This is the one where Superman fights some robots.

This is the second one. We get the whole Faster Than A Speeding Bullet and Amazing Stranger speech here, along with the “Truth and Justice” declaration. Then we’re right into the scene of a robo-bank robbery. An criminal figure is controlling the robot and has it robo-escape by flying back to headquarters and robo-depositing the ill-gotten gains in the money vat. The robots in this short have numbers on them, right? Well it has bugged me for years that when the criminal controls his robot to go rest by the wall until needed again, he doesn’t put them in order. I may not be overly concerned with bank robberies, but this chaos requires the aid of Superman!

Fortunately for me, the criminal is not happy with vats of money, he pushes his luck to also robo-rob a really cool-looking jewellery display place (what is it a museum or something?) and that is very noticed by Lois Lane and Clark Kent. During the chaos, Lois pulls Clark to safety with a visceral “C’mon, you fool, you wanna get trampled?” but she has far less concern for herself because the first chance she gets she sneaks into the robot. Just gets right inside the containment hatch it is stuffing the jewels. One of the more dangerous things I’ve ever seen Lois do.

Lois is captured by the criminal but won’t tell him what happened to the jewels, so the criminal puts her in a deadly trap and Superman comes and busts up the robots and saves the day.

I like this one, which I don’t think is a controversial opinion. On this viewing some of the things that stood out to me were the detail on some of the still backgrounds, such as the jewel display and, even moreso, Metropolis from the sky. We’ve got some iconic things in here as well. Clark protecting Lois from the molten metal with his cape is one I’ve seen referenced, and ending with Lois and Clark at the Planet always feels right with me, though this one lacks a wink. The robots themselves have made appearances in the comics from time to time and they are pretty good robots. They’re not top-level S-tier supercool robots, but they’re solid B-tier I think, especially for the time and for giving Superman a pretty cool fight. That said, the bit when they spend so much time on each robot individually waking up almost feels like a joke to me, but was not intended as such.

More noticeable perhaps is that Clark gets into his Superman suit in a phone booth in this one. It’s a thing that has happened far less often than you’d think considering its reputation. I think it’s interesting that he went in there to actually make a phone call to the police or whomever. He wasn’t gonna Superman up for those jewels until Lois got in trouble. This makes sense to me. People are more important than jewels.

And thus ends another year of Phone Guys comics. What will the next year bring?

Hey, you know how the Prophets of Bajor exist outside of time and didn’t understand how linear time works until Benjamin Sisko from Earth taught them? (Let’s ignore for now if Sisko taught them at some point, they should always have known for now.) And you know how they also give visions of the future to their worshippers on Bajor? Well, what if Benjamin Sisko’s physical appearance provided the beauty standards that made Bajorans evolve to look like humans?

Yes, I’m at it again, complaining about how too many aliens in Star Trek look like humans. But this time I’m providing a reason it works. Sure, canonical Star Trek has already provided an excuse (which I do not like) for why so many aliens look like human, and they’ve doubled down on that excuse in recent years. But I find my theory here more interesting in this case.

There already exists a fan theory, one that I had nothing to do with and am only using here as fodder for my own theory, that Cardassians and Bajorans are a single species that has diverged in evolution after some of them made their way to Cardassia from Bajor. I’m not gonna bother looking it up again for this post, but that idea is based on evidence such as Bajorans and Cardassians being able to very easily produce offspring together (many Trek hybrids, notably Vulcan/Human ones, are mentioned to require technological intervention to make a viable offspring, but Bajoran/Cardassian ones have been shown to happen as mistakes). Also, there’s the matter of a natural space-warp thingy that just happens to bring primitive spaceships from Bajor to Cardassia where those ancient Bajoran astronauts (who were active thousands of years before human ones) could have crashed and lived out their days starting a new species in the process. There may be more evidence, I don’t remember, but the gist of it is that the ones who wound up on Cardassia evolved into Cardassians.

What PDR is suggesting is: what if the ones who ended up on Cardassia are actually closer to “original” Bajorans than “modern” Bajorans are? Those on Cardassia are outside of the direct influence of the Prophets, but those back on Bajor are getting the visions from the beings who know the future. And some of those visions are surely of the Emissary, the great religious figure from the future who is none other than Benjamin Sisko. And if even a handful of Bajoran artists get such visions, they’re gonna make art that depicts a figure like Sisko and the people are gonna revere that figure. If that figure looks human, humanoid necks and foreheads and skin tones are gonna be appealing to the people. Natural selection would happen and those traits would be selected more often, passing along genes that hew closer to human traits. In the thousands of years of separation, Cardassians surely evolved to their new world as well (maybe that’s when their love of heat came into it), but I definitely think that Bajorans used to look closer to Cardassians back in the day.

The only flaw with this theory (the ONLY flaw, I will not be accepting any other flaws because as I so confidently say there are no others) is that the visions from the Prophets that we usually see don’t typically involve figures from the distant future, but instead people already known to the person having the vision. But hey, it only takes a couple of visions to a couple of artists over the millennia to start the thing rolling. Once one artist is doing it, others could emulate that one, and before you know it smooth foreheads are just the most popular thing and the divergence has begun.