• When you click on links to various merchants on this site and make a purchase, this can result in this site earning a commission. Affiliate programs and affiliations include, but are not limited to, the eBay Partner Network.
1 1
  • entries
    50
  • comments
    47
  • views
    4,822

Behold...Electro!?

0
tomo

934 views

When it comes to comic book storage, I don't really have a man-cave full of items on display.  I did build custom shelves fit to hold long-boxes that currently take up one wall in my office.

Shelves.jpg.5d8aa5ce1f6e32662965bbdd84086256.jpg

I work out of my home, so my office is shared between my work and my hobby.  It's not the greatest of solutions, but I'll do the whole comic book room when I retire and move out to the country!

In the meantime, however, I did pick up a couple of picture frame shelves from Ikea that I use to display about a dozen books at one time.  I like to pick a theme and swap out the books on display every couple of weeks or so.  This is this week's selection...

Shelf-Court.jpg.e4103e8c68f2546d74128958dacfc2a8.jpg

The picture is not the greatest, as this room doesn't get a whole lot of natural light, but you get the idea.  I decided to go with a Superman on trial theme, after realizing how many of those covers there were after looking for books for a previous journal entry.

My son doesn't really have the comic book collecting passion just yet, but he does enjoy trying to guess the theme every time I change it up.  This theme was relatively easy, but he did notice something that I didn't (aside from the shame of only having a reprint of Adventure Comics #247 so far).

Who the heck is Electro, the glowing frog skeleton?

AC286.jpg.853b63ba3e6b170c1b9576bf905d36c4.jpg

He must be pretty important, right?  He is, after all, a member of the Jury of Super-Enemies.  It turns out I haven't read this story yet from Action Comics #286 from March 1962.  I did, however, remember this guy from an earlier cover...

AC271.jpg.8213b31b60fa279ca4f262478efe4bb9.jpg

This story from Action Comics #271 from December 1960 I do remember quite well, as it features a great Lex Luthor scheme.  Spoilers for anyone hoping to read this themselves one day, but there is no light ray creature from Dimension X.  In reality, it's one of Luthor's goons projecting an image of a man made from neon-tubes! It was all a ploy to get Superman trapped inside the fake "spaceship."  Thinking he was getting transported to Dimension X, he was instead trapped on Earth inside a lead sphere while Luthor attempted to swindle the world's governments out of their stockpile of nuclear weapons.

Superman eventually breaks free of his lead cage and reveals Luthor's scheme to the world.  So all this time, there never was a dimension X, nor were there any light ray creatures.  If that's the case, how did a figment of Luthor's imagination end up on the Jury of Super-Enemies?

It turns out that the cover for #286 was part of dream sequence caused by Red Kryptonite induced nightmares!  Makes sense.  Electro never speaks, nor is he ever addressed by name in the issue.  He does get to put a Superman doll in a bowl labeled "DOOM" (why not?) and he leads a shackled Supergirl to the arena where she will fight Superman.  If it wasn't for the cover of this issue, we would never be able to associate the name Electro to this type of rampant villainy!

It does beg the question, where were all the other actual super-enemies when they commissioned this cover?  It did get me to reread a classic Superman story from earlier in the run, so mission accomplished...I guess.

0



0 Comments


Recommended Comments

There are no comments to display.

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now