Silver Age DC covers were written before the stories were, which is the single most useful thing to know about them. An editor would decide on an image arresting enough to move copies off a spinner rack, and a writer would then be handed the picture and told to explain it. It produced sixty years of gloriously deranged premises, and it produced this one.
March 1962. Superman is in a glass booth. Six of his worst enemies are seated at a bench in front of him — Saturn Queen, Cosmic King, Brainiac, Lightning Lord, Electro and Lex Luthor — and the cover lists their names in a box along the bottom like the cast of a play. Luthor, standing, holds the verdict. Superman’s wrists are chained. Somebody has clearly been thinking about how to sell a comic, and it worked.
The good part is what Curt Swan and Stan Kaye do inside that setup. Superman is not waiting to hear the verdict. He is looking through the paper in Luthor’s hand with X-ray vision, and the word balloon tells us he already knows the answer — a fair trial, he notes acidly, in which they have found him guilty and are about to sentence him to the worst fate in the universe. It is a small, sharp piece of characterization smuggled into a cover built to be lurid, and it is the reason the image has lasted.
Robert Bernstein and Jerry Siegel wrote the issue. Swan, George Klein and Jim Mooney drew it. Krypto turns up. A Supergirl story shares the book, as it did throughout this run of Action — the two features sharing a title through the period when Supergirl was still, in-universe, a secret.
This copy is CGC 8.0 with off-white to white pages, in an older-generation CGC holder. Early-sixties Action is genuinely difficult in this grade for a specific reason: the cover’s broad orange field shows every handling mark a book ever picked up, and most survivors wear their history plainly. This one does not. A Heritage Auctions lot sticker from a previous sale sits on the outside of the holder; it can stay or go, as the buyer prefers.
Silver Age DC covers were written before the stories were, which is the single most useful thing to know about them. An editor would decide on an image arresting enough to move copies off a spinner rack, and a writer would then be handed the picture and told to explain it. It produced sixty years of gloriously deranged premises, and it produced this one.
March 1962. Superman is in a glass booth. Six of his worst enemies are seated at a bench in front of him — Saturn Queen, Cosmic King, Brainiac, Lightning Lord, Electro and Lex Luthor — and the cover lists their names in a box along the bottom like the cast of a play. Luthor, standing, holds the verdict. Superman’s wrists are chained. Somebody has clearly been thinking about how to sell a comic, and it worked.
The good part is what Curt Swan and Stan Kaye do inside that setup. Superman is not waiting to hear the verdict. He is looking through the paper in Luthor’s hand with X-ray vision, and the word balloon tells us he already knows the answer — a fair trial, he notes acidly, in which they have found him guilty and are about to sentence him to the worst fate in the universe. It is a small, sharp piece of characterization smuggled into a cover built to be lurid, and it is the reason the image has lasted.
Robert Bernstein and Jerry Siegel wrote the issue. Swan, George Klein and Jim Mooney drew it. Krypto turns up. A Supergirl story shares the book, as it did throughout this run of Action — the two features sharing a title through the period when Supergirl was still, in-universe, a secret.
This copy is CGC 8.0 with off-white to white pages, in an older-generation CGC holder. Early-sixties Action is genuinely difficult in this grade for a specific reason: the cover’s broad orange field shows every handling mark a book ever picked up, and most survivors wear their history plainly. This one does not. A Heritage Auctions lot sticker from a previous sale sits on the outside of the holder; it can stay or go, as the buyer prefers.
