JUST IMAGINE! December 1957: The Law of Diminishing Superheroes

In order to tell a good superhero story, writers must constantly come up with ways to undermine their protagonist’s built-in advantage in power.
“I can remember breaking my neck to come up with ways to make him vulnerable, you know?” recalled Jackson Gillis, one of the best writers on the 1950s TV series The Adventures of Superman. “Because the most difficult hero in the world is the toughest man in the world… The best hero is the little guy, rather than the big guy.”
So why not cut the all-powerful superhero down to size?
Literally.
Among the many superheroes who have been reduced to insect size are Marvel’s Fantastic Four, Archie Comics’ Jaguar and the Fly and Fly Girl. The latter were rocketed to a planet where germs were gigantic, so that amounted to the same thing.
Batman and Robin were miniaturized in both Detective Comics 127 (an illusion) and Detective Comics 148 (for real),
And Superman shrank too, first as a teenager, then as an adult and finally many more times when he started traveling back and forth to the Bottled City of Kandor in his Fortress of Solitude.
In a tale drawn by John Sikela, The Shrinking of Superboy (Superboy 61, Dec. 1957), the Boy of Steel is subjected to a shrinking ray by tiny orange-skinned aliens, and doesn’t know why.
Superboy’s diminishment is not instantaneous in the usual comic book manner, but slow. Martha Kent exclaims, “Why son … I have to bend to kiss you! Land sakes! You — you’ve grown smaller!”

That suggests to me that the story was inspired by Richard Matheson’s 1956 novel The Shrinking Man, which had been adapted into the film The Incredible Shrinking Man and released in February of 1957.
After dodging Lana Lang and thwarting an attempted murder by catching and steering a bullet, Superboy is reminded about the value of not jumping to conclusions. Because the aliens hadn’t reduced him in size as an attack, but to enlist his help in repairing their small spaceship.
When the popular tale was republished in Adventure Comics 317 (February 1964), the editor wrote, “This story is a milestone in the Superman saga, because it marks the first time the Boy of Steel had ever been reduced to tiny size — even before Brainiac reduced the people of Kandor to puny size.”
Good concepts can often be inverted in superhero comics, and shrinking is no exception. Doll Man, the Atom and Ant-Man all turned that condition into a crime-fighting advantage.

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