DC Comics Presents #97: Superman & The Final Chapter of The Phantom Zone Criminals (September 1986)

Superman's looking down at his cock. What's happening to it?!

Aside from Superman's cock, you might also be wondering what happened to issues #1-96. Well, I gave most of them away to a friend about twelve years ago. A couple of months ago, he gave me a few that he picked up somewhere and he thought I'd like. Well, hells yeah! I did previously own them, you know! DC Comics Presents (and notice, you pedantic twats, the title uses the term "DC Comics" which I'm completely okay with but some people think it's like saying PIN Number or ATM mouth (I know I've used that joke before! It's one of my favorites!)) was the first comic book series that I began collecting in a serious manner when I first began collecting comic books way back in '84 or '85 or whatever. Yes, the series did end quite soon after I started collecting. But the fun was in searching for back issues! The series was weird and varied enough that it kept my interest the entire time. Plus it had all of Ambush Bug's first appearances! I mean his first and subsequent appearances before he had his own mini-series (again, directed at the pedantic twats). I didn't give my whole collection to my friend; I kept some back for my collection. Like Issue #26 with the first appearance of Wolfman's Teen Titans insert. And the Swamp Thing issue written by Alan Moore. And all the Ambush Bug appearances! So I'll be reading those as I stumble upon them in my short boxes.

Not Particular Fun Fact: this is the first comic book I've reviewed written by Steve Gerber. Also the first one drawn by Rick Veitch! What a fucking team up! It's probably the only reason DC allowed a pre-Crisis story to worm its way back into their monthly books. Plus it was the last issue of the series. The editors were probably all, "Fuck it! We can't be bothered to care anymore! Print whatever script and art we already have lying around. Even if Superman is getting his dick sucked by ghost on the cover and Mr. Mxyzptlk becomes God! We're outta here!"

The issue begins by showing how well Jor-el sleeps at night now that he realizes Krypton is about to blow at any time.

I guess Kryptonians never invented Xanax.

That panel is Jor-el relaxing. As soon as he gets out of bed, he spirals into an existential crisis about he and Lara having brought their son Kal-el into a doomed world. His hands shake as he stares at his wife and drinks cup after cup of Folgers-el coffee. He's desperate to save his child and he knows of only one possible way: a theoretical other dimension! He's built a thing that, if the other dimension exists, it will transport things to that dimension. I don't know how you build a thing that opens a portal to another world when you're not even sure the other world exists yet. But, hey, this Krypton! And it's a comic book! And I'm probably supposed to be 11 years old when reading this so that it fires my imagination instead of 53 and so world weary that I'm not even sure wonder ever existed.

Why is Jor-el so concerned about his hands?

Jor-el's theory is correct but there's no way he can send his baby into that hellscape! Time to work on Plan B: Shoot My Baby Into Uncharted Space.

As Jor-el flits about the Phantom Zone feeling separate from his physical being, he senses another presence, a lone voice that can barely comprehend the idea of another mind. But it speaks English. I mean Kryptonian. Oh shit. Am I one of those guys now? Who can't just allow for easy communication between exponentially different species and races to facilitate the story being told because nobody needs to read five million sci-fi and fantasy stories that all spend five hundred pages establishing how the different beings can communicate with each other? No, of course I'm not! I'm just a cynical bastard who looks for any reason to complain about the comic book I'm currently reading. I really don't mind shrugging and thinking, "I guess it's some kind of empathic telepathy that facilitates communication! Or a fish that disproves the existence of God!"

From my blog entries, you probably think I'm a nightmare while watching movies and television. Far from it! Being a literature major, I long ago decided I needed entertainment of which I wasn't critical. So television and movies get such a pass from me that I often love terrible shows and films. Unless one of them pulls something so fucking stupid that I can never forgive it, like Independence Day ending with that bullshit about how the entire world can now enjoy the greatest holiday in the world because it's an American holiday! Fuck off with that patriotic claptrap, Independence Day. And while you're fucking off, please take Armageddon with you. And the television show Heroes!

You'd think I could come up with some more timely movies and television shows I hate but I'm fucking old, man. You think I keep up with the current pop culture?! To me, it's still the turn of the millennium and I've just watched Ghost World, Moulin Rouge, American Movie, and Dancer in the Dark!

Here we discover the Phantom Zone is not a place; it is a person. Perhaps even a god. Or, you know, the God.

I say "the God" not as a believer but as a respectful atheist who understands that reading something from Western Literature that hints at a supreme being is hinting at a quite specific supreme being. It makes for way easier allegory than something like Hinduism where we'd have to determine which god this is and why being that god is important to the story and where did all the fucking butter go again?!

Just to make it clear even though the comic book page I scanned makes it extremely clear already, the Phantom Zone is explicitly a person and not a place. It begins thinking with "Punctured! Opened! Something enters the self!" So Gerber's idea is that The Phantom Zone is a being. That'll probably come in handy to remember as shit gets weirder and weirder.

I should also make clear that Jor-el is not communicating with the Phantom Zone though he does hear voices while inside of it. Is he hearing an echo of the Zone's thoughts? Or do the other souls or spirits which reside inside of it still manifest an echo of their personalities as well? Oh, am I assuming too much? Read on, sirs and madams! Read on!

Jor-el discovers that he can still view his dimension though he can't return because a wire on his experimental machine came loose from the car battery he was using to power it. So he finds he can exist either inside the Zone or as a ghost in his own dimension. Which means, as we see in the following couple of panels, that the Zone can watch and observe our dimension as well, from beyond or beside or, you know, above it all.

The Zone also knows Jor-el's wants and desires and prayers.

Jor-el's ghostly hand passes through Lara's sleeping body and she starts awake as if having heard him. Could those past the veil of their world still reach the dreams of the living? It seems so because Lara rushes over to Jor-el's machine, re-hooks the wire, and opens the passage back. Jor-el returns and the Phantom Zone is relieved. It desires solitude.

After being thoroughly slapped by his wife, Jor-el admits that maybe his theory of parallel dimensions needs a little more proof and a lot less, "Hey! I just imagined something that might be real! I won't do any math or science on it, though. I'll just build a hoopty-ass doorway to the dimension I've just decided must be there!" I know Jor-el is a scientist and he probably has done some scientific work that brought him to the theory instead of thinking up the theory and then working backwards to prove that it's true. He's not like all the fucking morons who claim they have more common sense than intelligent people and who have no actual idea what the term "theory" means in science. Too many fucking choads think a theory is just stating your opinion on an observation. Like seeing a light in the night sky move and thinking, "My theory is that's a UFO and that's as valid a theory as anybody else standing nearby because they can't prove it's not!" Maybe learn what the word hypothesis means for a start, dumb dumbs.

One thing I like to point out to the common sense is better than intelligence crowd is that common sense would have you believe the sun revolves around the Earth. It's what we observe with no indication of anything else. The Earth revolving and changing our point of view? The Earth orbiting the sun? All nonsense because common sense indicates no sense of movement. People think the world and our observations of it are simple. They're not. They're complex. Common sense is simple. And often wrong.

One man's prison is another God's heaven.

The perspective changes as a year or more passes. The executioner of Krypton begins narrating the tale long after Jor-el's trip into Mr. Phantom Zone. He wields the Phantom Zone portal as his executioner's axe. To free up space on Krypton, criminals now just get sent to The Phantom Zone to serve out their sentences. I don't know how they get any specific person back once they go in, or how the executioner isn't overrun by convicts every time he opens the door. I guess Jor-el perfected it to zap people in while instantaneously closing the portal behind them. And they probably have some kind of bracelets identifying them so they can be pulled out. What the reader isn't privy to is the political atmosphere that allowed all of this to take place. It was probably in decades of old pre-Crisis comic books that I never read.

The main goal of this part of the story is to allow the executioner to drop a whole lot of names of people he's literally dropped into the Phantom Zone: Jax-ur, Va-kox, Xadu, Faora, Nam-ek, Kru-el, and everybody's favorite, General Zod. A whole cast of malevolent baddies thrown into the safest place on (or near or around or within or just out of phase with) Krypton! Jor-el knew the planet was going to blow up at any time so instead of throwing all the good people into the zone to figure out how to escape later, he rescues all the bad ones! He was so traumatized by his trip within Mr. Zone that he felt living within the Zone was worse than blowing up with Krypton.

And how did all this affect The Phantom Zone? Well, It was beginning to go a little bit nuts.

So death was Its beginning! Gerber's about to get cosmic on our asses!

The Phantom Zone reminisces on Its origin, long forgotten and only now reminded of it by the individual sentients being forced into It. The Phantom Zone's beginning was death. The death of billions and billions of mortal creatures across the universe. Their rage and fear continued to exist long after death, like particles creating a cloud. They merged and formed into a single being whose one ambition was to escape this universe where death is so prevalent: The Phantom Zone. It's also possible to think of The Phantom Zone as heaven and the billions of dead simply souls passing on to heaven where they lose their individuality and become part of the Self. But as there is no real indication of the Self being separate from the Phantom Zone, and even evidence that They are the same, like the language the Self uses when people enter the Phantom Zone such as "the Self is pierced" and "something enters the Self", I'm going to acknowledge they are one and the same. Any theologian probably wouldn't argue the idea anyway. How would you separate God from Heaven? And if souls wind up in the arms of God or in Heaven, why distinguish these as separate things?

The Phantom Zone did not create the universe. It explains the formation of the universe in its origin story and only partway through, after life has arisen on planets all across the universe, and only after that life begins to understand and fear the death of ego, does The Phantom Zone become. It is the merger of the dead looking for existence beyond death that creates the afterlife. A self-fulfilling prophecy. Or a tautology. One of those! And then the mass of dead simply become the afterlife itself. It is merely a place apart from change. A place safe from death. It is eternal stasis.

Except now living beings who retain their ego have figured out how to enter heaven and their individuality disturbs the fucking shit out of the Phantom Zone! Usually the dead lose themselves in the merge with the Phantom Zone; the living merge differently with It. And these living beings, like Zod here, are arrogant, strong-willed bastards!

Oh yeah. If you wanted more allegory, The Phantom Zone is shaped like an apple.

The criminals inside the Phantom Zone discover they can influence people on the outside, as Jor-el did when he woke his wife the time he was trapped within it. So while trapped in a world where they feel nothing and live for eternity, they're also privy to everything happening outside the Zone. Like ghosts or loved ones or . . . angels! Bad angels, of course! Jor-el, almost manipulated by the criminals to free them, consults with the other leaders of Krypton and they decide for everybody's safety to send the Phantom Zone Projector into space so that it could never be used to free the criminals. I guess they also decided crime was over? And the criminals that were only condemned for fifteen or thirty orbits around their red sun had their sentences changed to life sentences? Jor-el points out that it would have been safer to keep the Projector on Krypton where it will definitely be destroyed soon instead of sending it safely into space to be found and used by aliens in the future. But all the other leaders get upset at him and call him a downer and some of them wish Kryptonian cancer on his baby. Probably, I mean. Maybe I've been too online lately!

A Kryptonian named Thul-kar, leader of a Kryptonian death cult, discovers his cult have done their duty as they know Krypton has nearly no time left. Using magic instead of technology, Thul-kar finds his way into the Phantom Zone to preserve the teachings of Juru mysticism. The next day, Krypton explodes!

But not before Baby Kal-el follows the Phantom Zone Projector into deep space as the Zoned criminals watch on and celebrate Krytpon's destruction.

Time passes differently within the Phantom Zone. Or maybe it just feels longer because it's so boring. Eventually, many years later ("An eternity," says the narrator but I don't buy it), Thul-kar has befriended the Phantom Zone. He calls It "Aethyr". Thul-kar is the only individual within the Zone who Aethyr doesn't believe wants to leave and Thul-kar uses that to his advantage by befriending It. All the other criminals continue to try and escape with seemingly no notice that they're trapped inside of God. Aethyr seems to be against their leaving. Perhaps the eons spent as a "Self" have conditioned It to think of every being within It as part of Itself, even if these particular ones have not completely merged with It. Perhaps It is loathe to lose any single part that comprises the Whole. They were once Other; many years later, They are Self.

Thul-kar has built a cube with his magic and he shows it to Aethyr who hates it. Aethyr, a being of the Cosmos, knows only spheres and circles. When It lashes out at the cube, Thul-kar traps some of Its power within and creates a living world: Bizarro world. Being Bizarro World, the day of its creation is the day of its destruction.

Bizarro is a better father than mine!

The implosion of Thul-kar's little Bizarro World creation (which through magic and the power of Aethyr manifested the real Bizarro World in the actual universe; and due to the time dilation between dimensions, the real universe Bizarro World has a decently long life) creates a white hole where Bizarro World had been. A white hole is obviously the opposite of a black hole: it spews energy and matter into the universe rather than sucking it up. Due to Bizarro World's connection with the Phantom Zone, the energy being shot out into the universe is made up of the Phantom Zone. Aethyr realizes that without somehow transmuting Itself into matter again, It and all the beings that make up the Self will disperse and cease to exist. Thul-kar's escape plan has worked far better than any of the other criminal dullards from Krypton.

Aethyr, still thinking Thul-kar is a friend, asks him for help. Aethyr needs a way to transmute Itself into a corporeal being before the Self is terminated. God and Heaven must not die!

I suspect I know why this story wasn't published until after Crisis when it couldn't matter anymore.

Thul-kar knows a little imp that could help Aethyr survive: Mxyzptlk. He contacts him by speaking to him the way the ghost-like entities speak to people in the real world. But since Mxyzptlk is super-dimensional, he actually hears Thul-kar and agrees to merge with Aethyr to help It survive. He only does this because he's in prison in the 5th Dimension for bigamy. Seriously.

Mr. Mxyzptlk has the square root of -1 problems and the b ain't imaginary.

I don't know what that caption means either. Get off my fucking back. This is free, you know!

You might be thinking, "Don't these DC Comics Presents issues always feature Superman? Is showing him in a rocket in one panel all we're going to get?" Of course not! Steve Gerber realizes that his script is almost over and he's yet to shove Superman into it so out of nowhere, we discover that Mr. Mxyzptlk wasn't just recruited to make sure The Phantom Zone survives re-entering the universe; he's also been hired to make sure Superman doesn't interrupt. I don't know why Superman would interrupt. He isn't paying particularly close attention to anything except his news anchor co-host Lana Lang. Mxyzptlk, while in his null-void prison, admits to himself that the only reason he hadn't killed Superman was because he was following the rules of the 5th Dimension, "Mischief not Mayhem." But now that his people have turned on him and taken his child away from him, he decides the next time he gets the chance, he's just going to kill Superman. And Thul-kar gives him that chance just seconds later!

Mxyzptlk gets Superman's attention by dropping Bizarro's head into the news studio. Then he smashes Superman over the head with Argo City, nearly killing him since Argo City was still sitting on top of Kryptonian rock. You know, Kryptonite!

That should keep Supes out of the way for a bit!

Now the streets of Metropolis are full of Kryptonite and corpses. But Superman can't help clean it up so he flies off to pass out on the moon for a day or two.

Unfortunately, this is where the story begins to fall apart. Gerber may have wanted to tell a bigger story than he had pages for so once he introduces Superman, the story just sprints to the end. But first, with Superman out of the way, Mr. Mxyzptlk goes to perform the act he was rescued to perform.

While Mxyzptlk works, the criminals escape the Zone to wreak havoc on Earth.

Superman puts up a bit of a fight against the criminals but they're not destroyed until a new God comes along and imprisons them back in itself.

Don't worry! Crisis made sure Mr. Mxyzptlk as God was removed from canon. Or never actually part of it since this story was published post-Crisis.

Luckily for Superman, Mr. Mxyzptlk doesn't want to fuck with him anymore. He's got new God-things to do, like torture Zod and Faora or the entire population of the 5th Dimension. He's got grudges to keep and vengeance to pursue. He disappears leaving Superman to utter his concluding line, the worst part of this entire comic book: "He gets the last laugh after all!" Also when he says that line, Washington, DC is burning down behind him. So I guess that's another good reason this story was never published and nobody has to deal with the horrible aftermath of the story. Metropolis alone is so fucked with Kryptonite and Kryptonian corpses, Clark Kent is going to have to move back to his parents' house in Smallville.

DC Comics Presents #97: Superman & The Final Chapter of The Phantom Zone Criminals Rating: A. This is the kind of fucked up shit Superman books should be about! People whine about Superman being so powerful that he basically never feels threatened. But how about making him feel utterly confounded for several issues? It's possible Superman even shit his pants on the final page when he realized Mr. Mxyzptlk, who was already all-powerful but could only do pranks, had become a God who was ready to do some wickedly Old Testament shit to a bunch of people but chose to let Supes off the hook for once. Superman just faced something he definitely couldn't have handled; hell, he never even figured out what the fuck was happening. Bizarro's head dropped on his desk. Zod and all the other Kryptonian criminals terrorized Earth. Mxyzptlk became a God. And the whole time, Superman mostly just almost died from Kryptonite poisoning on the moon after being hit in the face with Argo City. What a day!

This is the face of a man who definitely just shit his pants.