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ACTION COMICS #300



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Comic Book Historian Michael E. Grost notes:

In Superman Under the Red Sun, the cover story in Action Comics #300 (1963), Superman gets trapped in the deserted, ruined Earth of the far future, a red Sun world in which he has no super powers.  The imagery of this tale recalls the final sections of H.G. Wells' The Time Machine (1895), which also showed a similar Earth future.

Writer Edmond Hamilton had an affinity for stories about lonely people in SF landscapes - see Last Stand of the Legion (Adventure #310, July 1963).  As usual, Superman is the only human in this tale, but not the only being - there are animals and androids around as well.

The tale is also part of a series of Hamilton stories that examine the long-range implications of the Superman mythos, how it will transform over time.  These tales include The Three Generations of Superman (1965) and The Superman of 2965 (Superman #181, November 1965).

This story is deeply geographical.  Its geographical layout forms a mandala, a figure to meditate on.  The vast expanse of time is also extremely thought provoking and emotional.  It causes the reader to wonder about the ultimate shape of things.  This story concentrates on all the regions of Earth that were added to the real world by the Superman mythos.  In this tale, only the Superman mythos seems to have survived into the far future.  We encounter five different loci of Superman family stories.  Superman's visits to these make up much of the plot.

Superman emerges as a tiny figure at the end of this tale, just like the hero of Hamilton's Search for a Lost World (Strange Adventures #67, April 1956).  This has a poetic quality, in addition to its role in the SF plotting.  It seems to suggest something about the lonely nature of the quest, and the feeling of fragility and smallness of man in the universe it engenders.  It also gives poetic expression to Hamilton's heroes and their outsider role in society.  Perhaps it is not so much the universe as society that causes Hamilton's heroes to feel small.

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