Was Superman a Spy? is a book based on a weekly column called "Comic Book Urban Legends Revealed" that appears over at Comic Book Resources every Friday morning. Each column, Brian Cronin answers three reader questions about something that they maybe heard this one time from a friend. Cronin determines whether the rumor is true or false, and then explains the history behind the rumor. I really enjoy checking out the column every week. A lot of the time, it's pretty dull, but every once in a while, there's a great one, like a couple of weeks ago, about how Wolverine was originally supposed to be a mutated wolverine and not a human at all. Some of the stories are astounding, like this story that took place in the comics world in the 70s:

Writer Tony Isabella, who had written a number of issues for two African American superheroes over at Marvel, Power Man and Black Goliath, was approached by DC to take over a new series it had not yet debuted. Scripts were in for the first two issues, and the title was to be called The Black Bomber. It would star a Caucasian Vietnam veteran who, due to the side effects of some experiments he underwent in Vietnam (to better camouflage troops), turns into an African American man at night and fights crime as the Black Bomber. When he was his normal identity, though, he was a bigot a la Archie Bunker on All in the Family.

This is, of course, one of those stories you simply can't make up.

The problem is that for some bizarre reason this book completely abandons the Q&A format of Cronin's regular column, which, for me, was part of the fun. Instead, Cronin assembles each of the rumors by character and by company—Superman rumors, Batman rumors, DC rumors, and so on—and tells them in rough chronological order.

Unfortunately, Cronin isn't a very good writer, and so this conceit utterly fails. It's not a linear history. Cronin tries to segue between some sixty or seventy completely unrelated rumors and he's not a capable enough craftsman to accomplish that. This should be a book you can dip into and flip around in; the linear approach makes that impossible. I can't understand why anyone thought that abandoning the Q&A format would be a good idea. Luckily, all the urban legends are available, for free, in their superior original format, over here.