Nerding Day: Superman vs Microwave Man (Patreon)

I don't know a whole lot about Superman. I lived through the Death and Return of Superman era, when everyone thought they were going to retire and/or pay their kids' tuition with an overhyped marketing stunt. I remember when he came back and had hockey hair for a bit, then had electric powers for some reason. And I know that he once fought the alien from the hit movie Alien. But beyond that, I know barely anything about him, except this — before they got dark and twisted in the '90s, Superman comics had a generational run of being wildly, irresponsibly stupid.

It makes sense, right? You can only have Superman fight wizards so many times — and while we're on the subject, "magic" is kind of a bullshit weakness, isn't it? I mean, you hit Batman with a magic lamp, he's going to turn into a genie slave too.

So what do you do with Superman if no one poses a meaningful threat? You put him into Urkel-ass hijinks where he invents a brain-enhancement machine that accidentally splits him into two guys, or have his dad get bonked on the head and think that he's Superman. And this bullshit wasn't just confined to the Superboy days, either. Well into the 1970s, Superman was getting into idiotic shenanigans involving time travel, aliens, and sewer gators.

Meet Microwave Man. Issue 487 of Action Comics, released in 1978, introduces him as a 1930s supervillain who terrorized Metropolis in the years before Superman rolled up. In fact, he's billed as the "first supervillain." I like the implication that the first guy to get magic bullet-erasing powers in a world absent of any other superpowered beings would obviously use them to enrich himself during the Great Depression. I also like that the cops call his microbeams "fantastic." If this was a genuine Golden Age panel they would have called them "queer" and meant it in both senses of the word.

Meanwhile on Krypton, Star Trek is calling about getting their iconic catchphrase back. Unfortunately, all phones on the planet are currently exploding.

Cut out and wear your Microwave Man Action Reading Glasses now.

So we're setting up this parallel between Superman and Microwave Man, then asking: how could these two characters ever meet given the decades between them? Make your wagers now.

A) They couldn't, the issue is about Superman fighting Microwave Man's son. He's decided to revive the Microwave Man identity after seeing Star Wars thirteen times.

B) Microwave Man is dragged into the present when Superman does some time travel bullshit to make his date with Lana and give his speech at a banquet for puppy veterans.

C) An insane old man is given the gift of renewed youth and spends it in a fruitless bid to test his might against immortal space Jesus.

Ready? Then let's begin. Superman is in hot pursuit of a UFO!

Haha, "IFO." Cute. This whole story is peppered through with editorial comments like this from legendary editor/prolific sexual harasser Julius Schwartz. He was 63 years old at the time, which I don't mention for any particular reason.

The UFO fires on Superman and shits out an old-timey car. Superman is about to use a miniscule fraction of his strength to rend these assholes into their component molecules when the aliens just leave. He checks on the elderly man, having missed that he emerged from the spacecraft, and the old guy immediately starts pawing at him like he's an undergraduate research assistant.

Well, he's just a harmless senior citizen who greets strangers with immediate physical contact. Or… dun dun dun… is he?

See, Superman is the living embodiment of unkillable justice, but he's not always the most perceptive. Batman would have clocked that license plate within seconds and deployed one of his eleven plans for dealing with gropey time traveling kooks before the guy could manhandle his well-sculpted traps. (Plans one through ten are "extreme physical trauma." Plan eleven is to exploit their lust via disguising himself as a beautiful lady, exactly the same way he would take down Nightwing.)

Again, I don't know a whole lot about Superman. But my sense is that the character — and writers — were just kind of fucking around for a significant part of the 20th century. How else to explain the apparent fact that Lois Lane, Jimmy Olsen, and Clark Kent wrote Superman's biography and sold it to a publisher, or that Superman as Superman wrote another book about Krypton?

I buy that if Superman existed, there would be an entire room at the bookstore about him. But the existence of books he wrote himself means that either:

A) Superman is a braggadocious moron.

B) Superman is a genius who deliberately created "official" sources about him which contain misinformation as to his true powers and weaknesses in order to fool Lex Luthor.

C) Superman woke up one day in his crummy studio apartment paid for with his junior reporter salary and realized there was an easy way he could get rich quick.

But Clark Kent is actually a news anchor at this point, so he's either the wealthiest and most famous news anchor in history or he donated all of his book proceeds from the book to puppy veterans.

Anyway, Lana and Jimmy are attending a seminar on UFOs. "Fuck these brain-damaged yokels," they whisper to one another. "Aliens are real and we've met them. These clowns are making up horseshit, the clowns."

Superman, an alien from the far reaches of the galaxy, is the most famous man in the world. Jimmy's statements imply that other aliens are known to exist by at least some people. And yet nobody takes these eyewitnesses — including the old man — seriously.

Let me try to make an analogy here. Imagine living in a world where bigfoot is a massive celebrity and other, lesser bigfoots occasionally show up to rob banks or steal monuments and the main bigfoot has to stop them. The existence of bigfeets is irrefutable fact. Now imagine that you meet someone who says "I met a bigfoot that smelled bad," or "I met a bigfoot who took me on a road trip to Tijuana." If your response is to call that person an insane liar who should be laughed out of polite society, you would be the asshole in that situation. Maybe that's why bigfoot doesn't want to hang out with you.

"This demented old pervert knows nothing and should be killed," proclaims Jimmy Olsen, professional journalist. "I have seen sights beyond my wildest imaginings, but this particular thing surely could never exist. And if I'm wrong, may a flaming ball of molten irony immolate my flesh where I stand."

Fuck you, Jimmy. You stumbled into working a few desks down from an undercover alien and now you're acting like you invented pussy. I wish Superman had let you fry.

It turns out that the old man is none other than Lewis Padgett, Microwave Man! Nobody remembers the name of the guy who melted bank walls with his mind forty years ago except Perry White, and in fairness, there have probably been a lot of those in Metropolis over the past couple of decades.

See, Padgett decided to test his microwave powers and accidentally created a death orb. Tragedy was only averted because he'd read all about Superman and decided that hopefully he was near the building he sent it hurtling towards.

So, you're Lewis Padgett, doddering septuagenarian who can kill with a thought. You almost just did twenty 9/11's by accident. Do you:

A) Return to space to ensure that this sort of thing never happens again.

B) Return to the bookstore and purchase a volume by Superman titled "How to Control Your Micromatic Stunts."

C) Return to your jack shack and plead with your all-powerful alien masters to give you the might to destroy the Superman.

"This time I know what I'm doing," the near-death man wearing a high-vis spandex suit thinks, as he psychically beseeches unseen star beasts to give him the hot young body of a 30-year-old.

What's Superman up to during all of this? You know, normal Superman stuff…

…fighting crime, helping citizens in need…

…tormenting animals. Maybe I'm on Microwave Man's side now. Superman needs to be taken down one or more pegs.

That's a start! To hell with that particular statute of Superman.

This is fucking tragic, though. Imagine you go through all the trouble of regaining your youth through advanced star magic and your grand challenge to Superman ends up looking like the work of some rowdy teen vandals. Surely Microwave Man was just getting warmed up, and his next provocation will be something Superman couldn't possibly ignore.

Ha! Quiver in fear, Superman, as I give you a legitimate reason to take a break from your day job! It was total coincidence things worked out that way because I had no idea that you were secretly news anchor Clark Kent, but quiver nonetheless!

By my count, Julius Schwartz has now marveled at the space-age discovery of "microwaves" something like thirty seven times. But in all fairness, he was born before the invention of penicillin, the old creep.

Microwave Man graciously lets the citizens of Metropolis go back to watching CHiPs and Superman gradually starts to realize what's going on.

I feel like we're dealing with a depowered Superman here, because at most other points in the character's history there's no way some jobber named "Lewis Padgett" even touches him.

Superman's next move is to deliberately hit everything in a forty foot radius except his foe. It turns out that Microwave Man can fly, but even if he couldn't, Superman knows he can shoot microwave beams, which are a kind of high-frequency radio wave lying just below the infra-red region of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Kal-El's had enough of this tomfoolery and gets Microwave Man in a weird kind of hammer lock choke. How does Microwave Man escape?

A) He doesn't, Superman breaks his neck and then screams in helpless despair over having been forced to kill him.

B) He calls on his alien friends to fire their Kryptonite beams, weakening Superman enough for him to wriggle free.

C) He experiences sexual gratification from being choked out by the strongest man in the world, which increases his micromatic power level.

Yes, it's a rare variation on the old "getting so mad you fight harder" trope: getting such a big hard-on that you fight madder.

Microwave Man, who is a man whose powers operate much in the same way that microwave ovens cook food, turns the tables on Superman and sends him for a trip on the old Alligator Express.

Flying ass-first into space, Superman realizes why this pre-war pervert is dunking on him.

And he comes up with a simple solution: just hit him so hard he's launched into the 19th century!

Seems sensible enough. Let's go Huey Lewis on this nerd and get him back in time.

Get his ass, Superman. Or don't. I've lost track of who I'm rooting for here.

Wait, what?

Yes, Superman loses! Or… does he?

No, he lied! He threw the fight to a space-addled retiree because the guy decided that a lifetime of having superpowers, meeting real aliens, and seeing the infinite wonders of the stars wasn't enough — he also had to be a Make-a-Wish Kid that got to kill Superman.

What an entitled little freak. Superman should have broken both of his arms and left him humping the ground in sexual frustration. At the very least, he could have leaned down and whispered to him, "I let you win, motherfucker. No one will remember you in two weeks. Was it worth it? Oh, and by the way, tell Satan I said you're welcome for the alligators. All alligators go to hell, yeah. It's sort of a reverse of the dog thing, if you've seen that movie. I mean, it hasn't come out yet, so I don't see how you could have. I can time travel, though. I could have easily done that to kill you, but you weren't worth it. Fuck you, Micropenis Man."

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Vooster, a time traveling wizard that created this comic to torture all of us!

You can read this article and every other one on the much better in every way 1900HOTDOG.COM