January 1982. “Creepy” and “surreal” are not words normally associated with Bronze Age Superman stories, but they’re apt descriptions of the 1982 miniseries THE PHANTOM ZONE by Steve Gerber and Gene Colan. Probably inspired by the 1980 movie SUPERMAN 2, the mini begins with a recap of the history of the Phantom Zone, discovered by Superman’s father Jor-El as a means of imprisoning Kryptonian criminals, but this is no E. Nelson Bridwell continuity-charting affair: The Phantom Zone inmates stage a mass escape, wreaking bloody havoc on Earth as Superman and an amnesiac former prisoner named Quex-Ul, forced to take the escapees’ place, begin a perilous journey to the heart of the Zone, which is far stranger than Jor-El had ever imagined.
Most of the Phantom Zone villains who appear in this story had been seen before, but Gerber makes them actually frightening, a collection of madmen and human monsters who were scary enough on Krypton, without the incredible powers bestowed by Earth’s yellow sun. Gerber also emphasizes the horror of the Zone itself — being imprisoned, possibly forever, as a thought without form — and his revelation of what the Zone actually is is unexpected. None of this would have worked if the series had been drawn by Curt Swan, but the art by Gene Colan (inked by Tony DeZuñiga) lends a sweaty, claustrophobic nightmare vibe to Gerber’s script.
DC reprinted the miniseries in the SUPERMAN: PHANTOM ZONE trade paperback in 2013, also including Gerber’s followup in DC COMICS PRESENTS #97, drawn by Rick Veitch, which is unsettling in its own right, and much meaner than Alan Moore’s contemporaneous “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?” (That collection shouldn’t be confused with the earlier TALES FROM THE PHANTOM ZONE TPB, which is a compilation of Silver Age Phantom Zone stories.)
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