Y’all remember Ka-Bala, the mysterious toy with the power to predict the future?
While I cannot predict the outcome of baseball games or someone’s love life, years of immersing myself in fiction have given me some skill at spotting plot twists and big reveals (I’m sure I’m not the only one here who can do this). Take a couple of DC books cover-dated August 1969.
In Action Comics #379, Leo Dorfman and Curt Swan (who drew the cover) pit Superman against “The Eliminator” — though that’s not obvious in the story (this is one of those covers that gives spoilers though not fatally so). When Superman opens the coffin of the occultist Phantas — Phantas’ lawyer thinks that’s where they’ll find the will — Phantas’ spirit rises in outrage. As magic won’t work on Superman (yes, I know), he’ll punish Clark Kent for supposedly asking Superman to help. One by one, some of Clark’s friends die in mysterious accidents — is it possible that magic is (gasp) real? Yep, it’s one of those stories that pretends Superman has never ever run into magic.
As it turns out, magic isn’t real, at least not Phantas’ magic. He’s an ET, his world’s Eliminator—executioner—and the men he hunted down and killed were alien criminals in disguise. Superman isn’t thrilled by the alien’s methods but concedes it’s his planet’s criminals, his law.
I figured it out early. True, I read it in reprint some forty years back but I think it has more to do with recognizing the similarity with Action #364’s Supergirl story “The Kiss of Death” which came out the previous year. That Otto Binder/Kurt Schaffenberger story has Supergirl investigating why women keep dropping dead after marrying and kissing the mysterious Count Durkla. It turns out all three victims were ruthless killers on their own world; Durkla was an alien executioner carrying out their sentence. It’s not an exact match, but close enough for me to guess the Eliminator’s agenda.
For the record, the Supergirl story was better — tighter script with better art (I love Curt Swan but Jack Abel’s inking does him no favors) and fewer plot holes.
“Please Stop My Funeral” (Robert Kanigher, J. Winslow Mortimer, with Neal Adams providing the cover) in Adventure Comics #383 is completely new to me but I still guessed the twist. After Supergirl intercepts an alien spacecraft it explodes — and apparently kills her. Out of the many possible ways to explain that, I correctly guessed this one was going to be “explosion threw her into a parallel world” which is a trick the Super-books have used a couple of times before. Sure enough, it turns out this is an alt.Earth where Abraham Lincoln survived his assassination and Isaac Newton introduces the Chinese to gunpowder. And don’t worry, that Earth’s Supergirl turns out to be alive too.
Now if only there were a way to make money off my awesome powers …
