The Power Within
Superman is said to have returned in Action Comics #643, but he hadn't actually been absent from the series that whole time. After issue #600, the series became Action Comics Weekly. While it mostly focused on other characters, like Green Lantern after the cancellation of his series, it did have a 2-page Superman strip by Roger Stern and Curt Swan which was unrelated to the ongoing story line in Superman and Adventures of Superman.
Fortunately, this entire run was later collected as Superman: The Power Within, so you don't have to hunt for 41 48-page comics just for 82 pages of story. Every 2-page strip spreads across 2 pages, so it has the feel of a Sunday newspaper strip that the creators were going for. It really does read like a newspaper strip, with redundant recaps and other conventions of that medium, so while it's convenient to have them all in one collection, you won't really get the effect it would have had if you had read them weekly when they first came out.
In the story, Superman investigates a murder which eventually leads him to a cult that worships him as a god. Stern makes too many jokes stereotyping California as a place where all the cults come from. Clark Kent struggles to assist members of the Fellowship without intervening too much as Superman so they won't see him as any more of a god than they already do. The Fellowship believes their faith in Superman is giving them super powers too, and they come into conflict with a rival cult that sees Superman as a demon instead of a god. Superman discovers that both sects are being manipulated by the villainous Darkseid as nothing more than a sadistic experiment. Though their faith in Superman's divinity is destroyed, Superman gives the Fellowship their lives back.
The last 3 strips are an unrelated short story. After a Quraci suicide bombing, Superman helps a Quraci-American restaurant owner after his business is attacked by a pair of arsonists. He leaves the criminals with the authorities and a message of tolerance. This story is a kind of modernization of Superman vs. the Ku Klux Klan, but its brevity makes it less memorable.
These strips are generic enough that they could fit into almost any period of Superman. Aside from a passing reference to Maggie Sawyer, the format makes these tales feel more like pre-Crisis (and the art by Curt Swan also helps). The Superman cult would appear again after the death of Superman, but other than that you don't really miss anything important if you skip these issues.
Fortunately, this entire run was later collected as Superman: The Power Within, so you don't have to hunt for 41 48-page comics just for 82 pages of story. Every 2-page strip spreads across 2 pages, so it has the feel of a Sunday newspaper strip that the creators were going for. It really does read like a newspaper strip, with redundant recaps and other conventions of that medium, so while it's convenient to have them all in one collection, you won't really get the effect it would have had if you had read them weekly when they first came out.
The last 3 strips are an unrelated short story. After a Quraci suicide bombing, Superman helps a Quraci-American restaurant owner after his business is attacked by a pair of arsonists. He leaves the criminals with the authorities and a message of tolerance. This story is a kind of modernization of Superman vs. the Ku Klux Klan, but its brevity makes it less memorable.
These strips are generic enough that they could fit into almost any period of Superman. Aside from a passing reference to Maggie Sawyer, the format makes these tales feel more like pre-Crisis (and the art by Curt Swan also helps). The Superman cult would appear again after the death of Superman, but other than that you don't really miss anything important if you skip these issues.
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