Looking for info about an old Superman comic

[pekkahu]

I'm looking to find a name and, hopefully, a reprint of an old black and white Superman comic. It was originally published before -70's, how many decades before I do not know. It had a group of robots parachuting near Smallville during a storm. Robots were dressed as humans (overcoats, dark glasses) but had metal skeletons and were built as walking bombs (one had blown up a dam upon unsuccesful landing).

Any info would be appreciated.

[Lorendiac]

I'm looking to find a name and, hopefully, a reprint of an old black and white Superman comic. It was originally published before -70's, how many decades before I do not know. It had a group of robots parachuting near Smallville during a storm. Robots were dressed as humans (overcoats, dark glasses) but had metal skeletons and were built as walking bombs (one had blown up a dam upon unsuccesful landing).

Any info would be appreciated.

When I'm trying to track down a Pre-COIE story that was set on Earth-1 (pretty much anything from the late 1950s to 1985) I often use
DarkMark's Comics Indexing Domain (http://darkmark6.tripod.com/indexintro.html)

In this case, on the page http://darkmark6.tripod.com/superboyind3.htm on that site, I found the following summary of a story when I was searching for references to "robots" --

Superboy No. 150
September 1968
Cover: Superboy, Mr. Cipher, Jonathan Kent, Martha Kent //Neal Adams
Story: “The Stranger Who Stalks Smallville” (23 pages)
Editor: Murray Boltinoff
Writer: Frank Robbins
Penciller: Bob Brown
Inker: Jack Abel
Feature Character: Superboy (last appearance in ADVENTURE COMICS #372)
Supporting Characters: Jonathan Kent, Martha Kent, Lana Lang (all last seen in ADVENTURE COMICS #370)
Villains: An alien invader (first appearance; dies in this story), the Mr. Ciphers (robots; first appearance for all; all destroyed in this story)
Synopsis: An invader from space infiltrates Smallville with a corps of look-alike robots, each called “Mr. Cypher”, who force their way into every home in Smallville--and who are each powerful enough to take on Superboy.

I don't know if that's the story you're thinking of -- for instance, I don't know if any dams got blown up -- but it was the closest thing I could find on short notice. Let me know if this does you any good! :)

[pekkahu]

That was it! Thank you. Incredibly fast response considering sketchy description. And there appears to be plenty of those issues for sale on the U.S. EBay for a few of dollars. I just have to figure out how to set up the purchase since I'm in Europe.

[Lorendiac]

That was it! Thank you. Incredibly fast response considering sketchy description.

Not so incredible. I'd never heard of that specific story before, but the keyword "robots" was enough to help me get started in the right direction. Seriously! Since I knew that ALL of the Pre-COIE Superboy's adventures were indexed in just a few huge webpages over at DarkMark's place, I just had to find the page that appeared to include the right era and then start searching for "robots" and glance at the context of each summary that included that term. (If "robots" was part of the phrase "Superboy robots," I figured I could immediately click to find the next reference, etc., because that wasn't the kind of robots you remembered being at the heart of the plot.)

Finding what you wanted literally only took me about two minutes! (Plus another minute or two for pasting a copy of the summary into my reply, and typing out the rest of my reply, but we really aren't talking about a huge sacrifice of very much of my free time!)

Now, if I hadn't already known about DarkMark's website, I wouldn't have had any idea where to begin looking, and I would have moved on to other things and waited for someone else to come along and identify the story you had in mind . . . but I did know about DarkMark, and from there it was just routine :)