April Fool

Nineteen seventy was editor Mort Weisinger's last year in comics after creating his own empire within the world of DC comics -- the Superman Family -- over more than two decades. This issue of Action is from May of 1970, Mort's last year guiding Superman's fortunes. Letters from fans pointing out errors were a staple of sixties letter columns, especially in Mort's books. Sometimes the errors were as simple as a coloring mistake introduced in the printing process. Sometimes they concerned misrepresentations of a characters abilities or continuity errors. The editor usually conceded the fans were right, but sometimes the editor came up with implausible stories to explain the errors. It became a kind of letter page sparing match between editor and fan. 

This issue of Action was billed as a feast of errors and the editor challenged readers to catalog all of them -- sort of a comic story version of "what's wrong with this picture?"

Yet there was more to the story than an easter egg hunt for mistakes. The premise was that Superman had been away in space and when he returned he discovered Earth had gone crazy. 

At first he thinks it must be due to Mxyzptlk, but Mxyzptlk appears, recuses himself and disappears back to the fifth dimension, leaving the world as crazy as ever. Everyone knows whatever Mxy does is undone when he leaves, so he can't have been responsible. 

At the end of the story Superman discovers a hapless scientist in space who had intended to create a duplicate of Earth in a mirror orbit on the other side of the sun. Instead his device created an imperfect duplicate of Earth and slipped the real one into some other dimension. 

Using the kind of convoluted fairy tale logic that Mort is famous for, Superman uses the machine to create an imperfect duplicate of itself by pointing it at a mirror. Then he uses the imperfect duplicate machine to restore Earth and banish the odd copy to its own dimension.

But what of the error counting? Not a few of the readers realized that since there was a logical explanation for most of the oddities, they weren't really errors. That left only a few true intentional errors such as the bandage on Superman's shoulder in the opening panel of the story.