A hidden kryptonite time bomb gives Superman a tense time in One Hour to Doom (Superman 89, May 1954).
The devastation caused by super-bombs was much on the American public’s mind in 1954. In March of that year, the United States detonated the massive 17-megaton “Bravo” hydrogen bomb at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean.
The story by writer Bill Woolfolk and artist Wayne Boring opens intriguingly, with Superman awakening from a deep slumber under a tree. Returning to Metropolis, the puzzled superhero finds the city streets empty.
“Through the vast, echoing canyons, Superman goes — with no sound to break the stillness, no echo of another human voice!”
In a flashback, we learn that Superman had been rendered unconscious by Luthor’s kryptonite bomb test, even as the gloating criminal scientist broke into all TV channels to announce that he intended to detonate a similar bomb, hidden and vastly larger, in an hour.
Learning of the peril from Lois and Jimmy, Superman searches the city to no avail.
With three minutes left until detonation, Superman halts his frantic search and simply sits on a park bench, thinking.
“What a fool I’ve been!” Superman says, springing into the air. “Racing around in circles trying to find the bomb, when the answer has been under my nose all the time!”
Later, following a gigantic green explosion, Luthor and his radiation-suited henchmen move in to loot the city, but get a surprise.
Whirling the criminals senseless, the Man of Tomorrow explains that the explosion was merely 10,000 green firecrackers he’d detonated after he’d hurled the real super-bomb into space. He’d realized that Luthor would have had to hide the lead box containing the bomb in an inconspicuous place — the Metropolis Hospital vault where radium was kept in similar lead boxes.
One Hour to Doom, a story packed with earthshaking events, might well have been a book-length adventure a decade later. But in 1954, everything got compressed into 10 dizzying pages.
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