DC Comics Presents #8

And now, for no good reason, is “The Sixty Deaths of Solomon Grundy”

There just aren’t too many experiences in life like reading a pre-Crisis Superman comic. While some of the absurdities of the character survive today, they pale in comparison to the sublime absurdity that dominated the “plots” of many Bronze Age stories.
I’m a little sad for those who grew up without these intellectual calisthenics, which forced readers to justify contradictory concepts in order to make plot holes meet. As a character, Superman was a walking (flying?) obstacle in his own stories. He had grown so powerful over the years that it was almost impossible to tell a plausible Superman story. From anarrative point of view he was crippled by his own godhood.
An an example of this DC Comics Presents 8, which pits the Man of Steel against the brawny intellects of Solomon Grundy and Swamp Thing. After a Reader’s Digest version of Swamp Thing’s origin, the story begins in-progress with Swampy, Superman, and Solomon Grundy meeting — by chance — in a sewer junction beneath Metropolis. As it turns out, Swampy and Superman were both searching for Grundy for different reasons … Swamp Thing wants a sample of Grundy’s tissue in hopes that it could cure his condition, while Superman was after the pasty-faced brute for attacking a passenger train (which we don’t get to see.)
And that’s just the first three pages.
Because superheroes are so quick tempered, it takes all of three panels for these guys to get into a slugfest. Any other time Superman would just rip through these guys like tissue paper, but writer Steve Englehart (who is capable of much better work than this) has more than a dozen pages left to fill. And Superman hasn’t had a chance to say “Moons of Krypton!” yet, so you know there’s got to be more to this story.
In a series of incidents that are really too perpostous to try and relate here, Grundy knocks Superman out with a punch and joins up with a duplicitous Swamp Thing. In the course of the adventure Swamp Thing loses an arm (which seemed to happen a lot back then), accidentally clones an army of Grundys, and tries to convince Superman to exile them to another planet. Even though exiling his enemies to an alien world/alternate dimension was usually Superman’s answer to everything prior to the Crisis, he doesn’t go for it this time. Instead he flies around the city and “tags” the monsters with an antidote that will “cure” them of being alive.
We don’t get a good look at Superman’s murder spree, since the Grundy Army is introduced only three pages before the end of the story. Swamp Thing takes his shot at a pious monologue before finally wandering off to wherever it is he goes between series.