This is "Never Gonna Be the Same Again," a feature where I look at how bold, seemingly "permanent" changes were ultimately reversed. This is not a criticism, mind you, as obviously things are always going to eventually return to "normal." That's just how superhero comic books work. It's just fun to see how some of these rather major changes are reversed. This is differentiated from "Abandoned Love," which is when a new writer comes in and drops the plot of the previous writer. Here, we're talking about the writer who came up with the idea being the same one who resolved the change. This is also differentiated from "Death is Not the End," which is about how "dead" characters came back to life, since this is about stuff other than death.

Today, we look at how long Superman's robots remained decommissioned.

As noted in a recent Never Gonna Be The Same Again, when Julius Schwartz took over the main Superman title in the early 1970s, he decided to work in some major changes to the Man of Steel. In that other column, I wrote about how one of those major changes, the elimination of kryptonite as a threat to Superman, lasted a few years before writers reversed it. There were two other major changes that I'll address in this column, beginning with the loss of Superman's famous Superman robots.

There is a whole other column that I could write (and probably WILL write) about how Superman's Superman robots came into existence, but however they came about, the main result is that during the 1950s and 1960s (particularly the 1960s), Superman had a collection of robots that looked just like him that he used for ALL sorts of stuff, but primarily as fill-ins for him for secret identity purposes. But they did other things, as well, like work as security guards at this exhibit...

In any event, they were certainly very much tied to the past type of Superman stories that the revamp was trying to move away from, so in 1971's World's Finest Comics #202 (by Denny O'Neil, Dick Dillin and Joe Giella), Superman discovers that Earth's pollution has ruined his robots...

Of course, the one robot that was still out there had been swayed by a villain to help capture Batman and some others and turn them into slave labor to uncover a special tomb in the middle of the desert.

Superman shows up to stop his rogue robot...

However, the tomb is then opened and the being behind the door had special red sun powers and Superman is weakened and the Superman robot attacks and Batman has to distract the new threat while also stopping the crazed robot (comic books are weird, man) until the weakened Superman manages to disable the mysterious entity from behind the tomb door which also turns out to somehow be a robot, too...

That's a trippy ending, right?

So, were Superman's robots gone for good?

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Surprisingly enough, of all the major changes of the era, this change was probably the most successful, in that Superman's robots never returned to be plot devices like they were in the Silver Age. Never again did Superman use them to fill-in for him as a secret identity dodge. At least not before Crisis on Infinite Earths led to a reboot of the Superman mythos. There were a few Superman robots later on Post-Crisis, but that is a different can of worms than this.

Almost RIGHT away, Superman tricks a sort of parasitic entity into being trapped in a Superman robot in Action Comics #403 (by Cary Bates, Curt Swan and Murphy Anderson), but since the robot isn't actually used, that doesn't really conflict with World's Finest Comics #202...

Two issues later (in another Bates/Swan/Anderson effort), though, an old school Superman robot is part of a plot where Superman seemingly goes nuts to try to kill the President of the United States, but that "Superman" was really a robot and the "President" was actually Superman in disguise...

Likely knowing that this would conflict with then-recent status quo, the story ends with a reveal that it was actually an imaginary tale set in a possible future. Since there's no real need for it to be an imaginary story otherwise, that's gotta be the reason.

In a big reveal, though, in Action Comics #473 (by Cary Bates, Curt Swan and Tex Blaisdell), we learn that the robots are still commissioned...they just only work within the protected confines of the Fortress of Solitude...

That is the case in Superman #360, as well (by Bates, Swan and Frank Chiaramonte)...

In Action Comics #524 (by Martin Pasko, Curt Swan and Frank Chiaramonte), they went even further and showed that the robots COULD still leave the Fortress of Solitude, they just couldn't be trusted to do complex stuff...

So yes, the "the robots are decommissioned" stuff was, in fact, overturned, but in such a way that still kept it as a major change to the Superman mythos, a change that lasted a lot longer than the Kryptonite change and the other major change that I'll address soon.

Okay, folks, I KNOW that you have suggestions for other examples of this sort of thing in comics, so drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com with your suggestions!