"This is an Imaginary Story. ...Aren't they all?"

So wrote Alan Moore to kick off "Whatever Happened to The Man of Tomorrow?", an amazing tale that marked no less than the end of Superman's Silver Age as well as the final adventure of the Man of - but wait! We've got a decade or so of Imaginary Stories to discuss first.

For the uninitiated and/or just plain foggy of mind, Imaginary Stories (IS's) were a staple of the Superman family of comic books throughout the 1960s. And to those who might ask, as Alan Moore suggests, if "Imaginary" is not a bit of a redundant label for any story in which Superman appears: not if you're editor Mort Weisinger and his stable of writers, locking yourselves into an ever-expanding but nonetheless unbending continuity. The "Imaginary" moniker was a way for a writer to explore a tantalizing, unlikely, or simply silly story concept that could not play out in the "real" life of a hero who'd irrevocably lost his home planet, was implicitly sworn to celibacy, and never made a friend or an enemy who wouldn't love to soar spandexed through the air, same as him.

Most fans from back in the day have a favorite IS, while a vocal minority professes its dislike of the overall concept. But no matter, the IS's were undeniably a key component of the story of Superman and his associates throughout the 1960s and beyond. Imagine that era without them, and you lose a considerable amount of color and a whole lot of fun.

Comprehensive lists and analysis of IS's are elusive (see Resources below), but some Supe scholars cite "Superman's Other Life", comprising all of Superman #132 in 1959, as the genesis of the genre. Interestingly, this story does not strictly meet the IS specs, which included at least two (but more likely four or five) disclaimers that the depicted events "may or may not ever happen".

Instead, writer Edmund Hamilton frames a "what if" scenario - Krypton avoiding destruction and our hero's subsequent life thereon - within a real-time session on a scenario-spinning super computer in the Fortress of Solitude. The Univac predicts that Kal-el would have enjoyed a younger brother, Zal, before losing all of his family in an accident

regarding husband Clark's milquetoast tendencies. The story's opening narrative conveys a near giddiness in announcing that what we are about to read is, indeed, "only the first of many such tales which could very well happen in the future... but perhaps never will!" One can almost hear editor Weisinger, his responsibility being ten or more Supe-related stories a month, thinking "Goldmine!"

Let me now say that as a young reader, I loved almost all of these stories. I found them enjoyable, creative,

and - in their ability to break down the thematic structure of Superman's life (if only for eight pages) - very exciting. Part Two of this article spotlights a handful of favorites, plus one Imaginary Story too famous to ignore.

Resources: I've been on and off the web or a few years looking for a full listing of Imaginary Stories, and finally found this as I was finishing this article.

It "may or may not" be complete, but there are certainly more stories here than I can remember, plus a couple of intriguing entries from Superman's very early years. Scroll down the page to Imaginary Stories at http://www.dcuguide.com/chronology.php?name=hypertime

I'm not hard to figure when it comes to favorite Imaginary Stories - I went for the blockbusters. The tales below are all faves, save for one.

this to be a highly satisfying comic book experience. (Trivia Alert: while a strong appeal of this tale is the uplifting art of Curt Swan and George Klein, Weisinger nonetheless had Lois Lane regular Kurt Schaffenberger re-draw the faces of Lois and Lana for their scenes in the last chapter. This despite Swan's ability to draw soulful renditions of those characters, as seen in his Lois in the first page of the story.)

"The Fantastic Story of Superman's Sons", Superman #166, 1964. Though Superman's wife is never identified in this tale, she IS human, and the twin sons they produce are an unmatched set: one with dad's powers, the other earthbound like mom. That the mortal brother might have a slight self-esteem problem is an obvious thematic choice, but one that's given thoughtful and compelling development in this book-length telling.

Similarly, readers will likely guess what it takes for young Kal II to prove himself, but getting there - including a sojourn in Kandor and a time-visit to Granddaddy Jor-el - is a lot of fun. Another Swan/Klein treasure, scripted by sci-fi veteran Edmund Hamilton, who tells a story both sweet and adventuresome.

"The Super Family from Krypton", Superboy #95, 1962. Jor-el and Lara escape in a conveniently enlarged rocket with their infant son.

The space immigrants are befriended by the Kents but sensationalized in the press, thanks to a hot-headed reporter named Perry White. An extended stay on Earth looks dicey until Jor-el, in addition to a few Superman-style rescues, begins shaking his super-Einstein groove thing. Whenever there's a problem (usually mythos-related), he's there with a fix: Kandor, Luthor's hair, Kryptonite, even legs for Lori Lemaris! Eventually, the el family does go house hunting in outer space, but not before handing off Kal's Superboy duties - by way of a super-powered formula - to the Kent's adopted son, an Earthling named Clark.

This yarn is a sentimental fave, but a re-reading reveals how intentionally Superboy was designed for younger fans. The writing is simplistic, and each turn of events earns a narrative re-cap ("Ironic, eh readers? In this story, Lex Luthor DOES have hair and LIKES Superboy!"). One also finds interesting foreshadowing of the later "Superman Red and Blue", what with more than one super-powered hero on the scene and Jor-el's mental capability to solve most every problem.

Above represents a small sampling of the stories and ideas that appeared beneath the IS banner. Left undiscussed are Jimmy Olsen marrying Supergirl, Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne growing up as brothers, Jimmy and Lucy Lane's son marrying Superman and Lois Lane's daughter (ulp - first cousins?!), Lois as a Super-Maid from Krypton, Lex Luthor variously as Clark's brother,Kal-el's father, and Lois' husband, and Superman's serial marriages - all in one telling - to Lois, Lana, and Lori.

Events of the later 1960s slowed the IS output to a trickle before they effectively disappeared. For one thing, DC lost me as a reader. This was not particularly significant on its face, but as a representation of comic fans old and new who, like me, were gravitating to the Marvel Comics line,

it was a big deal. Seeking lost ground, DC began to emulate Marvel's multi-issue sagas. As Craig Shutt notes in his intro to DC's Greatest Imaginary Stories, the format left little room for narrative-busting IS's and wacky, DC-style one-offs (bad news for Jimmy Olsen as Were-Wolf fans).

And so the great stable of Imaginary Stories became largely a thing of DC's fabled past. Julie Schultz could well have been considered the genre's executioner, had he not green-lighted what I consider the greatest Imaginary Story of all time.

Resources: The stories listed above, excepting Superboy's but including Lois Lane's from Part One, can be found in the trade paperback DC's Greatest Imaginary Stories. The volume also includes a few sort-of-IS's of several other super-heroes. "The Amazing Story of Superman-Red and Superman-Blue" and "The Death of Superman" have been reprinted often; both appear in the enjoyable sampler The Greatest Superman Stories Ever Told, another of DC's many compilations.

In 1986, Julius Schwartz retired from DC. Concurrent with the departure of the man who'd been a presence at the company for some forty years and Superman's editor since 1971 was the arrival of John Byrne. The writer/artist was charged with no less than a total re-boot of Superman: the character would be re-created on a blank slate, with no

obligation on Byrne's part to acknowledge any portion of the Man of Steel's history or continuity, both of which reached linearly - if somewhat tenuously - back to Superman's first appearance in 1938.

So it was that Schwartz - at the end of his tenure as steward of the comics' greatest super-hero - faced both a challenge and an opportunity that were unique in Superman's 48 year run: to bring an incredibly huge body of work to a fitting close. The result was a nearly 50 page epic entitled "Whatever Happened to The Man of Tomorrow?", presented in two parts in the September '86 issues of Superman and Action (the Superman comic, #423, became the last issue of the series that is now called Superman Volume 1). Set ten years in "the future", the story relates Lois Lane's first hand account of Superman's disappearance and presumed death a decade earlier.

Here I should say that I did not follow Superman comics in the 1970s and '80s. In recent years, I've read a reprint here and there, but there are elements of that era I couldn't understand if I wanted to - most notably the rationale behind and execution of the "Crisis on Infinite Earths" stories.

So while I'd noted the trade paperback reprint of "Whatever Happened" during my bookstore Superman scoutings back around the turn of the millennium, I initially considered the 1986 copyright warning enough that this story was not for a Supe fan from the 1960s.

Wrong, very wrong! Here are the Daily Planet's classic "staff of four", plus Lana, Krypto, Supergirl, the Legion of Super-Heroes, and members of the JLA. Causing vastly more trouble than usual are Luthor, Brainiac, Bizarro, the Legion of Super Villains, and - for truly vintage fans - even Toyman and Prankster. A '60s pedigree is perfect for this epic.

And while the large cast list might remind you of a Fantastic Four wedding, have no doubt: this IS an epic tale, deftly spun by Alan Moore with art by Curt Swan. There are heroic deaths - quite a few - and heartfelt pathos. There are surprising plot twists and satisfying resolutions. There are subtly dropped clues that will send you back through the story again. I will not spoil it for you - you would rightly hate me. The paperback edition is still available, and if you've read this far, for six bucks you should definitely pick it up. I pulled my copy to review for this column, and I re-read every word. The story is a true gift to fans like us.

Now - about the "Imaginary" status: Moore states on page one that "This is an Imaginary Story". Then he adds "Aren't they all?" Andrew Helfer, Schultz's successor in the editor's chair, points out in the forward to the paperback edition that directly following the original publication of this tale, ALL the Superman stories of the past would become "Imaginary"; Byrne's re-boot would implicitly make it so. The events in "Whatever Happened", this would seem to suggest, are as "real" as the reader cares to make them.

So where does that leave a "pre-boot" fan like me? Did the Superman I loved as a boy really come to career's end in a battle royale at the Fortress of Solitude, summer of '86?
Well, the Libra in me loves indecision. But I hope you'll decide for yourself. Maybe all the Superman stories ARE imaginary, but few are this good!

Resources and addenda: "Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?" was re-released in a "Deluxe Edition" in 2009. For the background information in Part Three of this article, I've borrowed liberally from the original paperback edition's forward, written by Paul Kupperberg. Many thanks to Bruce Dettman for his on-going inspiration by example, and for his gentle but persistent badgering of me to write this article!

Charlie Glaize - friend, voiceover artist extraordinaire, and reader of these articles - sent me an email about his own relationship with Superman comics, and one line in particular got me to thinking:

I recall reading every issue I could get my hands on, and I read them cover to cover, letters to the editor, the ads for the 10,000 army men-everything!

Wow, the 10,000 army men ads! A slight exaggeration, perhaps, but certainly in the spirit of the advertising itself. And Charlie's not the only person who remembers these amazing milestones in marketing; there are whole web sites devoted to the ads that reached out to us comic book reading kids in the 1950s and '60s. Surfing those sites has filled me not only with nostalgia, but also a long delayed sense of relief in learning I wasn't the only minor on the planet to fall for those persuasive pitches.

But perhaps I was the only one to fall... three times! Here's my rap sheet:

1. 204 Revolutionary War Soldiers $1.98! Whatever you might suspect, don't think this was an impulse buy. I was reading six or eight comics a month on my weekly stipend of 25c, and the ad for these plastic veterans of our nation's revolution appeared in nearly every one of those books. I found the visuals compelling, with repeated exposure heightening rather than diminishing my attraction to the depicted battle scene and therefore, in my mind, the product itself.

My focal point became the American officer in the lower right corner, rapier raised in defiance, mouth open in mid-shout of some long-lost patriotic exhortation. Historical probability aside, what this bluecoat was effectively saying to ME was "You WANT this set, young Alfred Walker! You know it, I know it, and the American people know it. Now, get out there and cobble together a dollar and ninety eight cents!"

And ultimately, I did just that. The exact terms of the financial package have been lost to the mists of time, but they relied on the fairly predictable blend of allowance advances, increased chore activity, and pleading. I filled out the coupon, scotch taped the exact change to a piece of paper, mailed in my order, and settled into a waiting period of sweet anxiety rivaled only by the weeks leading up to Christmas.

The day the soldiers finally arrived made for a difficult but valuable lesson in the ways of this world. The box, to begin with, would have barely held a soft ball. No way 204 of America and Britain's finest could fit in THERE! Was this just part of my order? No, this was the whole shooting match, if you will. The soldiers were barely 2 inches tall, cut from plastic so thin that they were practically 2D, and-worst of all-colored one single hue per army, red or blue depending! No flesh tones, no black boots and hats, no metal and wood hewn firearms, no white flashing teeth shouting "You WANTED this set, young Alfred Walker!"

As far as my parents (and finance ministers) ever knew, I never uttered a word of dissatisfaction. My pitch for the purchase had been, by my introverted standards, way too over the top for me to now admit disappointment with the actual items. I did bare my soul to my best friend, Billy Boy, for we had no secrets and we tended to view each other's problems as minor glitches in lives that could always be revitalized with a game of HORSE or a backyard wrestling match. Billy's take on my miniature, mono-colored minions boiled down to: OK, they're not what you expected-now let's PLAY with them.

We did a few cursory tabletop set ups, but where the wee warriors finally came into their own was the big sandbox my dad had built around the maple tree in our backyard. The hapless Brits were invariably called upon to defend the banks of a stream that traced its headwaters to the garden hose set to trickle. As if the stealthy Americans, hiding as they would behind sand dunes and hastily planted twigs, weren't deadly enough, the redcoats always succumbed to the great flood that overran the streambed, when another patriot victory was secured by ratcheting the hose up to full power.

2. Frontier Cabin $1! Somehow, my mom became a major player in this one. I think the cute little cabin as pictured must have struck her fancy as an excellent and economical addition to our indoor play stock for nasty winter afternoons and weekends. As her interest rose, my role became secondary: I needn't use up valuable kid cred in trying to persuade; I needed only to play in the thing when it showed up.

If two armies in a softball-sized box were a shock, imagine the jolt when a log - excuse me, "frontier"-cabin arrived in an oversized cardboard ENVELOPE! Well, the ad did say it was polyethylene, but it didn't say it was a plastic BAG! Yes, a five sided, cube shaped, white plastic garbage bag (before we knew of such things), which the user was instructed to drape over a card table. It was imprinted with half-heartedly sketched renditions of logs, and there were dotted lines to guide a li'l pioneer in cutting out the door and windows-presumably with Ma Ingall's help as needed. If you can picture a door-shaped flap in a plastic bag, then you can imagine how the upper edge of the 'door' would droop down, closely matching the spirits of the hapless owner.
I think we set the thing up a grand total of once. I dutifully crawled inside and sat for a few minutes, but it was pretty much a world of suck the whole time.

3. Make Money-Get Prizes-with Fast Selling Cards! OK, so I got scammed a couple of times. Those were toys for dumb little kids. THIS represented a sure-fire business opportunity! And this time I had Billy Boy in with me on the ground floor. Our plan was simplicity itself: Sell 72 boxes of all-occasion cards door to door-we'd work separately and therefore twice as quickly. Send in our earnings and score the two-piece walkie-talkie set. Get out clean.

Everything was running smoothly until the sale of-oh, about the eighth box of cards. We discovered that, for all intents and purposes, we'd saturated the market. Each of us had hit all the territory his bike could cover. And since we lived half a block from each other, our territories were one and the same. Our respective parents were tapped out, having bought 2 boxes per household.
So we revised our business plan.

We sent back the unsold cards (the company somehow had the foresight to ship only a dozen boxes a pop) and accepted a straight cash commission. This was roughly enough for burgers and limeades at Blair's Drug Store. There was a lesson in there somewhere, but it's hard to think about educational issues when you're sipping a really good limeade.

I found a couple of web sites that take a loving if grudging look back at the comic book ads of this era-you may find more. A little googling should reconnect you with many of the various soldier set ads, as well as some fine Charles Atlas products, hypnotism records, and-yes-X-ray specs!

But hurry! When it comes to brain cells supporting memories like these-supplies are limited.

This is a tale of three big Superman stories. How big? Really big. Huge. Strong enough to hurl a grownup Superman back to his home planet and family of origin. Bold enough to re-write his iconic journey from Krypton to Earth. Imaginative enough to re-cast him as a new hero with nary a single super power. These stories contain no elastic Jimmies, future-brained Loises, or super-powered Perries. Not even a Bizarro or a Mxyzpltk. Stock ingredients from DC's silly shelf can find no quarter in these serious minded, book-length sagas. I call them barnburners.

The stories, each unique in its way, share a commonality. They strut up to Superman's Silver Age mythos, give it a big bear hug, and leave it forever changed. For this reason alone, any of these tales could have slid easily into the stable of Imaginary Stories, but their grounding in "reality" makes them all the more exciting to the fans of Superman comics.

It's hard to say which is the most amazing, but "Superman's Return to Krypton" (1960) certainly stakes its claim. Simply put, Superman travels back through time and space for an extended visit with his late parents. This is one tall concept. Imagine your present day self paying a drop-in on your folks-back before you were born! Would your life and outlook forever feel a tad...altered?

The Man of Steel's trip to Krypton is inadvertent, and once there, he's reduced to the same mortal resources as the rest of the natives. He makes the acquaintance of his once and future parents right at the time of their nuptials, and though their intuition and his fatalism are both running rampant, Supe decides to keep mum about their true connection. Jor-el's inklings of the planet's fate have already begun in this telling, and "Kal-el"-as he introduces himself-becomes his research assistant. Kal's desire to fully connect with his parents is given a lot of play, though we're never clear why he holds back.

Adding texture to the tale is Kal's passionate romance with the stunning actress Lyla Lerrol. In noticeable contrast to the pesky and baggage-laden Lois, Lyla truly knocks our hero off his feet. When his best bet to start an exodus from the planet (and change history) falls short, Supe resolves to spend the rest of his seemingly numbered days with his latest and loveliest LL.

With 25 pages to fill, the narrative sometimes moves at a travelogue pace, providing the most comprehensive and fantastic view of Krypton up to that time. The planet's natural and architectural wonders-nicely rendered by Wayne Boring-must surely leave nearly as deep an imprint on Superman as his visit with his folks.

Krypton became a more integral and active thread in the continuity of our hero's adventures from this point forward, and we readers are privy to Superman's memories of this one visit-and his ill-fated romance with Lyla-often in the years that follow. There's no place like home!

"Return to Krypton"'s inevitable climax happens to serve as the opening for "The Two Faces of Superman" (1960). And while the planet's demise-despite Superman's best efforts to the contrary-occurs right on schedule in our first tale,

"Two Faces" presents succeeding events we thought we knew by heart in a startlingly altered narrative. Baby Kal-el's rocket, en route to that cow pasture outside Smallville, is bathed in a strange ray during a fender bender with another craft. A duplicate vehicle and child are formed, with a virtually identical trajectory toward Earth.

Little Kal-el's story unfolds in all the familiar ways, but we now are treated to the amazing revelation of his double being found nearby and raised in secret-by gangsters!

Super-Menace, as he's called, stays rather incredibly under the radar throughout his formative years. This is at the bidding of his calculating foster parents, Wolf and Bonnie, who are saving up for one big payoff.

But without love, one is a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal, or just a force manifestation in Super-Menace's case. Immune to Kryptonite, he has the upper hand in his winner-take-all confrontation with Superman; but when he realizes his foster parents have been playing him for a dupe, he opts to go out with an act of redemption by sparing Supe and dematerializing himself into the ether.

I find this tale intriguing for several reasons. As suggested, the implications for the mythos are huge: here was this Superman doppelganger growing up right alongside our hero-in secret!-for lo, these many years. We have all the

So I had the unique pleasure of reading this one for the first time a few years ago as an adult.

But I didn't miss the debut of Nightwing and Flamebird! And these were characters DC did revisit more than once. Their first appearance-in "Superman in Kandor" (1962)-formed the core of some really fine storytelling, elevated by Curt Swan's art at its Silver Age peak.

There's trouble in Kandor city and, in one of the few blatant contrivances of the plot, Superman takes Jimmy along to investigate the doings in the big bottle. Circumstance and dastardly deeds have conspired to make Supe

unpopular among his tiny fellow Kryptonians, and so he and Jimmy cobble together disguises in order to make their rounds. For Superman, it's a costume to hide his costume. With an acknowledged nod to Batman and Robin, Supe and JO become Nightwing and Flamebird, tooling about Bottleville in a tricked out Nightmobile. Swan enjoyed drawing variant costumes for the Man of Steel, and here we get a double bang for the buck: these guys look Mah-velous!

Swan's work in this story deserves one more mention. Two of the most compelling panels-for my money-consist only of Superman thinking. Not what one would think of as signature art for a superhero adventure, but I'd say it's Swan at his best.

The tale presents a confluence of strong themes. With Kandor as a surrogate Krypton, Superman once again pays an extended visit to his homeland. We feel the tug on his heartstrings; Earth is the planet that raised and nurtured him, but Krypton made him-and made him what he is. Kandor's collective angst for its life as an arctic ant farm is also given full play here, pitting its citizens' loyalty and gratitude to Superman against their resentment of his inability to make them whole. And Jimmy "Jeepers" Olsen has never seemed less a boy. When Nightwing is injured and captured, Flamebird must step up and run the show solo. Jimmy's wits and courage serve him well, and his bearing in this tale is a far cry from the Human Porcupine-type stories that populated his own comic book.

Nightwing and Flamebird were natural hits with their readers, and after a quarter century in the super-hero biz with only two identities, Superman found himself with a third. The Dynamic Duo of Kandor appeared twice more in the chronicles, ultimately leading to a gimmicky Battle in the Bottle with Batman and Robin.

Big stories. Big themes. Barns on fire! I'd love to be 10 years old and reading 'em all one more time-for the first time!

Lou (March 19, 2011)   

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