Has anyone ever said you look like Superman?

I recently wrapped up the first Silver Age Superman omnibus, which I bought to upgrade from the Showcase Superman black and white TPBs. As I’ve blogged about before, this was an era that added a lot to the Superman mythos, from the Fortress of Solitude to Brainiac, Bizarro, Kandor and the Earth-One Mxyzptlk. Plenty of the stories still suffer from the painfully sexist treatment of Lois or just plain silliness but I’m a Silver Age kid so it’s a win overall.

The two stories I’m looking at today come near the end of the volume. They didn’t add anything to the mythos — I don’t recall any follow-up or callbacks to them later — but they aren’t silly ones either. And they both concern a double for the Kryptonian Crimebuster, one good, one evil. I think I’d have had more space between the two, but then again the tales aren’t much alike.

In “The Two Faces of Superman” by Jerry Siegel and Curt Swan, we learn that Kal-El’s escape rocket encountered an alien ship on the way to Earth. The ship’s tech created an exact duplicate of baby Kal and his rocket, composed of solid energy. The rocket crashes at the hideout of “Wolf” Derek and his wife Bonnie, currently in hiding, though comfortably so (Wolf’s clearly got money). When they realize this rocket has delivered a super-baby into their lap, they see dollar signs. With the right training they can train “Super-Brat”‘ to grow up into a Super-Menace, one who can put Wolf on top as the king of crime.

As Clark grows up, so does Super-Brat (no, the Dereks never give him a real name. As parents they suck), becoming first a teen Super-Bully, then the adult Super-Menace. To postpone the Clash of Titans as long as possible, Wolf orders his kid not to engage Superman; better to keep his existence a secret until the time is right. That doesn’t make much sense — like an evil Superboy wouldn’t be enough of a weapon? — but it does stretch the story into a “three-part novel” as they used to call them.

It also gives us a chance to see Super-Bully is a smoldering cauldron of resentment. He’s been taught to hate Superboy as a symbol of law and order but he also comes off resentful of Superboy’s life full of friends and family; at some level Super-Menace seems to know his parents aren’t what they should be. At one point he attempts to covertly destroy Smallville but doesn’t succeed.

In a nice touch, we see the Dereks have visibly aged by the time they send Super-Menace to finish off his counterpart. Showing himself an absolute jerk, Wolf informs Bonnie she’s way too old for him; once he secures his status as crime kingpin, he’s kicking her to the curb. Eavesdropping, Super-Menace learns from the following argument how little his parents care about him. Fueled by resentment and an immunity to kryptonite, he defeats Superman … and discovers he’s not taking any pleasure in his long-awaited triumph. The Dereks made him a monster but he doesn’t want to be one after all. Saving Superman from the green kryptonite, Super-Menace flies back and detonates his energy form, blowing up his parents real good.

Siegel gives Super-Menace more pathos than such duplicates usually get, and that makes the story work. He also gave us (as far as I know) the first Evil Superman Duplicate, of whom many more would follow, from Earth-Three’s Ultraman to the uninteresting super-kid of Brightburn. It’s also the first story to ask the question, What If Kal’s rocket landed somewhere else? A question that would be echoed in Red Son, The Nail and an episode of the Superboy TV series (Clark’s rocket lands on the farm of Smallville’s richest, shittiest man), among others.

Action #265 introduces us to “The Superman From Outer Space” (Otto Binder, Curt Swan) — an odd title, given that Superman is from outer space himself. In this case, the title refers to Hyper-Man, Superman’s exact double from the planet Oceania, an exact Earth lookalike. Having been rocketed away from the doomed planet Zoron as a kid, Hyper-Man fits into the Superman role on Oceania, in between working as TV journalist Chester King and fending off snooping, secret identity-suspecting coworker Lydia Long (three guesses who she looks like, not that you’ll need them). Robots don’t work on Oceania due to electrical properties in the atmosphere; would Superman fly to Oceania with Hyper-Man and help him throw Lydia off the scent?

Superman agrees, but we learn early on that he’s up to some sort of “super-dickery,” working to expose Hyper-Man’s identity rather than conceal it. Sure enough, an “accident” involving Hyper-Man’s weakness, zoronite, exposes him as Chester King. As if that wasn’t enough it strips him of his powers. Oceania turns against Superman but showers honors on its former greatest hero; Lydia makes it clear that powers or not, she loves him.

A year later, Chester dies. Superman learned before flying to Oceania that Chester had been exposed to a particularly deadly, unknown isotope of zoronite that would kill his powers, then him. They accident was a deliberate ploy that let Chester marry the woman he loved and spend his last year happy and honored.

Unlike “Two Faces of Superman,” I can’t say this one foreshadowed much. But damn, it works every time I read it, tugging my heartstrings when Chester dies and learning Superman did his best to give him a happy ending.You can’t ask more from a story than that.