DETECTIVE COMICS #234: The Martian Convict
This is maybe, maybe the most sensible story in this entire book. J’onn goes undercover at a prison to figure out who is planning a prison break that the warden suspects is going to happen.
Don’t worry though, dumb stuff will still happen.
At the station, the chief sends Detective Jones down to the prison to check out this prison break rumor. It’s important to figure it out before the break occurs, even though the chief states that the prison is apparently escape-proof. Escape-proof! It is far better designed than the martian prisons where you float in space for the rest of your life.
John decides he needs a disguise, as many of the criminals would recognize him as the detective that arrested them. Unless they were arrested when he pretended to be a ghost and drove them to confess their crimes. Those ones won’t recognize him.
The disguise they stick on him is, quite seriously, a bigger nose and a pair of glasses. While they put the uh…nose on him, the cheif lights up a cigarette and J’onn momentarily panicks. I strap in for a large fire to start later.
In the prison, they put John near the break’s presumed ring leader Big Mike. They suspect there are two other ring leaders, and John turns invisible and walks into Mike’s cell late at night to eavesdrop on their plans.
The next morning while still covertly spying on Mike during laundry duty, a big basket of laundry hits John in the back and knocks his disguise off.
I am still a bit flabbergasted as to why a shapeshifter would wear a fake nose, but when it gets knocked off one of the cons recognizes him and rushes off to tell Mike, who says that Jones is on his last case! I get excited for the big fire! Oh boy!
Then as John is working lumber detail (lumber detail? what?) the line on the crane snaps somehow and a pile of lumber almost crushes John. I guess it’s presumed that the cons did that to try to kill him, but I don’t know how or when. Later John is in the license plate plant (god, seriously?) when a barrel rolls towards him somehow (there’s no one near it) and almost knocks him into the stamping machine. A guard notices his second near-death experience in one day, and tells John to man, go take a nap or something, I’m tired just watching you.
Big Mike is frustrated at his failure to kill Jones, and decides instead to frame another convict as being one of the escape plans leaders. He tucks a note into a the pants of another con, and John sees it, grabs it and arrests everyone he can right then and there. Big Mike throws the bar of soap that he apparently carries around with him at another con that his laughing at him.
As John looks over the record of the framed convict he realizes that he’s been had, and also figures out who the third break leader actually is! He runs back to the guy Mike threw the soap at. It’s him! And inside the soap is the evidence!
What?
Who hides evidence in..
I guess convicts.
And that’s the end, prison break busted.
HEY WAIT WHERE WAS MY FIRE? WHAT THE HELL?