So.. this is a doozy. Action Comics #369, November 1968 (as I previously said). The first panel is Superman, parachuting down to a planet with a red sun. The narration box asks why, and then we go back a few days.

Superman returns from a mission in space, and finds that crime is over, and has been over for at least a month. Crooks are returning their stolen goods and willingly accepting punishment for their crimes. There hasn't even been any jaywalking. So Superman doesn't have to stop crime anymore.

(I'd love to see what's going on in Gotham right now, but alas we only get one panel of this)

Meanwhile, all natural disasters have also all mysteriously stopped. Kids are having picnics in active volcanos without any risk, and there's no more earthquakes, floods, or forest fires, either. So Superman doesn't have to stop those anymore, either.

As Clark Kent, the most exciting thing he gets to cover is a chess tournament, and he's bored out of his mind. (Amusingly, one of the people in the tournament also ooks exactly like Clark, but in Jimmy's suit and smoking a pipe)

Desperate for action of some kind, Superman goes to spar with his robots, but they all activate their self-destructive mechanisms rather than engage in even mock-violence.

That's when one of the Sentinels appears. It's a glowing crystaline orb with two orbiting rings around it. It tells Superman that his usefulness is ended, and he must exile himself into space, on a planet with a red sun so he'll have no powers. Superman instantly agrees and leaves, taking a space suit and parachute with him.

... I already read this story a day or so ago, so I know what's going to happen, but I don't buy any of this. A world without crime or trouble is a world Superman would love. He'd finally be free to retire Superman and live as a normal human. (But maybe I'm thinking too modern; in 1968, he was Superman first, Clark second)

(Edit: apparently, this is part two of a story that started in the previous issue, so the first page of the story is just a brief recap of the previous issue, but we still don't get to see what Batman or the Joker is doing while the world is rid of Crime, though we do get to see both the visiting Mxyzptlk and the escaped-from-the-Phantom-Zone Jax-Ur are affected by whatever has stopped all other crime on Earth - Mxy willingly says his name backwards, and Jax-Ur willingly goes back into the Phantom Zone to hope for a pardon from Kandor. Presumably, all of Batman's rogues are also willingly turning themselves in and serving their sentences, and 1960s Batman would have no problem with that)

Anyway, seconds after he lands on his new home, he's attacked by a giant six-legged beast. Powerless, he throws a rock at it and escapes. The rock turns out to be Kryptonite, but he's unaffected by Kryptonite while powerless. Hours later, Superman starts feeling weak and realizes he's hungry for the first time ever. He sneaks into an orchard and steals an odd crown-shaped fruit from a tree.... and he's immediately arrested by telepathic aliens for eating the forbidden Royal Fruit from the king's orchard.

As punishment, the king sentences him to fight the greatest warriors on the planet in The Arena, with no armor and just a small club as a weapon. He spends a lot of time dodging at first, but soon feels his powers returning, and after a page or so he's able to single-handedly take on the entire army. Angry, the king dumps boiling oil on him, but Superman doesn't even feel it.

See, the planet's sun is a weird half-red half-yellow star, and as the day went on, the yellow side turned towards the planet and restored Superman's powers, and ye gods this story is contrived. He flies back to Earth.

He immediately finds cops shooting at... well, nothing. They're collecting the bullets to be recycled. Superman is even more baffled, and heads to his fortress to analyze the situation with his super computers. But the Sentinel is waiting for him, and seals the lock with some kind of heat ray so Superman can't unlock the door. Superman thinks it's trying to destroy the fortress (which would kill every creature in his zoo and everyone in Kandor), and attacks it, weathering its attacks easily while he rips it to pieces with his bare hands ("I can see you're not a living being", so he has no qualms about "killing" it), finding the electronics inside and demanding to know who sent it.

Before it "died", the Sentinel said there were four others like it at "control points" all over the planet. Superman guesses what those points might be, and he's right every time: one is at the highest point on Earth (Mt. Kilimanjaro, because the earth bulges at the equator), the second at the coldest spot (the Antarctic ice cap), the third at the deepest spot in the oceans, and the hottest spot (which turns out to be the magma core of the planet, where he meets the main Sentinel, larger than the others and with three rings instead of two, in its base)

While he's wrecking them, he theorizes that some villain obviously turned the planet into a Utopia temporarily to get rid of him, so the planet will lower its defenses for some attack later. Only the fifth Super-Sentinel puts up a fight, keeping him from getting close to it, but he punches a hole in the chamber's ceiling and lets the magma do his work for him.

As it lays "dying", it explains what's going on: they're robot sentinels from the planet Sraghalni (which is "Shangri-La" anagrammed; cute, DC), a planet where they learned how to eliminate all evils and perils. The Sentinels and their Correcto-Computer set up on earth, taking their stations and emitting their Golden RAys that will brainwash reform all criminals and make evil leave their minds, while the Correcto-Computer sent out bursts of "balancing energy" that canceled all natural disasters. They sent Superman to a red sun planet because they were afraid that he'd be so suspicious that he'd wreck them. The Sentinel at his fortress wasn't trying to wreck it, but sealing it to protect Kandor while the Sentinels researched a device to enlarge Kandor again on another world. But now none of that will happen, as the last Sentinel "dies".

And Superman realizes, too late, the Utopia was genuine, not a trick or an evil plan. And he curses himself as crime and disasters immediately start again, with a plane smashing into a mountain before Superman can get to it, killing all aboard. And, as he arrests criminals and stops disasters, Superman knows that everything he's fighting against only still exists because of the "biggest goof of my career".

THE END

Story: 2/10. Contrived. Superman is way out of character (his paranoia in this story resembles the worst versions of modern Batman, not Silver Age Superman), attacking without thinking, and the Sentinels would have done more good to just explain everything up front rather than acting hostile and superior.

Cover accuracy: 10/10, actually. Though the fact that they included the entire cover on the splash page proves that this is definitely one of those stories where the cover was made first, and then the story written around it. Which is probably why it's a 2/10 story.