Hot on the heels of the great treasury-size All-New Collector’s Edition #C-55 featuring the double covered Legion of Super-Heroes came what very well may be my favorite comic book of all time: All-New Collector’s Edition #C-56, Superman vs Muhammad Ali!
With another fantastic wraparound cover, this time by Neal Adams, Superman vs. Muhammad Ali sounded initially like a dumb idea. Of course Superman could easily beat Muhammad Ali in a fight–any fight. I had watched Muhammad Ali fight all through the 70s. I had seen virtually all of his title defenses and losses, including his loss to Leon Spinks on February 15 that year. So, by the time Superman vs. Muhammad Ali came out, Ali was no longer the champ. That diminished the power of the comic book not at all.
Now, Neal Adams was primarily known as a Batman artist. He had done lots and lots of Batman stories. But his Superman covers were just beyond compare. As much as I love Curt Swan’s artwork, when you bait-and-switch a Curt Swan story with a Neal Adams cover, that’s a pretty big shock.
As soon as I opened the Superman vs. Muhammad Ali comic, it was different than any other Superman comic I had ever read. The opening double-page splash was just Clark Kent, Lois Land, and Jimmy Olsen walking down the street, yet it invited me to stare at it for several minutes. I’d never seen a street in a big city before, but it was easy to imagine that this is what one might look like. I almost felt worldly just taking all the details in.
It doesn’t take long to get into the action, as the trio find Muhammad Ali shooting hoops with some local kids and naturally, an alien lands to challenge Ali to a fight against his champion. Because in the 1970s, this was not out of the ordinary at all. I loved comics then! When Ali refuses, the alien threatens Earth with destruction by firing two missiles at the planet. While Kent sneaks off to change to Superman, he rushes to the missiles, but finding that they are made of plasma and he passes right through them. By flying in circles at superspeed, Superman creates a wind tunnel powerful enough to affect the mass of the missiles, which then detonate in the ocean. The don’t detonate harmlessly, however, as a tidal wave is set into motion. Superman stops that by slamming his fists together to make a shockwave. At the same time, the aliens, called the Scrubb (unfortunately) have launched two more missiles, that Superman is just a fraction too slow to intercept.
Now, all of this occurs in just the first dozen or so pages of a 72-page story! It was not a reprint. It was not a collection. This was something special. In effect, Superman challenges Ali for the right to fight against the Scrubb champion. But of course, things being equal, Superman would easily win. But it’s revealed that the Scrubb homeworld orbits a red sun, so Superman wouldn’t have any powers there anyway. Ali agrees to train Superman but they are given only a short time to manage this before they fight each other for the right to go up against Hun’Ya, the Scrubb fighter.
I’m not going to spoil the rest of the story because it really is a lot of fun. There are twists and turns and a pretty big surprise that fooled me as a 13-year old, and I wouldn’t want to ruin it for you. Trust me, you need to read this comic book. I promise you, it all makes sense in the end.
I studied every page of this comic book for the next year, and that’s not an exaggeration. By the time the next summer rolled around, I had my brother and sister record an audio version of it with me, using the tape recorder I had received for Christmas. You could tell that DC was gearing up toward the big event, and I started buying more Superman comics. Gary Grossman’s book, Superman: Serial to Cereal got a new printing, which I also bought. This was the first time I learned of the Fleischer Superman cartoons of the early 1940s. I had known about the radio show, but had no idea that there were Superman cartoons before 1966. I had also never seen a single episode of Adventures of Superman, the long-running TV show of my dad’s youth. The book explained that Superman had his own movie serials too!
I was born into Batmania, but clearly there had been more to Superman than had met my eye! It was at this point, even before Superman the Movie would be released in December, that my favorite fictional character was shifting from Batman to Superman.
