Action Comics #355
Cover date: October 1967

Writer: Leo Dorfman
Penciller: Wayne Boring
Inker: Wayne Boring
Cover: Curt Swan

“The Mighty Annihilator!”

Action Comics #355 hit the newsstands in the summer of 1967 when I had just turned 12 years old. We were living in Hialeah, a suburb of Miami. About two miles or so from where we lived was what we called a “shopping strip”, basically a long, rectangular stand-alone building a full block long with various stores and businesses. I only remember two of the businesses in there; one was the barber shop run by my dad’s friend and the other was the Rexall’s drugstore on the end. The Rexall’s had a snack bar and soda shoppe and served some of the best ice cream sodas around. That worked out well for me in the next couple of years because the shopping strip was practically next door to the junior high school I would be attending. They also had the old “spinner racks” for comic books and it was placed where you could see it as soon as you stepped inside.

So it was, one afternoon that summer, as I stepped out of the blinding sunlight and through the door into the coolness of the drugstore, that my eyes were drawn to the spinner rack and the cover of Action Comics #355. I made a straight path to the display, never taking my eyes off the cover, until I reached the rack and searched through the books behind it to find one that wasn’t folded or bent. The very construction of the spinner racks meant that any book in the front was going to be bent as people looked through the comics at the ones behind it. Covers would be bent, folded or creased and even sometimes torn. The pages inside would also be bent or folded. I tried to avoid causing this kind of damage by starting at the back and lifting the book straight up to look at the cover and continuing to do so as I worked my way forward, rather than bending the ones in front of it down. But not everyone was as weird as I was.

There were three reasons why I was so mesmerized by this Curt Swan cover. First, I couldn’t previously recall seeing Superman’s face display such fear; second it was a kick to watch him watching someone else changing in a phone booth; and third it was just the fantastic profile of Superman drawn by Swan. I wanted to be a comic book artist when I “grew up” but my talent never matched my desire. This was one of the Superman poses I found myself drawing over and over again, just trying to get that strong profile down right.

The story inside was not as memorable, in fact I had to do some research to refresh my recollection. In a nutshell, a scientist discovers some Kryptonian chemicals, makes a solution that he injects himself with and discovers he has become a living nitro-glycerine bomb. If Superman uses any of his powers against “The Annihilator”, as he calls himself, then the Earth will be destroyed and Superman with it, forcing Superman to give in to The Annihilator’s demands that the Man of Steel leave Earth. This was a 2-part story that was continued in the following issue and I don’t remember much about that either except it involved The Annihilator’s son.

Filed under: Retro Comic Book Review
Tags: « Comic Book Artists • Curt Swan • Superman »
by admin