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 super-hero 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.
Nest: 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 would be 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!
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.
"(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.)"
No apology necessary. Our respective approaches are so different I don't see a problem. To extend the metaphor, you're not going over well-trodden ground, you're blazing your own trail.
I believe Jeff is only reviewing the Superman stories in Action Comics and Superman, so once you address her origin story there probably won't be any overlap.
Say, wouldn’t whatever museum or university that this guy works for want to have a word with him about giving away valuable artifacts?
"That belongs in a museum!" -- Indiana Jones, 1936.
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?
These chicken-and-egg questions drive me crazy. Especially since we'd know if someone had just bothered to ask one of the creators and printed the answer. But because comics were considered trash at the time, nobody did. And now everybody involved is dead and we'll never know. Grr!
Did they sell [kryptonite] in stores back then?
There was so much kryptonite on Earth in the Silver Age that it was probably more than Krypton could make. Years later, and I sadly don't remember where, it was suggested that a lot of was sucked to Earth by the wake of Superbaby's ship (or through the wormhole or whatever the origin story was at the time).
That works for me. But I still have to work my suspension of disbelief into overdrive to accept that petty crooks seem to have a unending source of the stuff.
In Smallville, Superbaby arrived in a hail of "meteor rocks," so there was plenty of it not just on Earth, but right there in Clark Kent's home town! And it affected humans, too, resulting in a "monster of the week."
Jimmy ... really was a Gilligan level bumbler in those days.
Fortunately, so were most of the criminals. To be thought a genius, Lex really only had to avoid capturing himself accidentally.
Superman "mating" his parents could've gotten really weird.
They could've re-named the book DC Triple Action.
The totem reacted to his typed wish rather than the one he was thinking?
A salient point!
I believe Jeff is only reviewing the Superman stories in Action Comics and Superman, so once you address her origin story there probably won't be any overlap.
Another salient point! This is going to be another fun Super-thread.
Next up is a house ad drawn by Al Plastino.
Wow, you're really getting into some granular details here: collection covers, house ads...
When I read certain comics, I often hear particular voices in my head. For example, when I read Silver Age Superman stories, I invariably hear the voice of Bud Collyer as the Man of Steel... except when he says things such as, "It... uh... must be an illusion!" Then I hear the voice of Chumley the Walrus.
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