Bxpa

Bxpa

A far-distant planet whose "barbaric rulers" have, by the spring of 1964, dispatched an invisible robot-manned space fleet toward Earth and "all [other] intelligent planets in the universe" with instructions to cow the target planets into submission with awesome displays of devastatingly destructive power and then to obliterate, by means of "an ultimate weapon," any planet that fails to surrender. Superman's desperate efforts to conceal the impending alien invasion and thus avert global panic take the form of an elaborate ruse in which the Man of Steel pretends that the aliens' awesome power displays—including the partial freezing of an ocean, the creation of an artificial earthquake, and the obliteration of an entire mountain with a "super nuclear bomb"—are feats that he has himself performed as part of a power-hungry scheme to blackmail the United Nations into agreeing to crown him King of Earth. Bxpa and its warlike civilization are ultimately reduced to rubble, apparently "wiped out by one of its own missiles that malfunctioned," and Superman rescues Earth from imminent "global extinction" by intercepting the robot-piloted doomsday missile swooping toward Earth and hurling the "hunk of horror" back toward the planet that spawned it, where it obliterates all that remains of Bxpa with a world-shattering mar (Act No. 311/1, Apr 1964: "Superman, King of Earth!"; Act No. 312/1, May 1964: "King Superman versus Clark Kent, Metallo"). (TGSB)