Okay, the cover doesn't EXACTLY reflect this issue's story, but it's close.
"Swamis Inc." is one of the most well-known of the early Batman/Superman team-ups and would be often mentioned fondly over the years in letters columns. In reality, though, it hadn't quite yet gelled. This is pretty much a Batman story with Superman helping out in the beginning behind the scenes and then returning as a Deus Ex Machina at the end.
Bruce Wayne goes undercover as a psychic swami in an effort to get in good with superstitious bad guys. He enlists Clark's aid in making his outrageous and unlikely predictions for ordinary people come true.
Once that's done, it's back to Metropolis leaving Batman and Robin to trail the bad guys where they eventually get caught.
Luckily, Superman has forgotten to return his friend's radio and this overhears the dilemma. He returns, playing against the villain's own belief in his supposedly magic sword.
Not that it makes any difference--this being DC Comics, not EC Comics--but there was only one more issue to go before the Comics Code settled on the covers for the next few decades. In the meantime, the company was pushing the fact that the DC symbol itself meant good wholesome comics!
Baby Ruth was a huge advertiser in early DC comics but not really as much in WORLD'S FINEST (originally ad-free you'll recall) as in other titles.
When I collected in the mid 80s, I recall that Overstreet listed #73-75 as 'scarce'. Any insight into why that might be true of those issues, and not others of this series?
ReplyDelete