SiC 10 — But Valentine’s Day Was Last Month (03:28:1985)

The two stories in Action Comics #568 are, in some ways, similar. The “Thought-Actualizer” device from the future in “The Amazing Matchmaker of Metropolis!” is, essentially magic (Arthur C. Clark famously said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”), and Jinx Turner in “Disappearing Act!” has “real magic”, and the magic is driving the stories. I laughed out loud when Jimmy Olsen’s date, Fifi, in “Matchmaker” blew him off at the last minute for a friend from out of town. That’s pretty much the pattern for Jimmy’s former longtime girlfriend Lucy Lane. I have to point out something that you and your listeners may not know: Elliot S! Maggin recycles. In his 1981 novel “Miracle Monday”, in which Superman fights the character C. W. Saturn (basically a demon from Hell), there is a character named Max Maven, as stage magician and mentalist named Max Maven, who actually has “real” magic powers that he hides from the public and never uses in his stage act, for the same reasons as those given by Jinx. Also, at one point, Max Maven does the disappearing milk trick and asks Superman to watch him very closely as he does it — monitoring his blood pressure, heart rate, even his “Krilian aura” (same mis-spelling you noticed) — causing Superman to conclude that Max has “real” magic. I’ve noticed, over the years, scenes that Maggin has written for the comics finding their way into his novels, and scenes from his novels finding their way into the comics.
The World’s Finest story “The Family Way!” raised a question for you with the comment that “Cheapjack’s back, and he’s not happy!” and you wondered where we might have seen Cheapjack before. He and the Werewolves of London appeared in Detective Comics #535 (Cover-dated June, 1985) in the story “On the Cheap!”, also written by Joey Cavalieri, as this story was. In that earlier story, they were antagonists of Green Arrow, rather than Batman. Finally, super-hypnosis: Where do you rank it compared to super-ventriloquism?