Showcase Presents Superman: Part 9

Okay, first I have to say, sorry for the lack of a Superman post yesterday. Have you ever felt like the week was dragging on and you thought it was Thursday when it was really Wednesday? Yeah, exactly. Long week. Oh well, here goes!

This is the ninth of numerous posts on Showcase Presents: Superman. I hope you enjoy this as much as I enjoyed the stories.Now, this won't be like most comic blogs with scanned pictures posted throughout. Mostly because I don't have a scanner, but the stories should speak for themselves, but also because I want to go through the whole book in the next few weeks, and I want non-comics readers to enjoy the kookiness that us comics readers understand from the Silver Age. While I may mock these stories, I am not making anything up, this is all straight from the comics! While I may mock, I love these stories and the character of Superman. This is great stuff! The cover scans are from the Grand Comic Book Database.

Superman #125

"Clark Kent's College Days"

Long Story Short: "One of the earliest Superboy stories."

This is the second of three stories in Superman #125. It begins with Clark getting an invitation to his college class reunion. He graduates from high school and immediately ships off to Metropolis U where he is mocked by the upper classmen for being weak and wearing glasses.

He snaps an oar on the rowing team, and has to blow out a light switch so he can escape his dorm room and put out a burring car. It reminds me of my college dorm, only we had burning couches outside the dorms and everyone would have been too drunk to realize I was Superman.

Clark is then in a class where he sees his professors newest invention. A steam powered robot! It developed a crack in class so Clark repairs it with heat vision. The prof notices and decides Superboy is in his class and needs to be "trapped."

The first test is a lie detector. Every student (I guess they are all boys) gets tested, but the bell rings right before the last student, Clark of course, can be tested. Randomly, he is then distracted, and nearly collides with a plane. So much for super concentration.

The prof then decides to drop two cannonballs off of a replica Tower of Pisa. He decides to fill one of them with explosives(!) to get Clark to use his X-Ray vision. Instead he flies off to dig holes for the balls to fall into. How he wasn't seen I have no idea. Luckily no one was killed!

Next, while Clark is cheering on the cheerleading squad (made up entirely of men!) he accidentally jumps too high (again with the super concentration). The prof is using his binoculors and would be able to spot him if not for the cannon smoke. So, he uses his super-speed to gather up a bunch of helium balloons to pretend he floated up there with helium. No, I have no idea why he wouldn't just use his super-speed to land! Wouldn't his chemistry professor realize that fourteen small helium balloons could not hold a full grown man aloft?

Finally, the prof takes Clark to a cave and corners him with kryptonite. He is able to stab the wall with his fingers discretely and releases some kind of gas that slowly poisons his prof and class. Well, not really, it just puts them to sleep. He is then able to rescure them all as Superboy. At the very end the prof is finally able to run his lie detector test on Clark. He passes on the question of "Are you Superboy?" Why? Because he is no longer Superboy, he is now Superman! *sniff* How sweet!