Action Comics #124

Cover by Wayne Boring and George Roussos.

1. "A Superman of Doom" (Superman)
2. "Little Brother"
3. "The Hot Car Mob" (Federal Agent)
4. "Mimic's Magic" (Zatara)
5. "Bebe"
6. "Homer"
7. "Case of the Crooked Rock" (Congo Bill)
8. "The Lonesome Kangaroo!" (Vigilante) written by Joe Samachson, penciled by Jerry Robinson and inked by Mort Meskin.

Cover: Superman is landing, dropping off a couple of crooks to the Metropolis Police Department.

In a story with appalling science, the atomic pile at the Elmdale nuclear power plant is about to explode and start a chain reaction that would destroy the Earth (back in 1948 this was still a widely held fear), so Superman goes into action and carries the deadly pile into outer space where there is a tremendous blast.

On his return to Earth, Superman discovers that he has become radioactive and his mere presence destroys all life around him. He initially decides to isolate himself from civilization, but when a crime wave sweeps Metropolis in his absence, he decides he has to do something, so he works out ways of fighting crime from a distance.

Soon Lois gets in trouble again when some crooks kidnap her and demand a million dollars in gold to be delivered by Superman to free her.

Realizing that this time he can't save Lois from a distance, he builds himself a lead suit so he can be next to people without harming them. Bizarrely, in this story his x-ray vision *can* see through lead.

Wearing the suit, Superman is able to save Lois and apprehend the crooks, and discovers afterwards that the lead has "absorbed" all the radiation from his body so he is safe again. (This, of course, is not the way radioactivity works; lead can block radiation, but it doesn't suck it out of radioactive materials - the radioactivity must take its normal course of decay as determined by its half-life.)