Today was an open slot in the blog schedule and had been a while since I had done a back issue so I was pondering what to cover. With Kneel Before Zod on the shelves, I thought looking back at the original Phantom Zone story and the introduction to General Zod might be fun.
So set the time machine for 1961 and Adventure Comics #283. In all transparency, I have this issue in the Tales From The Phantom Zone trade so might be mining that particular collection more in the future.
Pretty solid cover here by Curt Swan promoting The Phantom Superboy and name dropping the Phantom Zone for the first time. And nice ethereal colors on the phantom hero, showing us the terrain in the background.
On to the story.
As was the custom back in the day, the opening page was almost a second cover teasing the story. Given how the Phantom Zone and the two villains in the story have remained major components in the Superman mythos, it is a little amusing that neither are strongly shown in either place.
Instead, here, we learn that Superboy is an intangible phantom and that the Clark Kent robot that is imitating him is about to reveal his big secret. Obviously this very Silver Age story construct is a silly part of this story.
