Interesting read.
It’s not forgotten. I remember it well – and just cited it in another thread.
It was an awful story. Even ignoring that it added stuff to the continuity (and there were plenty of other stories at the time that did just as much – Superman took a zillion detours on his way from Krypton to Earth, it seems), it was badly-written and ill-conceived, and made Jor-el into a nut case. Edmund Hamilton (who’d been writing SF and comics for decades) shoulda known better.
I read the link but your quoted text is inadequate. What is it about Black Zero you find so unique/interesting?
Heck, there was that story about the “sun-thrivers”, beings who created Krypton’s red sun and eventually Krypton itself, who were endangered by the planet’s destruction and came looking for help, moving their entire star into the Solar System.
I vaguely remember a character called “The Kryptonian Killer” who supposedly was responsible for Krypton’s destruction and who then tried to kill the last remaining Kryptonians on Earth. Duplicated plot or related to this at all?
I also don’t find this to be much worse than normal for any given Silver Age comic.
He probably would. But Otto Binder wrote the story and Binder was never any good. He had no qualms about adding all the stuff to the mythos that characterized the 50s. He created Supergirl, and “With artist collaborators, he co-created the supervillain Brainiac, the Phantom Zone, and the supporting characters Lucy Lane, Beppo the Super Monkey, Titano the Super Ape, and Krypto the Super Dog. In the first issue of Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen, he introduced Jimmy Olsen’s signal-watch, and in #31, Jimmy’s Elastic Lad identity.”
That story was also just about at the end of his long career, which didn’t help. He had gone bankrupt and returned to writing just to pay the bills.
Just a nitpick, since I usually get it wrong myself unless I look it up. It’s Edmond, not Edmund.
Dammit. Shoulda looked it up again.
It’s clear Binder just needed to come up with a story. It’s pretty slipshod, and it’s sketchy at best. The thing I love is that Black Zero has Violet eyes, like Liz Taylor.
Binder may have just been out of his element with Superman; his work with Captain Marvel was superb.
But a lot earlier, as **Exapno ** noted.
I haven’t read much CM, but what I have read had much siompler stories and characters.
The Captain was far less complex, but far more fun. He was goofy, and his villains and friends were even goofier. Dr. Sivana was a parody of the mad scientist and characters like Mr. Tawky Tawny (a talking tiger who walked upright), Mr. Mind (an evil mastermind, who also happened to be an alien worm), Uncle Marvel (who hung around the other Marvels but had no powers and excused it because he suffered from Shambago), and the Sivana family (the good and handsome Magnificus and Beautia, and the evil and ugly Sivana, Jr. and Georgia) were delightful.
The Big Red Cheese was always psychologically 12 years old like Billy Batson, which lent him an appealing innocence.
The stories were no simpler than other stories of the time, though with a lighter, more cartoony touch.
Interesting factoid: When I was growing up, there were no comic books in my home. Once every several months, my family would drive out to the Valley to visit my dad’s sister and her family, who DID have comic books. TONS of comic books (all DC). That was the only comic book reading I ever did.
That’s why, in the '99 household, Silver Age DC canon is the only canon that has any validity. Superman grew up as Superboy, who had a platoon of Superboy robots at his disposal (the TV series Smallville makes absolutely no sense to me), Jimmy Olsen’s Signal watch is really a thing, and Brainiac is a Green-skinned human-shaped android with no hair, but with an electrode skullcap who keeps the shrunken city of Kandor in a bell jar.
In the context of this thread, that means I PREFER the version of Superman who is a Super Dope with unlimited power, but no control over the events around him.
“A secret in his brain that will destroy the human race” The Anti-Life Equation!
Quick! Get the Govenator! No not him, the other one!
And Aqualad.
And shudder Drizz’t.
This paragraph is self-contradictory. All of that stuff was awesome. (Well, maybe not Lucy, as she appeared in the Silver Age, but still…)
nm