Mr. Mxyztplk revisited

I recently found a copy of Superman #30 (1944), Mr. Mxyztplk's debut issue. Here are some miscellaneous notes on how Mr. Mxyztplk relates to various other parts of the sync-stream:

Whitley Strieber's The Key, a book I have associated with Tim, exists in two different versions, one with a gold key on the cover and the other with a silver one, and with slightly different text. When quoting The Key in recent posts, I have referred to the two versions not by year or publisher but rather as the "gold-key" and "silver-key" versions. Mr. Mxyztplk also exists in "gold" and "silver" versions with slightly different text. In Golden Age Superman comics, his name is Mxyztplk; in the Silver Age, this is changed to Mxyzptlk.

In my December 5 post "Still 'From the Narrow Desert,'" I posted the music video for "High Hopes" by Panic! at the Disco, which shows Brendon Urie defying gravity by walking up the side of a skyscraper all the way to the top.

In Superman #30, Mr. Mxyztplk walks in front of a truck while reading a newspaper, is hit, and pretends to be dead. When an ambulance comes, he then makes himself too heavy to lift, then steals the ambulance and drives it straight up the side of a skyscraper all the way to the top:

In the final panel above, it is revealed that the newspaper Mr. Mxyztplk had been reading was printed in mirror image. As everyone knows, the newspaper in Metropolis is called the Planet. Printed backwards, that would be Tenalp. In my December 2020 post "The rain god and the weather dogs," I discuss a story called "The Planet Tennalp." (In Metropolis's real-world analogue, New York City, the newspaper is called the Times. I would mention what that looks like printed backwards, but that would be, ahem, a "trope." A canard, if you get my drift. A bit anti-Times-ic. By a strange coincidence, the "rain god" post also mentions the New York Times.)

I wrote the above paragraph in the morning and then went out to deal with some things. The New York Times referred to at the end of the paragraph was a license plate that said "192 NYT." While I was out, I saw another license plate which also contained the strings "NYT" and "19."

A few pages later, Superman grabs Mr. Mxyztplk, but he slips out of his grasp:

When Supes grabs him, Mxy says, "In popular parlance, pal, ya got me!" In my November 11 post "Pleased to meet you, hope you guess my name," I report hearing a song with the repeated lines, "You got me, I got no alibi," and thinking of them as being spoken by Tim.

In the third panel, Superman is holding Mxytplk very tight, but somehow he slips out anyway. This is something that Mushroom People can do in Eleanor Cameron's novels. More than once a human seizes a Mushroom Person only to have him slip free even when it seems impossible to do so. At first the boys believe that Mushroom People must have no bones at all, but later they decide their bones must be "compressible." In my November 25 post "Likeness in anything is likeness to him," I connected Mxy's flight out the window on the above page with the ascension of the Mushroom Person Tyco Bass.

Later, a giraffe puts in an appearance:

The bottom left panel above is what I was thinking of when I said earlier (in a comment on William Wright's blog) that Mxy makes music come out of a refrigerator. Actually, I see now that it's not a refrigerator but some sort of cabinet or safe.

On the last page, we discover that Mxy can be sent packing by getting him to say his name backwards. William Wright has run with this idea, reverse-reading such names as Curumo (alias Saruman) and Tim.

I love how this is portrayed as Superman "outwitting" Mxy, when his sole strategy is just to ask him, "What's the magic word?"

In the third panel above, Mxy says, "I, a lowly court-jester, could become a king!" This reminds me of these lines from the Muse song "Knights of Cydonia" (see "Mini T. rex, longhorns, everybody walk the dinosaur"):

And how can we win

When fools can be kings?

Don't waste your time,

Or time will waste you.

The "Russian reversal" in the last line is a close cousin to the idea of saying something backwards -- and of course time is very close to Tim.

Finally, note that Superman, Inc. is located at 480 Lexington Ave. That's a four-minute walk from the Chrysler Building, which is number 405.