Superman, Vol. 1 #252 (1972) 100-Page Giant, Neal Adams Cover
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Superman & The World's Greatest Flying Heroes
Powerstone! Criminal mastermind Luthor has discovered a process using electricity to enhance his own strength. But he still lacked one key component that could make him Superman's equal; the Powerstone! To get that, needs the Man of Steel's help. A few days later in Metropolis, millionaire Brett Calhoun announces to the city that he would be giving away three million dollars to any man that could prove he was the richest person alive. It is odd enough to get every reporter in the city on the case, including Clark and Lois of the Daily Planet. Police are keeping reporters out, but Lois manages to sneak inside through a window. Inside, she sees Brett with the other millionaires seated at a table, when suddenly, Luthor enters the room! He planned the whole thing, Blackmailing Mr. Calhoun top set it up, so he could steal the fortunes of the wealthiest men. His electricity treatment has allowed Luthor to send small surges through the room, paralyzing anyone they touch, including a certain young lady reporter. When Superman smashes through the ceiling, Luthor gives him a choice: Either help him by retrieving the Powerstone from Skull Valley, or watch Lois die. Into Skull Valley Superman flies. He finds the Powerstone where Luthor said it would be; inside a cavern, encased in the forehead of a large idol. He rips the stone out of its casing, triggering a cave-in. But Superman manages to escape with the stone in time. Luthor is pleased to have the Powerstone in his hands at last. He reneges on the deal, saying with his new power, he can conquer the world. But Superman has tricked him. It was not the real stone Luthor was holding, but a replica Superman made. The real Powerstone was hidden where Luthor could never find it. Luthor's strength diminishes, the electric hold he had on the millionaires and on Lois fade. Police are called in and Luthor is arrested.
When Titans Clash! Lex Luthor tricks Superman into giving him the Powerstone -- an object which gives him super-powers (just as it did the last time he possessed it). When he is sentenced to die in the electric chair, he laughs: when the electricity courses through his body, it just makes him more powerful. But ultimately, Superman defeats him.
The Fire Murders Fires of unknown origin kill a series of wealthy men and women, some of whom are known to Inza Cramer. She ascertains that each of them had received threats, and had refused to pay for protection. When she tells Dr. Fate what she knows, he is attacked by a fiery globe! Fate magically sends that globe straight back to where it came from, plus follows it. On a rocky coast he finds an isolated steel castle. This is the stronghold of a sorcerer called Mango the Mighty, and it is defended, with a flock of ‘’Maylayan Poison Bats,’’ a giant flying fireball, and an undead army called the ‘’Legions of the Styx.’’ This villain also manages to kidnap Inza Cramer, but it works out badly for him. Fate rescues Inza, and transforms the sorcerer into a tiny statue of clay, which Inza seals in an ebony cabinet.
Hawkgirl Shiera Sanders is given a Hawk costume for a costume party. Hawkman’s bird friends mistake her for their master and summon her to a couple in distress. The couple are victims of a pair of racketeers. Shiera, again mistaken for Hawkman, investigates but is captured. Hawkman is alerted to trouble by his bird friends and shows up to rescue Shiera. He puts an end to the racketeering scheme, then discourages Shiera from getting into trouble with the Hawk costume.
The Missing Scientists Over the previous few months, dozens of scientists (Prof. Steiner, Dr. Marsh, et.al.), are kidnapped by foreign secret agents. Meanwhile Sen. Tom Wright is having problems getting appropriations bills, for the FBI and Secret Service, through the Senate. Sen. Wright goes on a fact-finding mission, and pilots his own plane, looking over key defense plants from above. He finds a factory with way too many boxcars for its available storage track, and forms a suspicion about that. That night, Sen. Wright returns to the plant on foot. He gets inside and while he’s looking around, sees one boxcar seemingly vanish. Tom then finds a workman and pays him $100 to swap clothes with him, then snoops around, but is quickly caught by a supervisor, who pulls out a pistol and tells Wright to come with him. They go to the boss’s office, and the boss turns out to be Jaspar Crow, who has his henchmen take the nosy senator out to the rail yard, and into a tank car. If he hasn’t suffocated to death by morning that’s too bad, because the car’s going to be loaded with prussic acid. Inside the tank, Tom changes clothes, then the Black Condor’s Black Ray pistol, shooting yellow beams of energy, sears a hole through the side of the freight car. Condor flies onto the string of cars from which he saw one vanish, and gets atop the last car. Soon it “vanishes” also, down a boxcar-sized elevator, at least ten stories deep. At the bottom he finds a huge secret factory, making black market war materials for a foreign power. The freight car contains abducted scientists Steiner, Marsh, and others, who are put to work building submarines, for illicit export. Black Condor flies around, undetected, and finds a room where newly-arriving scientists are hypnotized into obedient laborers. Next the Condor flies into the girders above a huge laboratory, toiling inside of which, he finds Dr. Paige and the great Hans Erlicka, both of whom have been missing. Condor changes clothes again, and approaches Paige as Tom Wright, and is soon able to verbally bring the scientist out of his hypnotic state. Paige then shows Tom where the captive scientists are barracked, and returns to resume his labors. Moving from cell to cell, Tom de-hypnotizes over a hundred scientists and gathers them together. But an alert supervisor in a watchtower notices something wrong: “Calling the leader! The men act strange … We think the trances are being broken by someone!” The masked face of Jaspar Crow appears on a large “televisor” screen, and gives the order to execute the scientists; the henchman throws an electrical switch sending thousands of volts through the steel shacks where the scientists are housed. Finding these empty, the guards pull out guns and start hunting for the escapees. The Black Condor has soon knocked them out and given their guns to the scientists, but now the bad guys have a howitzer-sized ray gun, shooting beams of energy at them. The Condor easily eludes the beams, which melt some girders, which fall onto some machinery, to destructive effect. The bad guys then hurry to load their disintegrator ray aboard a submarine, and get under way, announcing their plan to wreak havoc along the east coast. The submarine disappears through a sea-lock door, but the Black Condor’s pistol, shooting a red beam, blasts open the lock door like a tin can. Just then the Condor is distracted by seeing the hypnotist fleeing on foot. He catches this guy and forces him to call the leader on a televisor screen, then to hypnotize him as soon as his face appears. This seems to work, but when “the leader” appears in person and is unmasked by the Condor, he turns out to be some flunky left behind by Jaspar Crow. He has however called the police, as instructed. The escaped submarines, armed with disintegrator ray weapons, are lurking off the Cape Hatteras coast, and a large number of Coast Guard ships are approaching them. One sub surfaces and fires on one of the patrol ships, sinking it. This is observed by a Coast Guard patrol plane, which flies in to attack the sub, but also is disabled by the ray. The Black Condor arrives in time to yank the pilots out of the falling plane, and land them safely aboard one of the approaching warships (at least four). There he borrows four heavy bombs, and flies off to attack the submarines, and picks them off one by one. Soon Wendy Foster and her father are delighted to read in the paper about how Tom Wright single-handedly smashed the scientist-kidnap ring AND got the FBI’s funding appropriation doubled.
The Return Of Zor Using telepathy, Zor commands world-reknowned scientist Professor Dale Ericks to build a mechanism of unknown purpose, which then activates itself and projects Ericks across the depths of infinity to the weird castle where Zor is imprisoned, then to free him from a paralysis-ray. Ericks' reward is to take Zor's place. Once free, the evil spirit murders Police Sergeant Dexter and frames Jim Corrigan. Zor battles the Spectre, in a fierce exchange of comets, but Zor has more powerful knowledge of physics. -- Zor then enlists the aid of murderer Pedro Gonzalez, by magically interrupting his hanging. Pedro kidnaps Clarice Winston (her 4th kidnap) and ties her to a log and sends it over a waterfall. Spectre is prevented from interfering by an invisible wall created by Zor. The Voice tells Spectre that evil is vulnerable to the mystic ectobane tree. (That's the sum of their fourth conversation.) Spectre zooms to the distant country of Lugania, magically harvests some ectobane trees, rapidly builds a coffin, returns to the waterfall, paralyzes Zor, and places him inside it. He then rescues Clarice by reversing the waterfall, and transforms Gonzalez into a tree. Zor is then banished to the depths of the universe.
The Menace Of The Invisible Raiders! A new super criminal, the Mist, is stealing American secrets, and already has accumulated quite a few. He’s embittered because he and his inventions were scoffed at by the military in the past. With his inviso-solution he can render people and even airplanes invisible. The Mist and his band of Living Shadows plan to steal all of the U.S.’s secrets and sell them to its foreign enemies. He also intends to bomb U.S. factories in Pittsburgh and Bethlehem from invisible planes. The Mist's hideout is in Gigantic Cavern, Kentucky, and he has some invisible single-engine bombers down there, plus a secret hangar entrance, too. And a space-ship. Starman intercepts and blows up the dive-bombers in mid-air; no parachutes are seen. The Mist goes down with his spaceship and is presumed dead.
A Modern Pied Piper Happy Terrill investigates some ship sinkings, suspecting Dock Commissioner Jennings of being in on the mischief (which he is). By following the commissioner, the Ray is able to learn that a clarinetist named Stradivous, operating at a remote lighthouse, is using hypnotic music and conventional radio waves to mentally control first the radiomen then the crews of the targeted cargo ships. The Ray saves a ship loaded with gold from crashing, by turning off its engines, then, using his powers in an innovative new way, un-hypnotizing the crew. Then he visits the lighthouse hideout of the crooks, and gets captured, but Stradivous has carelessly left the transmitter on, and his music draws a police boat to the lighthouse.
Superman's Greatest Feats! After Superman saves Atlantis from an atomic testing, Lori Lemaris begs him to try and change history so that Atlantis will not have sunk. Despite his knowledge from a trip back to Abraham Lincoln's time as Superboy that history cannot be changed, Superman agrees to try. He goes back in time, prevents Atlantis from sinking, rescues Christians from the Colosseum, saves Nathan Hale from being hung by the British, rescues General Custer and his men at the Little Big Horn, stops John Wilkes Booth from shooting Abraham Lincoln, and builds a fleet of space arks which save the population of Krypton before their homeworld explodes. But, when he sees baby Kal-El in the arms of Lara at a time in which he still exists materially, he realizes that he cannot be in his own universe, where such a paradox would be impossible. Instead, he learns that he has gone into a parallel universe, where history can be changed. Since his existence there creates cosmic disturbances that threaten that universe, Superman returns to the Earth-One plane, and tells Lori that he cannot change their history--but in that other universe, Atlantis never sank and the people of Krypton live.
Release Date: 1972
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