This week's feature a Supermanica is Super-Menace, the Superman doppelganger who was raised by gangsters. I love this story and imagine it as a great origin story for the evil Ultraman of Earth-3. (did he ever have a detailed origin story?)
Envisioning E-3 Smallville tales with a heroic young Lex Luthor and Lana Lang investigating the mysterious sightings of an evil young super-boy....
http://superman.nu/wiki/index.php/Super-MenaceAhhh, yes, Super-Menace. Oh, boy, what a turkey this was.
At first, this tale seems like a "Mopee." The idea that Superman could have something as significant an evil twin that shadowed him his whole life (yet Superman never knew of him somehow) completely recontextualizes the Superman story and is
conveniently never mentioned again. In its own way, the existence of Super-Menace is just as ridiculous and terrible as the idea of Black Zero destroying Krypton or Superman's parents surviving: this reminds me of those "Sweeps Week" episodes of FAMILY MATTERS where it turns out Steve Urkel has a long-lost twin in France. Yet alas, there is some evidence that the Super-Menace story in fact, did happen:
Have a look at the pin-up map of "How the Super-Family Came to Earth from Krypton," which was first printed in SUPERMAN #100 (1962), and was reprinted in the Superman Giant Annual and the Superman Sourcebook: it clearly shows the place where the rocket struck the machines that created Super-Menace. So maybe this story happened after all.
Strangely enough, this is not the first time Superman has been explained as having an evil twin that is never mentioned again - nor is it even, really, the worst. That honor would go to the story written by (
of course) Bob Haney in WORLD'S FINEST #246-247, which had Superman's evil hunchbacked brother take over the earth and set up a totalitarian regime, with Batman on the run from Superman's brother's evil secret police. Bob Haney, the guy that "outed" Hawkman and Hawkgirl as aliens back in HAWKMAN #22, but suffered the monstrous indignity of having that entire story quietly forgotten.
By the way, when Alicia Masters first appeared, it was explained that she was physically identical to Susan Storm, to the point where if Alicia was given a blonde wig she could pass for Susan Storm. This makes Alicia Sue's "evil twin," and like Super-Menace and Super-Hunchback, their similarities were never mentioned again.