Five Superman Publications I Like Better Than The Movies 02: Superman #162



When I was a kid reading older, reprinted Superman stories and the occasional beat-up old issue, it seemed to me that the character in those comics existed more as a storytelling abstraction than as a character around whom dramatic situations developed. I might not have put it like that, but the comics I was reading were definitely more concerned with an idea given form than they were about a guy named Kal. Many of the stories from the 1950s and 1960s I was encountering hinged on some display of Superman being the best at everything, or at least very Superman about these things, while others used the character's standard plot set-up as a basis on which to riff: characters digging into his secret origin, for example, or some plot that revolved around the extent and scope of his powers. Superman #162 had a little bit of both: character-based drama and sci-fi abstraction. I discovered it in a wicker basket at my second cousin's house in 1973. I eventually picked it up as a reprint in an over-sized Superman publication and started reading and re-reading it all over again.

I love the stately pace with which the Superman Red/Superman Blue story unfolds, this measured walk through the implications of the initial, establishing incident. It's like the appendices that come after the climax of a movie, except here they constitute nearly the entire story. Superman #162 is pretty much all Happily Ever After. I also like that the Leo Dorfman-written story gives Superman this gigantic tip of the hat in terms of how awesome he is while at the exact same time underlining how he's limited, explained in a way that my eight-year-old brain got the character as it never had before. Two of Superman (and a pair of brain upgrades) overwhelms every problem known to man including his own; one Superman falls just short on making progress of any kind. That's a very powerful, specific fantasy, and too few of the Superman comics explore the notion of exactly how that fantasy might work. No one other than Curt Swan could have drawn it, and the story is festooned with moments of visual flair, my favorite being the halo of intellectual power that spin around the twin Superman heads at one point early on. Superman #162 was more imaginative than imaginary, and I still enjoy reading it.

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* "The Titanic Twins! [The Amazing Story of Superman-Red and Superman-Blue!]", Leo Dorfman and Curt Swan and George Klein, Superman #162, DC Comics, comic book, May 1963, $.12.

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