Superman vs. The Taxman: Epilogue

Those of you who stopped by yesterday will recall my summary of Superman's epic clash with The Taxman, a.k.a. IRS agent Rupert Brand.  Superman worked hard to pay off a billion dollar tax bill Brand insisted he owed to the U.S. government, searching high and low for sources of fast income.

One of the sources of easy money I'd mentioned was "a collection of priceless ivory", to which a reader named Jeffrey responded:

"Please tell me that Superman massacred an
entire herd of elephants to get all that ivory."

Well, to assure Jeffrey that Superman did no such thing, I thought I'd offer a brief "epilogue" to yesterday's entry and clear up some of the mystery behind the ivory stash.

You see, using an abandoned Foreign Legion outpost(?) as a receptacle, Superman scoops up the valuable ivory tusks from an elephant graveyard he'd "once spotted" during his travels...

(click on the panels for a larger view)

Unfortunately, as I touched on yesterday, Bizarro randomly appears to "help" Superman in his characteristically backward way, using a duplicator ray to transform the priceless ivory into bars of Ivory Soap!

Sharp-eyed (and slighty older) readers might recognize the subtle in-joke of Bizarro's "It Floats" remark, since that was Ivory Soap's famous tag line dating all the way back to its 19th century origins, as you can see here in this 1894 ad.

So, rest easy Superman fans.  Absolutely no elephants were harmed in the making of this Silver Age comic book story!