Review by Win Wiacek
Back in the day, the Phantom Zone was Superman’s humane way of dealing with irredeemable criminals posing a global danger. They were reduced to ghosts in a misty area, able to interact with each other, but not wider forms of life.
In 1982 comics maverick Steve Gerber and ethereal artist Gene Colan delivered their version. Gerber was a uniquely gifted writer who combined a deep love of comic minutiae with dark, irrepressible wit, incisive introspection, barbed socio-cultural criticism, a barely reigned-in imagination and boundless bizarre surrealism. His stories were always at the extreme edge of any mainstream company’s intellectual canon and never failed to deliver surprise and satisfaction, especially when he couched his sardonic sorties as thinly-veiled attacks on burgeoning cultural homogenisation and commercial barbarity.
His riotous recapitulation begins as Daily Planet paste-up artist Charlie Kweskill collapses at work. The solitary little dweeb has been sleeping badly, plagued by nightmares of a life on long-gone planet Krypton. His dreams detail how brilliant scientist Jor-El devised a non-lethal way to deal with Krypton’s most incorrigible criminals: human monsters such as Jax-Ur, Professor Va-Kox, Dr. Xadu, sadistic psycho-killer Faora Hu-Ul, potential dictator General Dru-Zod, and even Jor’s own bad and crazy cousin Kru-El.
Many lesser menaces like psionic aberrants Az-Rel and Nadira were also banished to the misty twilit realm, as well as stranger outcasts like callous biological experimenter Nam-Ek, but the one who most catches Charlie’s attention is fraudster Quex-Ul; a Kryptonian who appears to be Charlie’s doppelganger.
Of course, the dreams are all true: telepathic broadcasts beamed at Charlie by Zone inmates from within the plane of timeless intangibility. Their telepathic onslaught turns Kweskill into a somnambulistic slave, unknowingly spending his nights breaking into labs and stealing high-tech components. Superman, slowly putting the puzzle pieces together, is just too late to thwart the stealthy scheme, and as he bursts into Charlie’s apartment a hastily cobbled together Phantom Zone projector hurls him and the hapless mind-slave into the ghostly region, whilst simultaneously freeing a legion of the cruellest and most bored criminals in existence.
Not every Zone inhabitant is a criminal. For instance, Daxamite Mon-El was exposed to common lead in ‘Superboy’s Big Brother’ when his lingering, inexorable death was only forestalled by depositing the dying alien in the Zone until a cure could be found. Now, as Green Lantern faces the Zod Squad on Earth only to be soundly beaten and have his Power Battery stolen, Mon-El informs Charlie and Superman of a possible back way out of the realm of hellish nullity.
This package also includes a 1986 reprise by Gerber and Rick Veitch, offering a creepy adieu to a number of Superman’s greatest foes.
Superman has proven to be all things to all fans over his decades of existence and Gerber’s takes on these timeless tales of charm, joy and wholesome wit are unique and more necessary than ever: not just as a reminder of great tales of the past but as an all-ages primer of wonders still to come.
