Aldous
Superman Squad
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Downunder
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« on: December 27, 2006, 08:32:30 PM » |
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Recently I read "All In The Mind" (1972) for the first time, a "Fabulous World of Krypton" story by Marv Wolfman & Dave Cockrum.
Archaeologists uncover glowing globes that begin emitting thought-waves, and they give the ancient history of the war between the city-states of Erkol and Xan. Xan unleashes an All-Element Bomb which causes deformities in the babies born to the people of Erkol. The children have no thumbs (and therefore cannot grasp objects), enlarged heads, and are mute.
In an atmosphere of hatred and intolerance, for the war wasn't over by any means, the deformed children -- looking to be in their early teens by now -- were shipped off to an isolated, uninhabited area in automated, solar-powered aircraft called Sun-Disks, and left to fend for themselves.
Unknown to the elders who had banished them, the kids are able to communicate telepathically with each other. As they adapt to their new environment, and after some time has passed, a girl in the group is threatened by a wild predator, and a youth tries to lift a rock to use as a weapon, but he is unable to do so. In a spontaneous display of will power that would impress Hal Jordan, the youth uses his mind (to his great surprise) to move the rock (mind-over-matter), and uses it as a weapon against the predator.
The members of the group begin to explore their mental powers, and finding that they can now manipulate their physical environment, they start to build themselves houses out of the raw materials around them.
Some time later, during winter, a member of the new community is playing around inside one of the Sun-Disks and he accidentally turns on a screen which is picking up a live transmission from Erkol. Xan, the enemy city, is about to unleash a doomsday weapon which will destroy Erkol, and this sparks a furious debate amongst the group as to whether or not they should use their mental powers to save the city of the parents who abandoned them.
Making the attempt to stop the doomsday device from exploding, the teenagers find they are simply too far away from the city to have much effect. If they had not been sent away, they could probably have saved the people of Erkol; but as it is, Erkol is destroyed.
The history globes uncovered by the archaeologists finish their story: the teenagers stayed in the city they had built with their mental powers, and called it Kryptonopolis, and they went on to have children of their own which were all born normal.
So I take it these teenagers with mind-over-matter powers were the ancestors of Superman?
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