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Superman: Phantom Zone
by Robert Greenberger
During Mort Weisinger’s tenure as Superman editor, he had a stretch of time where he added one new element after another with astonishing regularity and today many readers’ understanding of Kryptonian lore can be traced to this fertile period. among those fantastic inventions was the Phantom Zone, the extra-dimensional space where criminals were eliminated to serve their sentences. The realm was first discovered by the scientist Jor-El in adventure Comics #283 back in 1961. once discovered, Jor-El saw it as a much more humane way to incarcerate criminals rather than send them into orbit in a state of suspended animation. He built the Phantom zone projector to allow the instant transportation of criminals to their prison realm two years later in Superboy #104.
The zone became a fantastic font for opponents and story twists, becoming so intertwined in the legend that Mario Puzo used it in his screenplay for Superman the film and its sequel Superman II. It has remained a fixture ever because but interestingly, some of the most interesting exploration of the zone itself didn’t occur until the waning years of the Silver Age. It ought to come as no surprise then that those stories came from the fevered imagination of Steve Gerber, an infrequent visitor to the DC Universe.
Dick Giordano invited Gerber to write a Phantom zone miniseries, partly to get Gerber back at DC and partly to tie-in with the sequel’s 1980 release. The writer agreed and then asked for his longtime collaborator gene Colan to illustrate the tale. For a variety of reasons, the project got delayed time and again until the four issue miniseries, inked by the amazing Tony DeZuniga, came out at the end of 1981. The major contribution to the canon was the revelation that phantom-like beasts also resided in this realm and the zone had a hidden back door exit.
Gerber grew up on the Weisinger stories and vividly recalled them, including one-time local Quex-Ul, who lost his memories and powers, living out his life as a human, Charlie Kweskill. Gerber remembered him and his tortured past, catnip to the writer. His unraveling mind and the creeping terror represented by the current residents made a super-hero story feel much more like a horror tale.
As Julie Schwartz’s tenure as editor was winding down with the DC universe prior to the crisis on unlimited Earths, he assigned the final issue of DC Comics presents to Gerber who chose to visit the Phantom zone one much more time, bringing artist Rick Veitch along for the ride.
“With no one paying attention, Steve turned in an absolutely nutty script in which the Phantom zone was revealed to be a living being made of billions of dead souls. I don’t know what was going on with Steve at the time, but it was written in a wildly disjointed style: “Again the self is pierced and again and again–and the begin time is now and now is the begin time and the else-ones multiply like– HATE! Fingers (what are fingers) gouging (what is gouging?) into faces (what are faces?) into–COWARDS! WHY DID YOU put us TO DEATH? …death was the begin time…” and came in pieces; three or four pages at a time. Julie was fretting, Steve wasn’t returning his phone calls and the whole project was wildly late so I hammered the pencils out in record time so Bob Smith could get them inked,” Veitch wrote on his website.
In this supreme visit to the Zone, Gerber revealed for the first time that the realm was sentient. The prisoners escaped en masse with the intent of destroying earth only to be absorbed into the crystal uni-mind of the zone, which was named Aethyr. In fact, it was so wildly out of left field that it could not be reconciled with what came before so when Martin Pasko and I co-wrote the essential Superman Encyclopedia, we ascribed the story as occurring in an unnamed parallel world, to be destroyed by the Crisis.
In or out of continuity, Gerber’s inventive writing is never dull and it’s always a distinct pleasure to read. Now, all five stories are collected in a single volume Superman: Phantom zone collection and it is recommended. Not only do you get Gerber, but you get Colan cutting loose with all-out super-heroic action, something he had not been doing at that point in his career.
Gerber gushed to Michael Eury, “[His Clark Kent] looked real and human, possibly for the first time in the character’s history.”
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Superman: Phantom zone SC