The case of David Vetter, the "Boy in the Bubble," caught imaginations in the 1970s. Vetter was born with a severe immune deficiency. He spend his early life in the hospital and then lived in a contained environment in his parents' home to protect him from all exposure to infectious disease. John Travolta starred in a TV movie about Vetter in 1976. Paul Simon's 1986 song "The Boy in the Bubble" refers to him briefly as well. Vetter was born in September 1971, so either Bates heard about him early, or he was inspired by some similar case earlier.
In this Cary Bates story, the bubble boy's immune system is dangerous to those around him; his white blood cells grow to monster-size and attack people. On the top half of the page, our teenage Bubble Boy escapes the protection of his home, convinced that a perilous situation on a TV drama represents real life peril, and he needs to help.
On the bottom tier, Clark Kent interviews a TV actor who is about to be fired from his own TV show due to the growing popularity of his co-star. "Rolf Kimb" is of course a reference to Richard Kimball, the lead character on TV show "The Fugitive (1963-1967).
In modern comics, the scene change would have coincide with a page break, if not a double-page break. Bronze Age stories were more compressed, often "done in one" as this story was.
