Superman Through the Ages! Forum

Meant to post this link yesterday --the 5 best horrific moments in Superman.
http://www.thehorrorblog.com/2006/10/30/five-favorite-scary-superman-moments

A great blog post I found with only one or two Iron Age choices.  And no, the most horrific moment is not Man of Steel #1.

Very interesting blog post. Thanks for finding it, TELLE! I've always argued that Superman is a character with whom many different kinds of stories are possible, including horror.

It's a shame the list wasn't longer, because all I can think of are all the things they left off: all the Silver Age stories about strange alien invaders about which little is known, who in one story could assume human form...

Another great horror story was an issue of DC COMICS PRESENTS featuring a Superman-Adam Strange team-up that had Rann haunted by the ghosts of Krypton, which I am surprised was left off.

They made a great choice with ACTION #399, no doubt. Some of you may remember that I talk about this story often.

Also: nice of the guy to give the PZ miniseries its props. The moment I heard this list existed, I already knew that Gerber would take the top spot.

But the blogger makes an interesting point: the brooding, introspective strangeness of Superman's behavior is really one of the scariest parts of all for that series. For that same reason, I always loved Maggin's Superman because occasionally, Maggin had Superman get frustrated an angry with crime...there were some battles Supes didn't wisecrack through.

You're welcome!


Maggin is almost alone in writing Superman stories that included credible emotional episodes.  No one expects Superman's emotional life to be "normal" --meaning that he would have the same reactions as other poor or middle class white children raised in rural Kansas to horrific or insane events.  Rather, as someone who was raised as an invulnerable moral paragon, he would have more complex or illogical (to us) reactions to certain human relations involving romantic love, lust, and relations with his parents (both sets).  Hence we have some great sequences where Clark/Superman is easily reduced to infantilism when confronted with a version of the uber-father (Jor-El) and forced to deal with the somewhat Freudian dynamics involved.

There were some horrific Weisinger-era tales.  "Superman's Mystery Power," where Superman feels threatened by a miniature duplicate of himself, is one.  It isn't really horror but it's a pretty spooky story.

Then there's the one where he has a third eye in the back of his head - it was such a horrific concept that I don't believe it was ever even shown in the story.  The eye was only referred to.

The tiny Superman story is unnerving but the "Third Eye" story is so scary I've only ever heard it referred to! :)

From the way the blogger described it, that Phantom Zone story sounds like Dante's Inferno. Superman even encounters a being like Satan and has a guide in Quex-El. I need to find this series.

Another notable one is "The Jungle Line," Alan Moore's one-issue run on DC Comics Presents. First of all, it had Swamp Thing in it, but secondly it featured Superman wandering around, looking for a place to die.

Any of the stories over the years in which Superman was dying ('Superman's Last Day of Life, The Death of Superman, etc.) are horrifying in my book. I would also count "The Man Who Murdered the Earth")