I had this comic in 1971 (Amazing New Adventures of Superman #236) and it is one of the few story lines that stuck in my head. The original comic got thrown away during one of the occasional, catastrophic tidy ups of my bedroom, but I am now so old and rich that I can lavish 100 times the original price (5p) in order to satisfy this nostalgic whim and I just have. And I'm glad I did too, because it seems just as astonishingly prescient as I had remembered.
So, what's so special about this story?
- A population that is bewitched by the music of the Surrus flower to such an extent that the wander around with the flowers stuck to their ears and listen to nothing else
- Looming environmental disaster that they have only a narrow opportunity to avert
- Mass distrust/denial of science (Dr Mo-De's warnings fell on deaf ears)
Can you see where I'm going with this?
Denny O'Neil wrote this in 1971. Never mind the iPod, the Sony Walkman was not invented until seven years later and the term global warming was not coined until 1975 (Wallace Broecker, "Climatic Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?" Science, vol. 189 (8 August 1975), 460-463.) Mind you, he was a bit off the mark with his fashion predictions wasn't he? I love old Gregory Peck there with his hippy head band and Star Trek costume. Probably jeans worn with a waist band 18 inches from the ground were beyond O'Neil's imagination and I'm not going to criticise him for that.
And the moral of this story? I don't know what lessons you'll take from it, but for me it is clear.
If I had only hoarded this away for 39 years I could have saved a fiver.
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