The Leper from Krypton

DC published a story in 1968 that burned itself into my memory for years. Between 1968 and 1973, the memory of this story caused persistent, albeit irrational, fears of household objects; fears of sudden, terminal illness; and, eventually, even of the color green. The illogic of these fears struck me, even then, but I knew only one thing would exorcise this persistent dread. As an act of self-preservation, back in 1973, I destroyed the books, and the fear went away.

The Infection of Fear

Action Comics #363-366, from 1968, detailed the saga of "The Leper from Krypton," and infused me, a helpless sprout of a lad, with a dread that endured for years. Other comics inspired no such fear. Children, after all, typically have enough sense to dismiss what happens within a comic book. Kirby monster books did not make me fear that some giant beast with ornamental pointy things sticking out of its head would gobble up cosmopolitan Denton, Texas; science fiction comics did not cause me to look to the sky, fearful of the coming invasion of badly-dressed extraterrestrials with atrocious complexions and unlikely color schemes. What, then, did this story contain to make it so scary?

Begin with a four-year-old's understanding of the Superman. These things make Superman formidable: he has grown to adulthood; he came from another planet, bringing with him a resume of abilities that rendered him so immensely powerful that nothing, as went the dogma, could hurt him. Things that could undo even the most capable of normal people meant, essentially, squat to him; a bullet fired at close range into his chest would harm him precisely as much as would a wind-blown grain of dust. Things that couldn't make him blink would decimate a normal human being. This much any four-year-old could understand.

What, then, could a four-year old make of a story in which a disease from Superman's home world, Krypton, made Superman so sick that he would die; threatened all of humanity by virtue of its contagion; possessed no cure; and made its victims into hideous green wrinkled things with awful black fingernails? Such a disease, severally described as "Virus X" and "Kryptonian leprosy" had terrified Krypton, and could even afflict the untouchable, invulnerable Superman. It could make him sick, turn him green and disgusting, and make him give up and shoot himself into space, in a rocket coffin, to die. Sensible thinking required that anyone conclude that a bug that could do that to Superman, after all, would make short work of a kid.

Superman Got Sick

Consecutive issues of Action Comics portrayed Superman going through the course of this illness. Each showed Superman becoming sicker and sicker as the pruny greenness of his skin spread and the disease cut its irreversible swath through the Maginot Line of Superman's compromised immune system. The creative team on these comics omitted only such details as might evoke the wrath of the Comics Code Authority; but, if they could have, they would have made Superman smell bad, too.

I do not own the first and third parts of this gruesome tale, I remember how it began. Luthor, clad in a biohazard suit, worked diligently in a prison laboratory someone had the poor judgment to provide him; he dropped clear liquid onto a test rabbit, which quickly turned green and wrinkly before dying quickly. Luthor congratulated himself for having recreated Virus X, the fatal infection that once terrorized Superman's home world of Krypton.

Luthor infected Superman by tainting a piece of fan mail with the solution containing the deadly virus. After touching the paper, Superman, in his Clark Kent persona, fell asleep at his desk, something that should serve as a red flag to readers aware that Superman need never have slept, eaten, bathed, breathed, or excreted back in the heyday of his godlike power.

Clark awoke, confused at this uncharacteristic bit of napping; and his concern grew as other, more characteristic, symptoms followed. Superman suffered a panic attack, in which he rent apart his Clark Kent clothes (no great loss, since he must have owned a billion identical blue suits). When he recovered his wits, Superman remembered this symptom and its name (the "Panic Plague"), and began to realize just what afflicted him: Virus X. Then he embarked on some expository flashbacks for those readers who had not grown up Kryptonian.

Superman's flashback included a number of scenes carefully contrived to disturb a four-year-old. The first panel depicted a dying alien, green, wrinkly, and gruesome, reaching out to two horrified Kryptonians. A word balloon containing an indecipherable extraKryptonian hieroglyphic must have indicated a plea for help, but the Kryptonians themselves involved themselves in proclaiming their horror: A ship had escaped from the "Plague Planet" and crashed on Krypton!

The next panel showed the beginnings of a Kryptonian Virus X epidemic. Crowds of men lay on the ground, rending their clothes as Superman had. Presumably female victims did not suffer this symptom, since it would entail a violation of the Comics Code.

The flashbacks concluded, Superman began to enjoy the richly visual symptoms of his newly acquired sickness. His hands turned green and wrinkly, and his fingernails turned an awful zombie black. Superman sat in an alley, mulling over his doom, and a stray cat rubbed against one of his infected hands; instantly, it went through the entire course of the disease. As Superman watched the cat die, he realized that, as much as his own doom seemed inevitable, the doom of the more vulnerable earth would occur much more rapidly if he didn't cure himself. At this point, he recognized that his options included finding a cure or banishing himself from the earth altogether.

To finish some unfinished business--Superman had to dismiss the prospect of survival early on--he resumed his identity as Clark Kent, improbably disguising his condition by donning white gloves. In the world of comics, after all, no one evidently sought to question a man wearing white dress gloves indoors, not even when wrinkly green wrists showed above their tops. Said improbable disguise allowed him to leave notices about his sickness, his plans, and his fate.

But then, as Superman sat at his desk, after hours, tying up his mortal affairs as Clark, he realized that the disease had already spread to one half of his face. The first installment of "The Leper from Krypton" ended with Superman, resembling Two-Face, cornered in the Daily Planet office as Lois Lane entered the office. Thus, both great Silver Age dooms confronted him then: Not only might Superman die horribly in a way that could take the balance of humanity with him, but Lois might discover his secret identity!

Superman's Last Hope

The second installment of this dread-inspiring romance appeared in Action Comics #364, and, in fine form, built up hope again and again, before dashing it cruelly against the rocks. Each new prospect for a cure or a solution to Superman's doom fell apart, incrementally draining the reader, and eventually Superman himself, of hope.

This chapter began with Superman, dressed as Clark Kent but adorned with unconcealable Virus X symptoms, attempting to escape the appearance of Lois Lane, whose untimely arrival threatened his precious secret identity. Let us ignore Superman's improbable concern about a matter that would surely resolve itself with his impending death and simply observe that he resolved the problem by rapidly changing clothes and appearing as Superman, explaining that he had to leave a note at the Daily Planet.

Within a page, Superman became completely green and wrinkled, clearly demonstrating the terminal stages of the disease. Thusly rendered weak (by Superman standards) and sickly, Superman nonetheless continued contriving elaborate means throughout the balance of the story to prolong his life, to find a cure for himself, and to spare the necessity for his exile and death.

Each new hope, in turn, crashed like a limousine with Ted Kennedy at the wheel. The assembled scientists of a U.N. medical delegation failed to help him, which, in those days, meant that the finest and most high-seeing of human minds ever produced (comics in the sixties thought somewhat more highly of the United Nations) could offer no cure.

Lex Luthor, architect of all this misery, demanded a ransom to cure Superman. He staged a phony cure of the diseased cat Superman had sent to the pet cemetery in the previous chapter; having convinced the authorities of his ability, Luthor then welched on the deal, keeping the money, all from the cozy confines of his inevitable prison cell. In truth, these scenes provided one of the Silver Age Luthor's most evil recorded moments, as he sat in his cell, gloating about swindling the authorities out of a cool million while sending Superman to his certain demise in the same act. Luthor's promised cure, as it happened, involved little more than a cheesy hypnotist act to make onlookers ignore Superman's symptoms; Luthor gloated evilly when said hypnotic spell crumbled under Superman's awareness that, although his skin seemingly appeared clear and pink again, he still felt feverish and weak.

Little hope remained to Superman at this point, and said Man of Steel left for one last patrol of the city. Clad in a clear suit to contain his disease, he encountered some high-tech bandits, who foolishly blasted away Superman's protective body condom and, realizing the danger that he presented, gave up rather than risk infection.

Using her noggin, Supergirl proposed to deposit Superman in the Phantom Zone, where he could wait indefinitely for a cure; but the assembled Phantom Zone inmates combined their will power and psychically locked Superman out, both out of fear for their own skins (which remained smooth and pink) and a desire to mess with the Blue Cheese of Metropolis. Thus did Superman see his last hope for a way out of his waiting coffin.

Superman saw the oncoming end, and climbed into a padded rocket-casket to blast his mortal remains into the heart of the hottest sun in the universe, where, presumably, he could either destroy any viable disease organisms or simply isolate himself altogether from anything his corpse might infect. At this point, the writers really began to jerk for tears, showing flags flying at half mast all over the world (poor protocol, with Superman not yet dead); and Superman, ever willing to sacrifice himself, donned a rubber mask depicting his undiseased face so that mankind's last memories would include Superman as he appeared in the prime of health.

This story, so far, had run circles around certain sixties formulaic elements. Firstly, it did not belong among the "imaginary" stories excluded from canon, because such stories inevitably warned the reader with huge banners proclaiming "An Imaginary Tale!" Yet Superman failed to outsmart the villain or compel him to undo his evil handiwork; and he had, seemingly, found no clever back-door escape (Superman robots did not get Virus X). What remained was the grim notion that Superman, this time, might have to cash in his chips; no clear clue pointed to a way that he might make things right and fulfill the Comics Code's mandate that evil must never prevail.

Pilgrimage to the Grave

In the third chapter, Superman, in his rocket coffin, heads toward his doom in the center of Flammbron, the "Hottest Sun in the Universe (TM)", which most likely would dispose of his physical remains in a way that would not allow other gentle beings to come to harm.

Milking for every tear they could extort, the writers had Superman receive salutes from everyone and everything he past, the last tribute from a multitude of worlds that all owed him for their very survival.

He passed the Bizarro World, where the Superman-like residents showed their grief by laughing like mad and pelting his rocket with whatever Kryptonite they had handy, a gesture that truly touched Superman because of his knowledge of their backwards psychology; for these absurd simulacra of his own person, this represented a moving, heartfelt sendoff. (If you need to, you may get a tissue to daub your tears.)

Then, as one last attempt to milk the gullible reader for pathos, an escort of spaceships joins Superman's rocket to accompany him as far as they dared on the way to the fiery doom which, with reddened tongue, overhung the Man of Steel. Superman, by this point, had gotten choked up so many times that one might plausibly expect him to have choked to death before Virus X or the heat of Flammbron ever had a chance; but, according to schedule, he and his little rocket plummetted into the heart of said star to meet their ends. At this point, chapter three ended, and the readers of 1968 had to wait until the next issue to see the very end.

The Inevitable Cop-out

The denouement of this tear-jerker, however, brought the reader back into the familiar terrain of contrived, twist endings, of deus ex machina on schedule, of loopholes invented at the last minute to save (or betray, depending on your viewpoint) the reader. But we deal with the height of DC's Silver Age, where bogus twist endings sprang forth like Athena from fevered brows once, twice, or many times a month. [Hint: if the more carnage-minded comics creators of the nineties couldn't let Superman stay dead in the nineties, would the sober minds of 1968 stand by their guns?]

We left Superman, in the last chapter, falling into the hottest sun in the universe, waiting for the heat, pressure, and radiation to consume his no-longer-invulnerable tissues. However, unbeknownst to Superman, flame-beings (with human anatomies and excellent skill with the English language) welcome him in his rocket.

At this point, Superman realizes that he has, somehow, healed, and flashes back to the previous chapter, where the Bizarros gave him their eloquent last respects, offering their backwards help by throwing white Kryptonite at him.

At this point, you might consider setting down anything you might otherwise spill or drop (or, for that matter, throw in the heady anger of betrayal).

White Kryptonite, it seems, has the miraculous property of destroying plant life, viruses, and bacteria, and, somewhere in these categories, Virus X!

Fortunately, the writers didn't just drop that gob-stopper of a cop-out in the readers' laps; instead, the story went on to detail a mystery. Superman, on returning to earth, hoping to tell a grateful human race about his near-escape from Death, found no signs whatsoever that Earth even acknowledged his death. Nothing appeared in the news; Superman memorial monuments remained incomplete and ignored. Superman enjoyed a hint of hurt feelings at this point, disrupted by the appearance in the sky of another Superman!

Superman unraveled the mystery quickly, realizing that the Justice League had opted to pass for him, using their own powers, while Supergirl trained Superman's replacement from likely Kandorian prospects, but, with his return, said replacement had become unnecessary.

At this point, all resolved itself in a warm and fuzzy smiley scene with everyone happy. At the time, a year or two after this story appeared in print, when I could finally decipher some of the words, this ending filled me with relief, although one scene with the Martian Manhunter stripping off a Superman mask to reveal his green skin frightened me. I suspected that other people still had Virus X and used those masks to conceal it; I had never heard of the Martian Manhunter, who had vanished from the pages of Justice League of America before I ever read that title.

Post Fin

Never mind the silliness, never mind the cheap escape, never mind the improbable resolution buried under a formulaic mystery resolution story. This story disturbed me. I knew how the story ended, with everyone safe, happy, smiling, and not dead; but the idea of Virus X kept with me, sometimes intruding into dreams (thankfully including others, rather than myself, suffering from said exquisite inconvenience).

The notion occurred to me that anything green could transmit the disease. At first, only the green ink on the pages of the Virus X stories held this power; then, green printed on anything; then, green plastic and cloth. I knew better, but did not trust my judgment; my morbid curiosity compelled me to confirm the harmlessness of each green object.

On quiet days with no grownups underfoot (or overhead), I would touch objects, then examine my finger to see if it showed any signs of becoming green and wrinkly.

I knew in my head the truth: Virus X would not infect me, since it appeared only within a few long-forgotten comic books of the late 1960s. But in my heart, as long as those comics survived, I feared it, just a little, the same way I feared that bad men might kidnap me and take me away. So, mustering some considerable resolve, I destroyed the remaining Virus X comics that moldered in my closet. Yes, I recognize this crime, even for a coverless book missing pages and possibly reeking of something the cat had done in my toy box. In my own defense, I must point out that the fear went away then, never to return.

I could even buy the comics again by 1998.