Superman vs. Muhammad Ali was part of DC's oversized series All-New Collectors' Edition, officially numbered #C-56.

[3] By the time the book was published, Ali was no longer World Heavyweight Champion, having been dethroned by Leon Spinks in February 1978.

[8] Following a tip, Jimmy Olsen leads his friends Clark Kent (secretly Superman) and Lois Lane into a ghetto district of Metropolis for an exclusive interview with Muhammad Ali.

If Earth refuses, the Scrubb and their huge armada of spaceships will destroy it, and to prove his point, he has his fleet fire plasma-composed missiles at St. Louis and an uninhabited Pacific island.

To make the fight fair, he decrees that the match should take place on his home planet, Bodace, which orbits a red star (whereupon Superman is temporarily powerless).

Ali personally takes care of Superman and orders him brought back to Earth to recuperate; a move which leaves Hun'Ya pondering.

Disguising himself as Ali cornerman Bundini Brown, he steals into the Scrubb command ship and sabotages their space armada.

Yet after witnessing Superman's decimation of his forces, the Scrubb leader cries foul and decides to destroy the now helpless Earth anyway.

Superman vs. Muhammad Ali's wraparound cover shows a host of late 1970s celebrities, including Frank Sinatra, Lucille Ball, Tony Orlando, Johnny Carson, the cast of Welcome Back, Kotter, and The Jackson 5; sharing close-up seating with Lois Lane as well as DC superheroes like Batman, Green Lantern and Wonder Woman, in addition to Warner and DC employees.

[9] Joe Kubert was originally asked to draw the cover, and his version (a black-and-white sketch of which still survives) did not feature any celebrities, but just a "normal" raucous crowd of boxing fans.

DC did not approve of Kubert's likeness of Ali, nor the overall grim feeling of the piece, and asked Adams to draw the book instead.

[10] In 2000, Adams did a riff on this cover — featuring Ali fighting basketball star Michael Jordan — for a special issue of ESPN The Magazine.

In 2016, Adams told BBC News that during the seventies DC Comics was more liberal to the writers with Jewish background and that they understood prejudice, in addition that depiction of Ali pairing with a white mythical Superman was a subtle political act.