Whenever Superman had to face off against some other superman, DC Comics earned my dime.
Unfortunately, I was negative three years old when Action Comics 165 arrived on newsstands in December 1951, so I missed that one.
Nevertheless, if I’d seen that issue, The Man Who Conquered Superman — by writer Bill Finger and artist Wayne Boring — would have seemed familiar to me. It helped establish a pattern for Superman stories that would be repeated several times in later years. A super-challenger appears, only to turn out to be a fake, part of some elaborate ruse staged by Superman. Mental Man, the Great Mento, the Black Knight, the Super-Genie of Metropolis, Julius Caesar’s ghost — we saw any number of them in years to come.
Arriving on the outskirts of Metropolis in “a space ship from Mercury,” Krag comes armed with the ability to leap tall buildings, super strength, invulnerability and even a jury-rigged “flame breath.”
“Wayne Boring draws Krag as one of his muscular heroes, and one can consider his replacing Superman as a plausible possibility,” noted comics historian Michael E. Grost.
The arrogant alien outlaw first tries to outshine Superman, and finally provokes an aerial battle with the Man of Tomorrow, whom he seemingly defeats. But Krag is really a humanoid robot, built by Superman to maneuver the city’s masked Crime Czar into exposure.
“All the cliches that will fuel so many Silver Age tales are already in place in 1952,” noted David Morefield. “Which is not to say it isn’t fun, as Finger keeps things moving along at a rapid clip and delivers a rare and welcome slugfest for our dime. Wayne Boring is in top form as well, benefiting greatly from the inks of Stan Kaye, who would hang around into the early years of Curt Swan’s tenure.”
Most of the supermen who arrive on Earth, real or fake, make a play for Lois Lane, and Krag is no exception.
“As much as I want to hate Lois for swooning over the first muscle-bound stranger who comes along, let’s remember that Superman was providing all of Krag’s dialog by super-ventriloquism,” Morefield said. “So in that exchange where Krag says he’d consider marrying Lois, Superman is just messing with her head. Yep, that’s a healthy relationship.”
“Superman shows more of a personality in this tale than he does in many Silver Age tales,” Grost observed. “While Superboy often emerges as a real person in early 1960s stories, Superman himself tends to be a bit bland, a hero without any feelings or desires. Superman ultimately shows a bit of an edge in this tale. The thread running through the story, of Lois Lane’s reaction to these events, also helps. One wonders if some of the events in the tale are an expression of Superman’s unconscious desires, an attempt to express feelings that he cannot otherwise release. Finger’s villains are loaded with bizarre impulses; occasionally he let his heroes express similar feelings, especially at the ends of his tales — in the early sections of his stories it is usually the villains who are triumphant, but at the finale, the hero prevails.”
The story was reprinted in 1961 in the fourth Superman Annual (“Featuring Superman’s most famous adventures in time, space and on alien worlds!”), retitled The Alien Who Conquered Superman to underline the 80-age giant’s theme.
And a decade after its original publication, the Krag story was revamped for the Superman newspaper strip. It was drawn once again by Boring in his familiar style, with those barrel-chested, square-jawed figures foregrounded against a soaring, clean-lined, art deco cityscape. Boring remains the artist I most identify with Superman.
About Author
