ACW #619 – Superman
Action Comics Weekly #619 (Superman)
“Protective Shield?”
Writer – Roger Stern
Pencils – Curt Swan
Inks – Murphy Anderson
Letters – Bill Oakley
Colors – Tom Ziuko
Editor – Mike Carlin
Yawn. Howsitgoin’ everybody… it’s Superman Day. It’s not a particularly special Superman Day… heck, the Man himself is barely going to grace us with his presence.
Let’s just do this…
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We open with our lone shot of Superman… who, you might recall is looking for Fellowship member, Bob Galt… who he’d left at Clinton Street for “safe-keeping”. Being a jerk, Galt decided to “take in the sights” of Metropolis… and has, naturally gotten himself into a little bit of trouble.
You also might recall that Bob found his way into a t-shirt shop, and has taken umbrage at the fact that they’re selling wares with Superman’s “S” shield on them. To Galt’s mind this is sacrilege… because, duh, the Fellowship worships Superman. The more I type, the dumber this whole thing sounds… also, the more I type, the more I realize that recapping is like the only thing I can do here… since not much happens in the actual strip!
Here goes: Galt’s being a jerk, a Policeman enters the t-shirt shop… Galt learns that Superman’s a-okay with the shirts being sold (all of the proceeds go to charity), he apologizes… and leaves!
But… but… on his way out, he is nyoinked into an alley by… hmm, just where might we have seen that arm before?
—
Well, well, well… Bob Galt gets himself a gear t-shirt, and gets yanked into an alley by… what struck me as a very familiar arm? Despite the fact that he never wore brown wristbands… just from that arm alone, I felt pangs of Vartox. I momentarily lost myself, and thought we might be in store for a Vartox Week Miracle to save us from this dreadful strip… if only for a week or two.
Just think of the possibilities: Bob Galt, devout Supermanist… faced with all of the offerings of Vartoxism. Having to weigh which Super-Hyper Hero he’d rather follow with his faith. I tell ya, that’s some deep storytelling there… deeper than anything we’ve gotten from this strip so far, that’s for dang sure.
Of course, that would be predicated on Roger Stern travelling thirty years into the future, checking out our Vartox Week coverage, returning to 1988 and canonizing the whole thing. Welp, stranger things have happened, right?
So yeah, this story is so dull that I’m left concocting ways in which literal time-travel might make it better. I’m sorry, I have no other ways to amuse myself with this strip anymore! Maybe I need to start writing my own “B-Plot” to this… it’ll almost certainly be terrible, but things would actually happen!
Oh well… I’ve already said more than I should have for this one. We’ll check back on this one next week, and we can all be disappointed to learn that arm doesn’t belong to Vartox.
Tomorrow: Secret Six… back in Action!
