Our recent discussions of Supergirl have made me want to re-read these. i'm not as good at this sort of thing as Jeff is, but I'll try my best.
We start with Volume One:
The cover art isn't bad, but I have to say that Miller isn't who i would pick to draw an Adventures of the Silver Age Supergirl book. (I mean because I don't think that his art style suits the character, not for any other reasons that you might not want to hire him.)
We begin with a foreword by Diana Schutz. I'd never heard of her, but she seems to have been an editor for Dark Horse. She talks about how she loved Supergirl when she was little, at a time when there were few good role models for little girls in superhero comics. She also mentions meeting artist Jim Mooney, and claims that she was one of the driving forces behind getting DC to publish Supergirl Archives (which would explain why she was asked to write the foreword, i suppose), and that she persuaded Miller to do the cover art. If so, good for her, I guess.
Next: Supergirl β
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That cover was kind of jarring to me when I first saw it, too.
DC has chosen more appropriate artists in recent years.
Action Comics #253: (June 1959) “The Secret of the Super-Orphan!”
(I’m not gonna post covers when Supergirl/Linda isn’t on them.)
Writing by Otto Binder
Art by Jim Mooney (Who I gather will come to be known as “the Supergirl artist”)
1) The orphanage is holding “Get Acquainted Day”, where the orphans will perform for prospective adoptive parents, which seems a bit demeaning to me, like, “This kid’s actually talented, let’s adopt them!”
2) Linda deliberately makes herself unappealing to a couple that shows an interest in her, thinking that she’s “not ready for that”. This comes across as her choice, but one assumes that Superman must have sat down with her and worked out what Linda should do if it looks as though someone is going to adopt her. Personally, I don’t think it would be fair to any couple to let them adopt Supergirl without them knowing who they were adopting.
3) Instead, she decides to help a boy named Timmy get adopted, directing him towards the Wilsons, a farm couple who turn out to be too poor to adopt a child. Supergirl decides to help them become wealthy enough to adopt Timmy. She does this by drilling a hole from the Wilson farm to Pisa (making sure that it looks “natural”, of course) so that the Wilsons can charge people to see the Leaning Tower from their farm. (I’m guessing that Otto Binder wasn’t a science major.) The Wilsons manage to make a small fortune before the tunnel collapses (which it would).
4) The Wilsons decide to move to town, which somehow means they can’t adopt Timmy, because a farm boy like him wouldn’t want to live in town, which kind of makes their interest in him look kind of superficial. Linda decides to help Timmy demonstrate that he’s interested in things besides farm life by surreptitiously using her powers to help him perform a magic act for the Wilsons. They adopt Timmy, and he lives happily ever after, at least until he realizes that he cannot replicate any of the tricks that he did with Linda there.
Overall: An OK story in an insane, implausible kind of way. You just have to imagine a world where people don’t react the way that people do in the real world.
Next: Confidence tricks!
Agreed on all counts about that Frank Miller cover, Baron. Miller's work, which has gotten increasingly eccentric over the years, has its uses and charms. (DC should hire him to draw all scenes on Apokalips in perpetuity.) But that rough, angry style is 180 degrees away thematically from the Silver Age Maid of Steel, which was about a sweet-natured teemager with the indefatigable optimism of youth. As you note, DC course-corrected with the other examples.
PS: I'm coming back to this thread two years late, as I'm reading DC Finest: Supergirl — The Girl of Steel here in 2025.
We seem to be skipping over "The Supergirl from Krypton," which introduced Superman's cousin (aside from a house ad). Was it left out of the Archives because it isn't a solo Supergirl story? (Superman co-stars.)
ACTION COMICS #252 (May 1959) "The Supergirl from Krypton!"
Writing by Otto Binder
Art by Al Plastino
Cover art by Curt Swan and Al Plastino
1. Superman does not recognize Zor-El's name. But when he mentions his own father, Jor-El, it is Supergirl who exclaims that her father and Superman's father are brothers. That makes sense, since Superman was rocketed to Earth as a baby. He may never have ever seen Zor-El. But Supergirl was in her teens by the time she left Krypton, with her memories of that world intact. What a bonanza for Krypton-curious Superman!
2. This is so early in the Silver Age that Superman's powers are still evolving. Superman says they have super-powers because of "Earth's lesser gravitation," not because of yellow solar radiation. (When did that change, I suddenly wonder?) And heat vision is ascribed to "the heat of my X-ray vision."
3. This is when Superman decides that Supergirl should live in an orphanage. We have discussed this before, with many Legionnaires taking umbrage to this decision. Notably, Commander Benson has come to its defense.
For my part, it seems reasonable as explained here, that Supergirl needs to "get used to earthly things." LIke, you know, not tearing doorknobs off accidentally. Where it falls apart for me is as an ongoing status quo.
For example, we never see Superman training Supergirl in future issues, or making much contact at all. She seems to have been dumped in a small-town orphanage with no guidance or family support. To an adult looking back on these stories, that seems cruel.
But I can easily imagine that Superman did take time to train Supergirl, did take time to visit and support her, did make her feel welcome on her new planet. And we just weren't shown it, because it's Supergirl's strip and he would upstage her. His appearance would change the tenor of the stories, which were generally small-stakes, feel-good, slice-of-life parables. Superman, as a larger-than-life character, appearing in a Supergirl story would be like Kirk and Spock beaming down in an episode of Happy Days. We suddenly wouldn't care if Richie can hide his pimple on prom night, and we'd worry instead that the Klingons are about to invade and kill everyone. We'd go from 0 to 60 in an instant. It would have been nice if they had a stray thought balloon now and then referencing Superman's support, but these were stories written for children and it probably never occurred to them to waste real estate addressing what, for them, is a non-problem.
Another place it falls down is Supergirl sabotaging her own adoption efforts. Again, this seems cruel -- not only to Kara's desire for a normal Earth life, but for the adults who are extending a welcome to her from their families, only for some terrible thing to happen. A more natural course would be for Linda to tell the administrators that she wasn't on the market yet, as she needed time to work through the trauma of her family's death. (Not far from the truth, really.) But then, we wouldn't have any strories, would we? Nope, Binder & Co. blazed ahead with these nonsensical kiddie stories that in 1960s DC world had no consequences, but to adults in the 21st century seem almost heartless.
The bottom line is that these stories were written with a LOT of heart ... but for children. So looking back at them as an adult and tut-tutting seems, to me, to miss the point of the exercise. I try to enjoy the story for what the writer intended. However, I reserve the right to point out plot holes. Like ...
4. "Linda Lee" fixes a bent, metal bed and a broken mirror all by herself, with no tools, and in jig time ... and nobody notices.
We seem to be skipping over "The Supergirl from Krypton,"
It's on page two of this thread, Skipper. My recollection that it was one of the posts that got jumbled or swallowed when the site was last updated, and it had to be re-posted. If you check the next page, myou'll even see that you replied to it back tehn.
And there it is! I thought I'd mentioned the lead-sheeting silliness somewhere.
This is so early in the Silver Age that Superman's powers are still evolving. Superman says they have super-powers because of "Earth's lesser gravitation," not because of yellow solar radiation. (When did that change, I suddenly wonder?)
The first time that the radiation from a yellow sun was attributed as part of the reason for Superman's super-powers occurred in Action Comics # 242 (Mar., 1960)---in, coïncidentally for this thread, the Supergirl story of that issue. In "Supergirl's Greatest Victory", Superman explains to his cousin the reason why they possess super-powers on Earth.
This reason was iterated in the book-length tale in Superman # 141 (Nov., 1960) and, henceforth, became canon.
But I can easily imagine that Superman did take time to train Supergirl, did take time to visit and support her, did make her feel welcome on her new planet. And we just weren't shown it . . .
Certainly, the readers of the day weren't shown these things because of the compressed story-telling style of the time. But your amplification of the specific reasons why these things were skipped over is spot-on, Cap. It's the kind of analysis that would have been over our heads when we were reading these tales sixty-five years ago.
Thanks, Commander! So it was only a year later that they dropped the "lighter gravitation" thing. It was already yellow-sun radiation when I started reading the Super-books, so that tracks.
Seems like a case of selling the artist and not the art - all too common after a certain point in the 00's.
Superman #123: (August 1958) “The Three Magic Wishes: The Girl of Steel”
Writing by Otto Binder
Art by Dick Sprang and Stan Kaye
(I know that we’ve gone over this story in Jeff’s Silver Age Superman thread a few weeks back, so apologies if I go over well-trodden ground.)
1)Superman rescues an “archeologist” (sic) who wants to give him something in gratitude. Supes suggests that he should give Jimmy a souvenir, instead. The grateful academic gives Jimmy a totem that is said to grant three wishes every hundred years. Say, wouldn’t whatever museum or university that this guy works for want to have a word with him about giving away valuable artifacts?
2)Jimmy thinks about wishing for a Super-Girl to exist and his wish comes true. (The implications of being able to wish a person into existence are kind of weird when you think about it.)
3)Super-Girl looks and dresses a lot like the later “real” Supergirl, except that her skirt is red. This almost feels like a beta test. Were they thinking about creating a “Supergirl” character and used this story as a test run, or did they print this story as a one-off, and got such a good response that they decided to do a “real” Supergirl?
4)Super-Girl keeps getting in Superman’s way, eventually even giving away his secret identity to Lois. (He gets it back by proposing to Lois as Clark, knowing that she would believe that Clark would never propose to her if he was really Superman. This works, somehow. Supergirl runs afoul of some Kryptonite that some crooks happened to have. (Did they sell the stuff in stores back then?) Fatally poisoned, she has Jimmy use the totem’s re-set button to undo her existence.
5)Some crooks steal the totem. (Careless of Jimmy to just leave it lying around once he realized that it worked. He really was a Gilligan level bumbler in those days.) The crooks wish for Superman to lose his powers. (Sure is lucky that they didn’t wish for him to die, or to have never existed, or to become their willing accomplice, or whatever.)
6)Superman and Jimmy go to great lengths to convince the crooks that he still has his powers. At one point, Supes takes part in a publicity stunt for a pistol club. (Wait, Superman is available for [publicity stunts? Is this really the best use of his powers?) They catch the crooks and recover the totem, which Jimmy uses to undo the crooks’ wish. For some reason, Superman leaves the totem with Jimmy, instead of taking it away from him so he screw things up further with his third wish.
7)Jimmy decides to wish for Superman to meet his Kryptonian parents. He wants it to be a surprise, so he types his third wish, so Superman won’t hear it, having apparently already forgotten that the totem responded to his first wish that he only thought. Jimmy accidentally types that Superman should “mate” his parents, which is an odd typo to make, really. This prompts two thoughts:
8)On Krypton, a ghostly Superman discovers that Jor-El was working as a special agent for the Kryptonian G-Men, and that he and Lara had infiltrated the plot of a would-be dictator named Kil-Lor. The cops bust them all, and they’re all sentenced to exile in suspended animation on a prison satellite, where they will be reformed with “mind-cleaning rays”, which sounds really Orwellian.
9)Once they’re in space, Kil-Lor, Jor-El and Lara gain super-powers. (Did no one know this might happen? Had Krypton never sent anyone into space before? No test animals, even?) anyway, Supes tricks Kil-Lor into inadvertently creating Green Kryptonite, thereby killing himself. (Maybe Supes rationalized it that Kil-Lor was going to die anyway when Krypton blew up.)
Overall: An OK little oddball story, probably wouldn’t be much remembered today if they hadn’t introduced the next year.
Next: “Super-Girl? Is that you? But I thought you died!”
I'll be checking in when I remember a story. I don't have any Supergirl reprints.
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