That’s the one!
Do you know the title and issue number for The Day Superman Became the Flash?
A quick Internet search turns up issue #314, July 1964
The cover:
http://www.comics.org/coverview.lasso?id=18463&zoom=2
The listing at this site is incomplete, since they only list the Flash as making a guest appearance:
Hee’s the other one I was thinking of – Action comics #370, Dec. 1968 – “100 Years – Lost, Strayed, or Stolen” by Neal Adams (!):
Good heavens…the Super-Flash hybrid costume is…hideous. But thanks for tracking down the issue.
Also, since we’re ‘not actually Kal-El’ versions, there are 2 different ‘Supermen’ who were actually human astronauts, who gained superpowers due to accidents in space:
The version of Ultraman from JLA: Earth-2 was injured, badly, and when aliens reconstructed him, he a) gained powers due to exposure to anti-kryptonite, and b) went insane.
Big Bang Comics’ Ultiman gained powers when he was exposed to a substance called Ultranium during his accident. (His (Earth-A) costume bears a striking, and unsettling, resemblance to the Ultraman of Earth-3’s.)
Polycarp, Cafe Society is not meant to be used by you or anyone else to “teach” someone a lesson about what you perceive–correctly or incorrectly–to be his/her posting habits. This is the forum for the discussion of the arts; your post belongs in the Pit. If you see a post of Der Trihs’s which is against the rules, please report it and let a moderator handle it.
Please do not do this again.
^^^Thank you, SkipMagic.
And thank you again, everyone, for the great reading list I’m assembling.
Sir Rhosis
The story was reprinted in Best of DC Blue Ribbon Digest #8, which I bought back in 1980 and dug up in researching my earlier post. It’s sitting on my desk as I type this.
The cover is visible here, on the left (I have the digest on the right as well). The “Super-Flash” costume is next to the “Genie”. The digest is a compilation of stories that relate to secret identities in some way. Within the Digest, the story is retitled The Five Other Identities of Superman!, which strikes me as more accurate and less pedestrian than the original.
For the sake of completeness, there was an old Alan Moore story in 2000AD in which an alien scientist of a powerful race, predicting that his sun is about to explode and destroy his planet, builds a spaceship which will send his infant son to safety on Earth: sadly the predicted destruction of his planet fails to occur, whereas the arrival of his son’s spaceship in America is mistaken for a Soviet missile, and triggers a nuclear war which destroys the Earth. Which just goes to show that even Alan Moore had his off-days.
Another Alternative:
In Planetary, the wise scientist has discovered that the gravity-assist launch system used on his world is destabilizing its core. He puts his infant son into a vehicle and sends it off. That is the launch that triggers the catastrophe.
When it arrives on Earth, the landing is observed by agents of the Four (human astronauts who were exposed to something strange in space and came back with powers that allow them to secretly rule the world). They open the capsule, the alien infant looks up and reaches for the first person he sees, and is incinerated. That member of the Four got a severe reprimand for that, but claims that his instructions were to recover the technology and were ambigous in regards to life-forms.
(The Four also shot down an interstellar policeman passing Jupiter and recovered his psychically-controlled lightbeam weapon. I love this series.)
Killer Kent vs. Super-Luthor is another imaginary story from Superman #230. Jor-El is a leading scientist on Krypton, with wife Lara and young son Lex-El, permanently bald from a lab accident. Lara dies during another accident which Jor blames on a thunderstorm. He goes mad and blames Krypton, eventually releasing a super-weapon that destroys the planet, emigrating with Lex-El to Earth.
Jor and Lex-El, now Jordan and Lex Luthor, settle in Smallville. Lex has superpowers and becomes Superboy (wearing a brown wig to disguise himself in his civilian identity). Jor does not, a convenenient by-product of his mental illness.
Clark Kent however, is an orphan. His parents Jonathan and Martha were a Bonnie-and-Clyde equivalent, killed in a car crash while leading the cops in a high-speed chase. Clark is adopted by the Lang family but eventually goes bad, anticipating a criminal career using advanced weapons to destroy Superman. Sadly, I don’t have issue #231 so I never did find out how it the story ended.