Paneling: Superman #367

I’m not sure what brought this panel to mind, but the mind is a strange thing, which is kind of the point of the panel we’ll be looking at today.

Said panel comes from Superman #367, which was the second part of a three-part storyline that ran in late 1981 brought to us by writer Cary Bates and penciller Curt Swan, with contributions throughout from Frank Chiaramonte, Adrienne Roy, Ben Oda, John Costanza, Rich Buckler, Ross Andru, Dick Giordano, and Terry Austin.

The story focuses on Superman’s efforts to remove a thorn that’s been in his side since his time as Superboy, a group of alien no-goodniks known as the Superman Revenge Squad.

While they’d been a problem for a very long time, after the events of issue 365, Superman decided it was time for action (even though this story takes place in Superman rather than…oh, forget it).

In that issue, a member of the Squad tried to get at Superman through his cousin, zapping her with radiation that caused her to behave erratically, which was taking things too far.

Thus, Superman hatches a scheme to infiltrate the Squad’s home base and learn as much as he can about their methods and motivations in an effort to find a way to deal with them once and for all.

Towards that end, he arranges for Clark Kent to be out of town for a bit, and because there is considerable danger – after all, he’s dealing with people who want nothing more than to see him dead – he lets some of the people in his life, like Lois, know that he’s going away and how he feels about them, as there is a chance he might not make it back.

When he talks to Lois, he basically tells her, “Oh, and uhh…Clark has to help me with this secret mission I’m going on. Yeah, that’s the ticket.”

Of course, later, there proves to be no need to provide cover for Clark’s absence, as some of his pals from the Justice League take turns pretending to be Clark, albeit not without some little screw-ups, one of which seriously jeopardizes his mission, but more on that later.

In any case, the story proper begins with #366, in which Superman takes a spaceship he has lying around out into deep space, pounds on it to cause some serious damage, then zaps himself with a beam that will temporarily transform him into a reptilian alien.

The transformation is total, affecting not only his body but his mind, making him forget who he really is and creating artificial memories for the being he’s pretending to be.

When members of the Superman Revenge Squad find the unconscious alien drifting in his disabled craft, they haul the ship to the world they operate from and are going to incinerate the disguised Superman until they realize that the damage to the ship was clearly caused by Superman.

They conclude that the alien must have had an encounter with their hated enemy and can perhaps provide them with some intel or even become an ally.

Once he wakes up, a female member of the Squad named Nryana hits him with a beam from a “transla-orb” that will allow him to speak their language and she asks him what his deal is, explaining that they were intrigued by the invulnerable fist-prints on his ship’s hull.

The lizard, who identifies himself as Vlatuu, tells a tale – that he fully believes to be true – of engaging in some light space piracy and getting attacked by some jerk in a cape.

Nryana shows Vlatuu around, explaining who that jerk in the cape was and that everyone on this planet agrees that he’s a jerk and wants him dead, and, indeed, are all fanatically devoted to achieving that goal.

That goal requires constant reminders of who it is they hate and reinforcement of that hate, so there are – heavily vandalized – monuments to Superman everywhere.

There is also, to Vlatuu’s shock and alarm, a synthetic “Proto-Superman,” a synthetic duplicate of Superman complete with approximations of his super-abilities, who flies around and grabs Revengers at random to allow them the opportunity to test their fighting prowess against their hated foe.

Any Revenger who is able to defeat the Proto-Superman earns the privilege of traveling to Earth to take on the real steel deal.

Even though Vlatuu has only known of Superman’s existence for like an hour, he’s a forceful hater and is convinced that this is the place for him and vows that he will be the Revenger who finally takes Superman down.

And that’s the first part of the story.

In the second part, we learn that Superman wasn’t the only one doing some plotting. Superman had been able to locate the Squad’s HQ thanks to following the trail of a ship that was sent to Earth to dispatch the Revenger who’d failed in his mission – failure means death – back in #365.

Turns out, that trail was left on purpose, as the theory was that Superman keeps winning because the Revenge Squad keeps attacking him on Earth. He’s got a home field advantage!

And though Vlatuu’s mind scans seem to show that he really is who he claims to be, one of the leaders suspects that he is Superman, having made an extremely on-the-nose guess about Superman’s gambit.

This seems to be confirmed when an agent dispatched to Earth to spy on Superman’s friends overhears Clark – Green Lantern in disguise – talking to Supergirl about Superman being away on a secret mission.

Still, not everyone believes the Vlatuu=Superman theory.

Especially not Nryana, who’s been spending a lot of time hanging out with the handsome – I mean, one assumes; he’s not my type – reptilian.

And it seems that Vlatuu in the process of seeking revenge has managed to find love.

And that’s what leads us to the panel we’re here to talk about, one that I’ve often thought about in the 44 years since I first read this story.

Though Nryana didn’t have time for his feelings when they were about to be attacked by the Proto-Superman, when they have a quiet moment in the fourth panel on page thirteen, we learn that she may have fallen for Vlatuu’s scaly charms.

Unfortunately for the two lovebirds, they immediately learn that one of the abilities that the Proto-Superman duplicates is the power of super-cockblocking.

(Cloacablocking? I don’t know how Vlatuu’s anatomy works.)

That provides Vlatuu the motivation he needs, and he manages to win the chance to kill the real Superman by using his damaged ship’s anti-matter drive to blow up the Proto-Superman.

And that leads into the third part of the story in which Vlatuu heads to Earth to get his revenge on Superman, only to fade out of existence as the temporary effects of the device that Superman used to transform himself into Vlatuu finally wear off.

Once he’s back on Earth, Superman reviews all of the data his mind retained from his time as Vlatuu and begins to plan his final revenge on the Revenge Squad.

However, on the chance that Vlatuu wasn’t who he claimed to be, the Squad managed to plant a post-hypnotic suggestion into Superman’s mind that managed to stick with him even after he became himself again.

If Superman could trick himself into thinking he was someone else, the Squad decided they could do the same, and thus they trick Superman into believing that he’s not really Superman but rather the Proto-Superman sent to Earth to kill Superman!

Ultimately, just as the power of his love for Nryana was enough to drive Vlatuu to succeed in his battle with the Proto-Superman, the power of his love for Lois is enough to return Superman to his senses.

With that done, he flies to the Squad’s base of operation and seeds their atmosphere with chemicals that will cause Revenger who passes through it to develop amnesia and forget all about hating Superman.

Thus, their options are to stay where they are and live with their hate or give up their hate to gain their freedom.

Anyway, while I always enjoyed this story – and still do – that one panel with Vlatuu confessing his feelings has always stuck with me because it’s kind of messed up if you think about it too much, which is exactly what I did and continue to do.

I mean, even though he wasn’t real, Vlatuu thought he was real. His feelings for Nryana were just as real as Superman’s feelings for Lois.

Of course, his desire for revenge was stronger, and he chose that instead of even considering the option of simply running away somewhere with Nryana and leaving their hate behind.

And there’s no way that Superman could have known that this little romance would happen, and Vlatuu, despite his feelings for Nryana, was a bad person – of course, that was because Superman decided that he would be – but given that Vlatuu effectively died on way to complete his mission, it always struck me as sad.

You say that love is the most compelling force in the universe, Superman, but what about that love you took from the universe? What about that?

Anyway, I also love this panel of the Proto-Superman in hiding, waiting for his chance to strike.

Also of note, a few months later in Detective Comics there was a somewhat similar storyline in which Batman, as “Matches” Malone, infiltrates an “assassination school” which offers a Killing Batman 101 course.

Also also of note, the design for Vlatuu reminded me of Superman #355 in which the bite from an alien reptile transforms Superman into a human (well, Kryptonian) crocodile.

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