Thursday, November 29, 2012

Groove's Faves: "The Starry-Eyed Siren of Space!" by Bates, Swan, and Anderson

Ol' Groove doesn't know why, but for some reason when I was a kid I was always enamored of Superman stories which featured the Man of Steel in some sort of impossible romantic entanglement. Toss together the menace of a skeletal dinosaur, the opportunity to rid the earth of ills like poverty and pollution, yet another Superman double (hadn't Supes just defeated the sandy-duplicate?), and a hot alien chick, top it off with stunning, stunning art by Curt Swan and Murphy Anderson, and yeah, you've got yourself another Groove's Faves offering. Nice work, writer Cary Bates! From Superman #243 (August 1971), get ready to meet..."The Starry-Eyed Siren of Space!"
Cover art by Neal Adams and Dick Giordano



















7 comments:

  1. The insides were great but if ever a cover could sell a comic it was this one! I cut the figures out with scissors and posted them in a scrapbook!

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  2. I,also have this issue...when I first saw the cover, I said to myself- "Whoa, Lois !" But of course, this isn't Ms.Lane. Supes was probably thinking/wishing the same thing !

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  3. Yeah, that is a rather racy cover - although I always suspected the actual story is a bit more mundane. And sure enough...

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  4. Why is Superman kissing that woman's left eye on the cover?

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    Replies
    1. What else ya gonna kiss when you're kissin' a "starry-eyed siren", Gary?

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  5. The Swan/Anderson Superman....My all time favorite!!

    RickH

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  6. I think this is an amazing story! I love stories about female hypnotists. I remember drawing a pic based on an older girl who was a friend of my family, with her eyes glowing like a Starry Eyed Siren from Space. I copied her image from a pic taken when we visited her family after they moved away. I think this might have been after I saw her wearing some amazing eye makeup which was a few shades of blue, but no yellow. Unfortunately, she was so busy working at a holiday resort that I never got a pic of her looking like that. I did some artwork of her with a word balloon where she said "You may kiss my belly", then I was bending down doing that. Another great hypnotic story was a two part Supergirl story with one part in Action Comics No. 367. This featured Supergirl up against two sexy females from the far future called Alpha and Beta. Their goals were quite reasonable. They had gone back in time to find a student at Stanhope University called David Carew. At one point they put on special glasses to hypnotize lots of Stanhope students to go and grab David Carew, then bring him to them. All they wanted him to do was to make them a large quantity of a drug or medication called Noricon which they heard he invented. This was because it was made of ingredients that were very rare in the far future, but common in the 20th Century. Sadly, in this story Alpha and Beta were wearing their own design of hypnotic glasses which were purple and glowed green, instead of the typical black and white circles or spirals which were even sold in ads in DC comics. One character, who I think was Linda Lee (Supergirl) Danvers even said the phrase "I can't resist!" when faced with this, but David Carew managed to resist and run off. I'm just typing this from memory at the moment, but I know and you may know as well where you can find a copy online. Later on in the story, Alpha or Beta said she was just going off to "enslave some more students" in their quest to capture David Carew. Unfortunately, it turned out they were in the wrong time zone and it was David Carew's son, who was named after him, who was the one who invented Noricon. They were arrested by the Police from the future, but obviously I think they should have got away with it just for giving the students and me so much fun by hypnotizing them. I wonder if anyone reading this can suggest some other stories featuring female hypnotists?

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Special thanks to Mike's Amazing World of Comics and Grand Comics Database for being such fantastic resources for covers, dates, creator info, etc. Thou art treasures true!


Note to "The Man": All images are presumed copyright by the respective copyright holders and are presented here as fair use under applicable laws, man! If you hold the copyright to a work I've posted and would like me to remove it, just drop me an e-mail and it's gone, baby, gone.


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As for the rest of ya, the purpose of this blog is to (re)introduce you to the great comics of the 1970s. If you like what you see, do what I do--go to a comics shop, bookstore, e-Bay or whatever and BUY YOUR OWN!