Why bother being a mere Superman when you could be an “Ultra-Superman?”
The Superman of 1959 was already powerful enough, a guy who could just about, as Denny O’Neil famously put it, “…destroy a galaxy by listening hard.” But in Action Comics 256 (Sept. 1959), we got an upgrade — a highly evolved Superman from the year 100,000 who can apparently project images and predict the future.
Written by Otto Binder and drawn by Curt Swan, this tale turns out to be just another of Superman’s elaborate hoaxes — this one designed to smoke out a foreign agent’s assassination plot against the president (presumably Eisenhower).
It’s funny. Those “it’s all a hoax” plots tended to make the stories slightly less fantastic, but even more implausible. Not an ideal tradeoff.
Nevertheless, this popular tale was much reprinted, notably in 1961’s third Superman Annual (The Strange Lives of Superman! giant).
The weird transformations of Superman and his friends were always an eye-catcher, and all the pals took a turn at the classic “super-intelligent big head look.”
“Of all the freakish distortions of the human body depicted on the covers of superhero comics, none of them quite compares to the spectacle of Big Head Covers (not to be confused with Floating Head Covers),” noted Mark Engblom in Comic Coverage.
“Huge, swollen craniums have been a staple of science fiction dating back to the pulps of the 1920s and ’30s, usually associated with malevolent alien masterminds or highly evolved future-men. As pulps gradually gave way to comic books, big-headed characters found their way into the burgeoning superhero fad, usually as villains… such as Brainwave (All-Star Comics 37, 1947). During the science-fiction craze of the late 1950s and early 60s, Big Head covers began appearing at an alarming rate. It should come as no surprise that the constantly transforming Superman Family was hit particularly hard.”
Engblom notes that Superman startled Lois with his “…intensely disturbing (and vaguely X-rated) futuristic head.” LOL, as they say.
The issue also included the new feature, Supergir,l and the old feature, Congo Bill, recently updated as Congorilla.
My friend and fellow comics historian Michael Fraley has made some fascinating deductions about this tale, by the way, and I’m republishing them here: I think it’s well known that Mort Weisinger tended to pit his authors against each other, giving one a plot to flesh out which was written by someone else in the stable. There have been plenty of times when I was CERTAIN that Edmond Hamilton wrote a particular story, but the credit would go to Binder or Siegel. This made no sense.
Hamilton tended to recycle ideas from his pulp science fiction stories from 30 years before. His mind just worked a particular way. Another writer using a Hamilton idea suggested to me that Weisinger had more than likely tossed the plot at Binder or Siegel.
In the same way, a Binder story often included elements drawn from his time working on Captain Marvel — but the credit would often go to Hamilton or Siegel.
One of the best examples to illustrate my shabby little theory is The Superman of the Future, from Action 256, which is credited to Otto Binder. It’s based on The Man Who Evolved, a 1931 story by, you guessed it, Edmond Hamilton.
The reverse seems to be true in Superman 301, in which a tale based on Binder’s The Trial of Adam Link is credited to Edmond Hamilton.
There are other stories which I HAVE to believe were plotted by Jerry Siegel, such as The Amazing Story of Superman-Red and Superman-Blue, credited to Leo Dorfman. Anyhoo, that’s my theory, Darwin.
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