by aliens who use her super-brain to become the 1967 version of ChatGPT. Don’t worry, she gets free in issue 354.
The story is by Otto Binder, who in addition to being a comic book writer was also an accomplished science fiction writer, so no wonder he predicted the future in his own way.
Interesting letters: a surprisingly rare snipe at the competition by the readers.
Superman WAS outselling Marvel at the time (selling twice as much as Spider-Man), although Batman was the highest selling book of 1967.
What WERE the best-selling Marvel books doing those 3 months, looking at the same cover date?
Compared to those, it feels like Superman was lagging twenty years in the past.
To be fair to DC, it’s not like Marvel didn’t have dumb stories: Daredevil #30-31 were in the same months…
…as was Adventure Comics #357, so DC did have some great stories too.
Just not often on Superman.
So they got Otto Binder, who wrote more Captain Marvel stories than anyone else, to write a cheap rip-off of the Big Red Cheese?
That’s pretty insulting.
Didn’t DC also have a Captain Marvel ripoff called Captain Thunder before they were willing to use the real one outright? So weird that they went to that well multiple times, differently.
There’s almost something to superman supplanting the Gods much like people speculate that superheroes are the new myths… This comic doesn’t come close to anything profound though. Zhavam indeed…
I was reading the legion awards and it got me thinking:
When was the very first “well, I’ll be a three eyed kryptonian babootch!”
Do we have any clue when the first Babootch catchphrase was?
The earliest remark of “I’ll be a three-eyed Kryptonian babootch” that I could find was when Superboy spouted it in “The Revenge of the Knave from Krypton”, from Adventure Comics # 320 (May, 1964). This was followed shortly thereafter by Superman exclaiming it in Lois Lane # 52 (Oct., 1964).
Hope this helps.
@Gabe Simpson: 1967’s Superboy #135 has a story by Jim Shooter that may or may not be just that.
@Chaim Mattis Keller: they had Captain Thunder, and it was a much closer match to the Big Red Cheese.
But his only appearance that about one and a half year after DC started publishing Captain Marvel, in mid-1974’s Superman #276. Late enough for DC to be publishing Shazam! #12 concurrently. I figure they felt a bit nervous about emulating Captain Marvel too closely before clearly establishing that they had the rights, which apparently only happened in 1973.
Odds are that editorial wanted to gauge reader reception for a meeting between Superman and Captain Marvel before fully committing, hence Superman #276 and Captain Thunder. Six months later Mister Mind and Doctor Sivana meet in Shazam! #15, which also establishes inequivocally that Captain Marvel and Superman exist in different, alternate Earths. I believe Superman and Captain Marvel only met in Justice League #135, cover date October 1976 – probably also where the name “Earth-S” originated.
That reminds me of the early 1980s Treasury Edition of Superman vs “Shazam”. That story establishes that Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen are aware that Captain Marvel lives in an alternate Earth.
Pre-Crisis DC stories rarely had any significant level of exploration of how secret the existence of the alternate Earths was supposed to be, nor of the consequences of knowing of their existence. A couple of Superman Family issues in the late 1970s have Earth-Two Superman visiting Earth-One in order to request that Jimmy Olsen become an organ donator for his own (older) Earth-Two counterpart, yet there is no talk of whether something comparable may or may not be done on a more regular schedule for other people. There was a stronger drive for keeping the status quo stable during that time.
I almost forgot:
It is indeed crazy that even after given two applicable (and really fairly easy) clues by his own enemies Superman’s bold plan is still ultimately _hoping_ that he gets hit by lightning bolts and that those happen to give him the bizarre powers and abilities that he needs at the time.
Another not-at-all subtle nod to the character that they are parodying in this three-parter, I assume.
And of course, it makes no sense whatsover that Superman does not even consider reaching for Wonder Woman to seek advice. But that would mean taking Zha-Vam seriously, and that was not in the cards.
…
Now I want to see Superman telling Diana about Zha-Vam. Diana would decide to take matters into her own hands and make an impossible movie about how she, her mother and her two younger selves all team-up to teach Zha-Vam to be a better, gentler, wiser doomsday weapon of the Olympic gods.
Maybe they did not vanish in this Superman story; they fled in shame for having such a foolish agent. Superman finds Diana just as she noticed their absence independently; now Kal and Diana have to find and pep talk each and every Olympic god as they work through their deep embarrassment of association with Zha-Vam.
This is it, folks: the unpublished storyline that will change the worlds of Superman and Wonder Woman – Forever! (Again).
Now you know the true reason why Crisis on Infinite Earths had to happen.
I’m now imagining Mooch (the cat from Patrick McDonnell’s Mutts comic strip), but instead of his usual chew toy of “little pink sock!”, he has a “green kryptonite sock!”
A Superman/Mutts crossover would guaranteed be better than revisiting Zha-Vam.
So Zha-Vam hasn’t appeared since 1969? Seems like the kind of character some weirdo would dust off — I’m looking at you, Grant Morrison.
Another story with a respectable idea — the gods sending a creature out of jealousy (nothing new there) — and a real challenge for Supes. But totally out of sync with the DC universe at the time, and way too wacky. Zha-Vam deserves another shot at the title.
Otto Binder was like that, Mark. He didn’t mind messing with the established Superman formula. He once wrote a story about “Black Zero”, an alien who claimed responsibility for the destruction of Krypton and who had powers that completely bypassed Superman’s invulnerability. For example, he could teleport a piece of green kryptonite INSIDE Superman’s body. He tried to destroy Earth with an antimatter bomb, a plot that was only foiled because Jimmy Olsen was eating lifesavers. It was an utterly weird story and no one ever referenced it again.
O lord…WHY?!?