Writer Jerry Siegel enjoyed a good deus ex machina.
The “god of the machine” from ancient Greek drama has come to mean a plot device that’s introduced suddenly and unexpectedly to supply a contrived, farfetched solution to an impossible-to-solve problem.
Is your character in a tough spot? Just ring in some super being from the far future to rescue him at the last minute.
Siegel used that trick first to bail out Superboy (Superboy 86, Jan. 1961) and then both Lex Luthor and Superman in the same story (Superman 147, Aug. 1961).
Recalling how he’d been defeated by the Legion of Super-Heroes’ Lightning Lad in that Superboy tale, the imprisoned criminal scientist reasons — not terribly logically — that a Legion of Super-Villains must also necessarily exist in the future, and rejiggers spare radio parts to summon them.
When the evil Lightning Lord, Cosmic King, and Saturn Queen capture and cage Superman, his now-adult teammates Lightning Man, Cosmic Man, and Saturn Woman appear to rescue him.
By using radiation from her home planet’s rings, the Man of Tomorrow can turn Saturn Queen against the super-villains — thereby turning the tables.
“There is often a certain good/evil duality to Siegel’s mystery tales,” observed comics historian Michael E. Grost. “Characters who seemed to be evil throughout the tales are revealed to be good at the end, or vice versa.”
“Siegel has a consistent interest in showing grown-up Legionnaires,” Grost noted. “He seems to be the only one of the Superman family to have done so. His first Supergirl Legion story, The Three Super-Heroes (1960), shows the kids of the original Legionnaires, an idea that was dropped from the mythos — probably it was considered a mistake. His Superman’s Super-Courtship (1962) shows grown-up Legionnaires celebrating Christmas.”
Siegel used similarly fantastical, out-of-nowhere plot stunts in his camp stories about Archie Comics’ “Mighty Heroes” a few years later, but they didn’t work so well in those largely unsalvageable tales.
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