Electro

Electro

In a tale chronicled in 1960, an electric "being" seems to arrive on Earth from a (fictional) "Dimension X" to request the help of Superman. The creature (un-named in this adventure) is actually a creation of Lex Luthor, intended to lure Superman into a space ship, as part of a trap that would detonate a bomb under Metropolis should the Man of Steel attempt to ever leave it. Luthor's plans to blackmail the leaders of the world into handing over their nuclear arsenals are foiled when Superman manages to escape the exile (Act No. 271/1, Dec 1960: "Voyage to Dimension X!").

Luthor has secretly broken out of prison—by constructing an ingenious “robot double” to take his place inside his cell while he himself escaped to freedom—and has, through plastic surgery, transformed his henchman Gypo into a perfect look-alike for Superman as part of an intricately convoluted scheme to use nuclear blackmail to make himself “dictator of Earth.”

The first phase of the scheme involves tricking Superman into believing that the inhabitants of an alien dimension desperately need his help and that they have dispatched a weird craft, called a “globeship”, to the earthly dimension by remote control to enable him to make the journey to their extra-dimensional world. However, when Superman steps inside the globe-ship for what he believes will be an inter-dimensional voyage, he instead soon finds himself marooned in the Sahara Desert, unable to escape from the globe-shaped craft without setting off a deadly “neutron bomb” that Luthor has planted beneath Metropolis.

The second phase of Luthor’s scheme involves having his Superman look-alike “return” to Metropolis, inside a duplicate globe-ship, with the claim that the alien dimension he just visited is menaced by an impending ice age and that only by borrowing Earth’s “entire stockpile of atomic bombs” can he hope to destroy the advancing glaciers.

Believing that this emergency request for nuclear weaponry is being made by Superman, the governments of the world, speaking through their delegates meeting in special session at the U.N., agree to hand over their nuclear arsenals, unaware that they are actually surrendering the weapons to Luthor, who plans to put them into orbit around the Earth as a means of blackmailing the entire planet into making him its dictator. Fortunately for mankind, however, the real Superman finally escapes from his globe-ship prison, returning to Metropolis in time to apprehend Luthor and his cohorts and recover the A-bombs loaned them by the U.N. (Act No. 271/1, Dec 1960: “Voyage to Dimension X!”). The story is in many respects similar to Superman No. 83/1 (Jul/Aug 1953: “Destination X!”) (TGSB).

Some time later, the Superman Revenge Squad uses Red Kryptonite to induce horrible nightmares in Superman's mind. One of these phantasms includes the Man of Tomorrow facing a jury of villains, one of whom is called "Electro" and exactly resembles the electric being from the previous adventure (Act No. 286/1, Mar 1962: "The Jury of Super-Enemies!"). The complex scheme to use illusions is thwarted as Superman is finally able to notice differences in the nightmare scenarios (Act No. 287/1, Apr 1962: "Perry White's Manhunt for Superman!").