Back Issue #84

SUPERGIRL IN THE BRONZE AGE!

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Pre-Crisis Supergirl ■ Death of Supergirl ■ Rebirths of Supergirl ■ Superwoman ALAN BRENNERT interview ■ HELEN SLATER Supergirl movie & more super-stuff!

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“‘80s Independents!” In-depth looks at PAUL CHADWICK’s Concrete, DAVE SIM’s Cerebus the Aardvark, and RICHARD AND WENDY PINI’s Elfquest! Plus see ‘80s independent comics go Hollywood, DAVID SCROGGY remembers Pacific Comics, TRINA ROBBINS’ California Girls, and DENIS KITCHEN’s star-studded horror/sci-fi anthology Death Rattle. Cover by PAUL CHADWICK!

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“Flash and Green Lantern in the Bronze Age” (crossover with ALTER EGO #132)! In-depth spotlights of their 1970s and 1980s adventures, MARK WAID’s look at the Flash/GL team, and PAUL KUPPERBERG’s Lost GL Fillins. Bonus: DC’s New York Office Memories, and Green Lantern: Ganthet’s Tale by LARRY NIVEN and JOHN BYRNE. With BARR, BATES, GIBBONS, GRELL, INFANTINO, WEIN, and more. Cover by GEORGE PÉREZ.

“DC Bronze Age Giants and Reprints!” An indepth exploration of DC’s 100-PAGE SUPER SPECTACULARS, plus: a history of comics giants, DC indexes galore, and a salute to “human encyclopedia” E. NELSON BRIDWELL. Featuring the work of PAT BRODERICK, RICH BUCKLER, FRANK FRAZETTA, JOE KUBERT, BOB ROZAKIS, BERNIE WRIGHTSON, and more. Super Spec tribute cover featuring classic art by NICK CARDY.

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“International Heroes!” Alpha Flight, the New X-Men, Global Guardians, Captain Canuck, and Justice League International, plus SpiderMan in the UK and more. Also: exclusive interview with cover artists STEVE FASTNER and RICH LARSON. Featuring the work of JOHN BYRNE, CHRIS CLAREMONT, DAVE COCKRUM, RICHARD COMELY, KEITH GIFFEN, KEVIN MAGUIRE, and more! Alpha Flight vs. X-Men cover by FASTNER/LARSON.

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Volume 1, Number 84 October 2015 EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Michael Eury

Comics’ Bronze Age and Beyond!

PUBLISHER John Morrow TM

DESIGNER Rich Fowlks

COVER DESIGNER Michael Kronenberg PROOFREADER John Morrow SPECIAL THANKS Cary Bates Elliot S. Maggin Alan Brennert Andy Mangels ByrneRobotics.com Franck Martini Glen Cadigan Jerry Ordway and The Legion George Pérez Companion Ilya Salkind Shaun Clancy Anthony Snyder Gary Colabuono Roger Stern Fred Danvers Jeannot Szwarc DC Comics Steven Thompson Jim Ford Jim Tyler Chris Franklin Orlando Watkins Grand Comics John Wells Database Marv Wolfman Robert Greenberger Karl Heitmueller, Jr. Heritage Comics Auctions Paul Channing Keefe Rob Kelly James Heath Lantz

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BACK SEAT DRIVER: Editorial by Michael Eury . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .2 FLASHBACK: Supergirl in Bronze . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .3 The Maid of Might in the ’70s and ’80s PRINCE STREET NEWS: The Sartorial Story of the Sundry Supergirls . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .24 Oh, what to wear, what to wear?

THE TOY BOX: Material (Super) Girl: Pre-Crisis Supergirl Merchandise . . . . . . . . . . . . . .26 Dust off some shelf space, ’cause you’re gonna want this stuff FLASHBACK: Who is Superwoman? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .31 Elliot Maggin’s Miracle Monday heroine, Kristen Wells BACKSTAGE PASS: Adventure Runs in the Family: The Saga of the Supergirl Movie . . . .35 Hollywood’s Ilya Salkind and Jeannot Szwarc take us behind the scenes FLASHBACK: Crisis on Infinite Earths #7 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .45 The death of Supergirl: the end of a hero and of an era INTERVIEW: Alan Brennert . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .52 Up close and personal with the writer of a handful of unforgettable comics stories FLASHBACK: The Many Lives of Supergirl . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .67 A look at the Post-Crisis Maid of Might BONUS INTERVIEW: Wonder Woman Contest Winner Orlando Watkins . . . . . . . . . . . . .75 Remember the Bronze Age Wonder Woman contest? We do!

BACK TALK . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .78 The latest from the BI Bunker

BACK ISSUE™ is published 8 times a year by TwoMorrows Publishing, 10407 Bedfordtown Drive, Raleigh, NC 27614. Michael Eury, Editor-in-Chief. John Morrow, Publisher. Editorial Office: BACK ISSUE, c/o Michael Eury, Editor-in-Chief, 118 Edgewood Avenue NE, Concord, NC 28025. Email: euryman@gmail.com. Six-issue subscriptions: $67 Standard US, $85 Canada, $104 Surface International. Please send subscription orders and funds to TwoMorrows, NOT to the editorial office.

Cover art by Karl Heitmueller, Jr. and friends. Supergirl TM & © DC Comics. All Rights Reserved.

All characters are © their respective companies. All material © their creators unless otherwise noted.

All editorial matter © 2015 Michael Eury and TwoMorrows Publishing, except Prince Street News, TM & © Karl Heitmueler, Jr. BACK ISSUE is a TM of TwoMorrows Publishing. ISSN 1932-6904. Printed in China. FIRST PRINTING. Supergirl in the Bronze Age Issue

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In the background: Cover to The Best of DC Blue Ribbon Digest #17 (Oct. 1981), featuring “The Many Lives of Supergirl.” Art by George Pérez and Dick Giordano. TM & © DC Comics.

COVER ARTISTS Karl Heitmueller, Jr., with Stephen DeStefano Bob Fingerman Dean Haspiel Kristen McCabe Jon Morris Jackson Publick

Supergirl by Jim Mooney. TM & © DC Comics. Courtesy of Heritage Comics Auctions.

by

Supergirl was a character I once took for granted. By the time I started reading Superman comic books in the late 1960s, the Maid of Might—no matter how nicely her adventures were drawn by Kurt Schaffenberger— was gobbling up space in the back of Action Comics … or at least that’s how her series was perceived by the grade-school me. I would’ve preferred to see another Superman story as Action’s B-feature, or some other hero who needed a home, like Metamorpho or Green Arrow (Action eventually became the home of those two heroes, but that’s another story).

Back then, I wasn’t the only fan who paid little attention to Supergirl. Boys like me were the primary target audience for DC Comics, a market DC’s statistics said would turn over every few years. American culture defined our gender roles starting with our pink-or-blue baby showers, and by the time we reached comic-book-reading age, boys picked Batman, Amazing Spider-Man, and Our Army at War and girls (if they were reading comics at all) opted for Wonder Woman, Young Romance, and Betty and Veronica.

We played with G.I. Joe or Barbie, and the Creepy Crawlers Thingmaker or Easy-Bake Oven.

Those were the rules. You didn’t cross the line.

Say what you will about the ironfisted management style of editor Mort Weisinger, the man who guided the Superman family through the Silver Age, but he knew his target audience (up until his last year or so behind the desk, perhaps). He helped build an entire mythology around Superman, transforming the one-time Last Son of Krypton into a franchise patriarch. And into that family was introduced the Man of Steel’s cousin—another survivor of Krypton!— Kara Zor-El, better known as Supergirl. After testing the concept with a prototypical Super-Girl in 1958, DC introduced Superman’s cousin Kara in the landmark issue Action #252 (May 1959), in a tale by writer Otto Binder and artist Al Plastino. This oft-reprinted classic gave the Man of Tomorrow a family, and paved the way for the long-running Supergirl backup in Action (drawn for much of the Silver Age by the man considered by most to be THE Supergirl artist, Jim Mooney). Supergirl’s existence was originally shielded from the public and she served as Superman’s secret weapon, appearing not only in her own tales but often guest-starring in her cousin’s. Through the prominence of Supergirl, as well as Lois Lane and Lana Lang, Mort Weisinger lured female readers into his Super-universe—and that sneak also tricked us fellas into reading stories about girls!

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Michael Eury

Supergirl started to grow on me. And why wouldn’t she?

She was cute, wore a real short skirt, and was powerful without being pushy like those Women’s Libbers elbowing their way into the media during my childhood. As I matured, so did comic books, and so did Supergirl.

No longer was she the boohooing teeny-bopper as depicted in her earliest stories—she became a strongwilled college student and worthy one-day successor to Superman as Earth’s Greatest Hero.

But no matter how likable Supergirl was or how independent she became, and despite her getting her own book on her tenth anniversary when the Legion of Super-Heroes feature was booted out of Adventure Comics (beginning with #381, June 1969), Supergirl had one thing working against her: she was a copycat. Or, as DC’s editorial director Dick Giordano once put it, she was “Superman with boobs.” She changed her clothing (a lot!) and creative teams (a lot more!), and she got her own short-lived title in the 1970s. In the early ’80s, she once again headlined her own title and starred in a live-action movie. Despite these efforts, Supergirl remained in Superman’s shadow.

Until she died.

You don’t have to be a comic-book historian to know that DC Comics shattered its status quo by offing the Silver Age Flash (Barry Allen) and Supergirl in its Crisis on Infinite Earths maxiseries. In the epic Crisis #7 (Oct. 1985), discussed later in these pages, Supergirl valiantly gave her life to save countless others. Its iconic cover showed the near-omnipotent Man of Steel blubbering like a baby as he held his cousin’s lifeless, broken body. Marv Wolfman and George Pérez finally gave us a Supergirl story with (excuse the term) balls.

And it was her last.

(Well, sorta.)

What I discovered on that day in 1985 when I first read the shocking tale of Supergirl’s noble sacrifice was that I had indeed cared for her as a character all of these years— no matter how skillfully Marv and George’s opus was, it wouldn’t have made me misty-eyed if I found the Maid of Might unlikable. But somewhere along the way, maybe because of my childhood gender-programming, I didn’t realize what a treasure Supergirl was. Until it was too late.

Of course, DC Comics and many other fans have since realized the magic of Supergirl. Shortly after she died, she returned… and returned again… and again.

Supergirl is now a television star. It’s unlikely she’ll make a crossover’s Death List anytime soon.

It’s been 30 years now since Kara Zor-El died. We could have commemorated that anniversary with a poignant cover recreation of Crisis #7, but instead we celebrate what made her special during the Bronze Age, the fun, quirky, and nostalgic tales which far too many of us overlooked back in the day. So put on your red hot pants (on second thought, don’t) and ease into a comfy chair as we remember the Girl of Steel’s Bronze Age adventures.

TM

by

John Wells

She lived among the Baby Boom generation, but she wasn’t one of them. Born years after the planet Krypton’s destruction, young, blonde Kara had grown up on a surviving fragment called Argo City and—when it became toxic—was shuttled to Earth for a surprise reunion with her adult cousin Superman in 1959’s Action Comics #252. Adopting the civilian alter ego of brown-wigged orphan Linda Lee, the freshly christened Supergirl went into training as the Man of Steel’s “secret weapon” in Action’s new backup series.

Nothing ever really changed that much in Superman’s world, but his cousin—not beholden to maintaining a particular status quo—was a different story. Linda had boyfriends—local kid Dick Malverne, Atlantean merboy Jerro, and the Legion of Super-Heroes’ Brainiac 5—and left Midvale Orphanage when she was adopted by Fred and Edna Danvers. As Supergirl, she went public to worldwide acclaim. Linda found a best friend in the psychic Lena Thorul (who happened to be Lex Luthor’s sister). Supergirl was reunited with her Kryptonian parents Zor-El and Alura, who’d miraculously survived Argo City’s destruction via “the Survival Zone” and relocated to the shrunken Kryptonian city of Kandor (in part to avoid any discomfort for Mr. and Mrs. Danvers).

Once Linda graduated from high school in 1964’s Action Comics #318 and headed to Stanhope College, though, the forward momentum ceased.

Five years later, Linda was still in college and the only thing that had changed was the artwork. In a movement by art director Carmine Infantino to reflect the more dynamic look exemplified by Neal Adams, longtime Supergirl artist Jim Mooney was forced out and replaced

by Kurt Schaffenberger effective with late 1967’s Action Comics #359. The change undeniably refreshed the series and may have caused wheels to begin turning in Superman editor Mort Weisinger’s mind.

KARA’S BIG ADVENTURE Since 1965, Supergirl had headlined an annual Giant issue of Action Comics consisting of old stories, and Weisinger wondered what the Maid of Might could do with her own monthly comic book. At some point, his eye fell on Adventure Comics, a title that had the unusual distinction of being one of DC’s—and the industry’s—bestselling comic books while simultaneously having the weakest sales of the company’s seven Superman-related titles. Although Adventure officially starred the Legion of Super-Heroes, it featured Superboy—and occasionally Supergirl—on every cover and Weisinger had come to believe that it was the Boy of Steel who was really selling the book.

While it still outsold Adventure, the Superboy solo comic book was losing more readers per issue. “Mort’s conclusion was that the Legion of Super-Heroes was draining sales from Superboy,” former LSH writer Jim

What to Wear?

In the early 1970s, writer/artist Mike Sekowsky whisked the Girl of Steel down a reader-recommended fashion runway that would even make Katy Keane dizzy! From Super DC Giant #S-24 (May–June 1971).

TM & © DC Comics.

Supergirl in the Bronze Age Issue

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Shooter told Glen Cadigan in The Legion Companion (2003), “and that the property really wasn’t good enough to hold its own.” Weisinger’s solution was to move the Legion into the back of Action Comics (effective with issue #377) while making Supergirl the new star of Adventure Comics starting with issue #381 (on sale April 29, 1969). With the Girl of Steel in place, Shooter detailed, the editor believed “that the sales would hold […] and that Superboy’s sales would rise, since it was no longer being diluted.”

The swap coincided almost exactly with the tenth anniversary of Supergirl’s debut and introduced the feature’s third long-term penciler in the form of Win Mortimer. The industry veteran had been the Legion’s regular artist at the time of the transition and Weisinger kept him on the book (generally inked by Jack Abel).

The Mortimer/Abel team drew the inaugural Adventure tale—Supergirl’s first book-length story—while a returning Kurt Schaffenberger was on hand for the entirety of issue #382. After that, each artist got half an issue for a short story apiece.

There was also new blood in the writer’s seat. After a decade of being primarily written by middle-aged men (most recently Leo Dorfman), Supergirl’s adventures were now coming from the typewriter of 21year-old Cary Bates. A contributor to Weisinger’s Superman books since the mid-1960s, Bates had written a few Supergirl solo stories before in Action #356, 358, and #366–368, but this was his first shot at a regular series. win mortimer His inaugural installment involved Supergirl and a gang of brainwashed female thieves who’d also been infiltrated by a tough-as-nails blonde … revealed on the last pages as the red-haired Batgirl. Despite being a relative newcomer, the latter had already met Supergirl twice in Bates-scripted issues of World’s Finest Comics (#169 and 176).

Issue #382’s Schaffenberger-illustrated book-lengther was a callback to a memorable 1957 story from Adventure #240 in which Superboy met a Kryptonian Robot Teacher. In the 1969 sequel, the Robot Teacher was revealed to have a pre-programed chauvinistic streak that convinced him that a female could never use superpowers properly. Supergirl, of course, proved him wrong.

Same As It Ever Was (top left) Supergirl usurped Adventure Comics from its previous caretakers, the Legion of Super-Heroes, beginning with issue #381 (June 1969; cover by Curt Swan and Neal Adams), but before long Superman family editor Mort Weisinger’s march toward retirement made the Maid of Might’s tales seem stale, as with (top right) this Luthor appearance in #387 (Dec. 1969; cover by Swan and Murphy Anderson). (bottom) Courtesy of Heritage Comics Auctions (www.ha.com), original Swan/Anderson cover art to Adventure #396.

TM & © DC Comics.

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“I’ve always had a fondness for the Robot Teacher character,” Bates tells “BIG MIKE” SEKOWSKY STEPS IN BACK ISSUE, “which I brought back for one of my favorite stories, ‘Don’t Call Sales reflected that assessment. Weisinger’s swap had been disastrous for Me Superboy’ [in 1976’s DC Super-Stars #12]. Obscure trivia note: in the Adventure’s profits, with circulation plunging an average of 57,000 copies never-seen ‘soft reboot’ for Superman I pitched in 1985 (just before they per issue between 1968 and 1969. Correcting the problem was no turned the reins over to John Byrne), Superman ‘died’ and eventually was longer the editor’s concern, though. He retired in April 1970 and the revived to discover all his powers were diminished. And it was the Robot Superman line was divided five ways. For Adventure Comics, that meant Teacher who came to his rescue and brought him back to life, in sort of Mike Sekowsky was now in charge. On the face of it, the assignment an homage to how Gort brought Klaatu back to life in The Day the Earth made perfect sense. The longtime penciller had been a critical part of the Stood Still. (Unfortunately, because this was written in pre-computer days, successful 1968 recreation of Wonder Woman as a more grounded, nonthere’s no digital file and after it was rejected I never kept a hard copy.)” powered heroine and Carmine Infantino clearly hoped that Sekowsky— Sexism was also at the heart of issue #384’s “The Heroine Haters,” recently promoted to editor—could work the same magic on Supergirl. wherein Supergirl used Superman’s computer to seek out her perfect If there was a flaw in that thinking, it was the failure to recognize the romantic match. She wound up on a planet where females were taught contributions that Infantino, scribe Denny O’Neil, and editor Jack Miller had from birth to see themselves as inferior to men and where the native also made to Wonder Woman. In his new role, Sekowsky tried to have it all, superhero—Volar, her supposed soulmate—was actually a heroine who not only editing but writing and penciling each story, as © DC Comics. concealed her gender due to the society’s biases. well, with little feedback or input from others. The result “I’m pretty sure the only reason I got away with was material that was often unstructured and chaotic a gender-switching bit like that back then was but undeniably different and more contemporary. because Mort Weisinger was a sucker for any As with Wonder Woman, part of the remake plot-twist he hadn’t seen before, no matter involved a new look, and Sekowsky’s cover for how kinky,” Bates remarks.

Adventure #397 (on sale July 30, 1970) teased Bates sat out Adventure #383 as Robert a new costume for the Girl of Steel. Diana Kanigher and E. Nelson Bridwell stepped in to (Wonder Woman) Prince herself was on hand for write the issue’s two stories. Both scripters would the occasion, guest-starring in the lead story that return over the next year as did Leo Dorfman, who pitted Supergirl against an occult villain called Zond. penned a notable two-parter in issue #387 and 388 that The conflict conveniently shredded the young heroine’s reunited Supergirl with her old friend Lena Thorul … costume, prompting Diana—a boutique owner at and Lena’s evil brother Lex Luthor. While Lex had the time—to come up with a new look on the spot. always kept his identity a secret from the unwitting With details that included thigh-high boots, gloves, mike sekowsky Lena, he still kept tabs on her and couldn’t resist the a miniskirt, and a mod belt, Supergirl could no temptation when he accidentally endowed her young longer be mistaken for her 1960s counterpart. son Val Colby with powerful psychokinetic powers.

The new look had its origins in the letters column of Kidnapping his nephew, Luthor used the toddler as his partner in crime Adventure #388, where E. Nelson Bridwell had invited readers to send in until Val’s powers burned out and Supergirl caught up with them. new costume designs with the promise that some would be incorporated Lena’s appearance, along with those of both sets of Supergirl’s into a story. Predictably, DC was inundated with submissions, but plans parents (Adventure #389) and the long-absent Dick Malverne (Adventure changed once the decision was made to actually give Supergirl a permanent #393), were reminders of the flourishing supporting cast that the young new look. As detailed in issue #398, the final costume was a composite of heroine was surrounded by in her high school days. Those characters two designs, one by Louise Ann Kelley and the other by Jean Bray. Supergirl mostly faded away once Linda went to college, and the situation didn’t also modeled the new outfit in concurrent issues of Action Comics, where she change in the move from Action to Adventure. While Schaffenberger’s guest-starred with Superman in several stories by Leo Dorfman and the Curt crisp artwork reflected modern fashions and hairstyles on background Swan/Murphy Anderson team (issues #395, 397, 398, 400, and 402). characters, the series as a whole was mostly locked in 1964. Supergirl Meanwhile, after a decade with a derivative logo based on that of attended “her” funeral on a parallel Earth (#384), faced hoaxers like her her famous cousin, Supergirl acquired a design that was all her own. alleged big sister (#385), played fairy godmother to a 1969 Cinderella Created by famed letterer Gaspar Saladino, it debuted on the cover of (#386), became a wolf-girl (#387), and generally engaged in situations Adventure Comics #498 although Sekowsky continued to use the original more reflective of an earlier generation. logo on all of his interior stories.

The Mod Maid of Might (left) Here’s the Mike Sekowsky/ Dick Giordano cover from Adventure Comics #397 (Sept.

1970), which inspired Karl Heitmueller, Jr.’s recreation (with a little help from his friends) which he kindly offered to us for use as this issue’s cover. (right) From that issue’s story, Supergirl tries on the first of a closet full of new costumes, assisted by Diana Prince, the then-powerless Wonder Woman.

TM & © DC Comics.

Supergirl in the Bronze Age Issue

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An Anniversary Mess (left) Original art page (courtesy of Heritage) by Mike Sekowsky/Jack Abel from the continuityviolating Adventure Comics #400 (Dec. 1970). (top right) Supergirl’s powers went haywire under Sekowsky, as teased on the Dick Giordano-inked cover to Adventure #404 (Mar. 1971). (bottom right) No secrets for Linda Danvers! Sekowsky/ Giordano cover to issue #407 (June 1971).

TM & © DC Comics.

Back in Adventure #397, Sekowsky addressed the matter of Supergirl’s essentially non-existent rogues’ gallery. A great fan of Milton Caniff’s Terry and the Pirates newspaper strip, the cartoonist fondly recalled a venomous girl from the feature named Nastalathia Smythe-Heatherstone, whom everyone called “Nasty.” Sekowsky created his own version of Nasty— real name spelled Nasthalthia—as a haughty new student at Stanhope whose real goal was to draw out Supergirl and expose her true identity.

Her first try was a failure, compounded by the Maid of Might’s discovery that Nasty was working on behalf of her uncle: Lex Luthor!

Diehard Superman fans immediately cried foul, pointing out that Lex only had a younger sister and a toddler nephew. In Adventure #401’s letters column, Bridwell rushed in with an explanation: “Luthor does have an older sister—one who married a European gentleman and has been living abroad. Lena Colby is unaware of this sister’s existence because her parents had disapproved of their elder daughter’s early marriage, and had no communication with her when they were killed in an accident.”

Bridwell also found himself fielding questions about Supergirl’s sudden ability to read minds in issue #397 and the error-laden Adventure Comics #400 [see BI #69 for more on issue #400—ed.]. In the latter, Sekowsky revived one-shot villainess Black Flame (from 1963’s Action Comics #304), along with three new villains called the Inventor, L. Finn, and the Toymaster, in a plot to murder Supergirl. Their ultimate weapon was Gold Kryptonite, a substance that normally removed a Kryptonian’s powers permanently. Here, though, it only weakened the heroine. Meanwhile, the city of Kandor—located in a bottle within Superman’s Fortress— was now on a planet of its own … as was the Phantom Zone, said here to house criminals from many galaxies rather than just those of Krypton.

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Adventure #405 assured fans that Superman scholar Bridwell would be fact-checking the scripts from that point forward.

Sekowsky was at his best when keeping the series grounded in the real world, notably in issue #399’s tale of black college football star Johnny Dee who was coerced into throwing games when the Ku Klux Klan—unnamed but obvious—beat his girlfriend Roxie and threatened to kill her. In the climax, Supergirl rescued Roxie from kidnappers by twisting a metal bridge around their car … only to get cited by the police in the last panel for “damaging state property … obstructing traffic…”

Sekowsky’s most ambitious plot began in issue #402 with the introduction of an international female mastermind named Starfire. Physically, she was a double for Sekowsky’s Wonder Woman villainess Dr. Cyber, with the conspicuous exception of Starfire’s jewel-studded eye-patch. Thanks to a scientist in her employ, the villainess had access to a pill that could supposedly kill superheroes and she intended to use Supergirl as her first test subject.

Seduced by a Starfire minion named Derek, the Girl of Steel ended up ingesting the drug and wound up losing her powers during a firefight.

With her abilities coming and going at odd intervals, Supergirl approached the Kryptonian scientists of Kandor for help in Adventure #404 and left with an exo-skeleton that could help compensate when her natural strength shorted out. The plot development echoed thencurrent events in Julius Schwartz and Denny O’Neil’s retooling of Superman and its scaling down of the hero’s powers. Still, Sekowsky had explored such territory earlier in Wonder Woman—where Diana lost her powers entirely—and Metal Men—whose cast hid their abilities.

With the new status quo in place, Nasty returned in Adventure Comics #406 on the milestone occasion of Linda’s graduation from Stanhope College. Observing Supergirl enter Linda’s dorm room and the soon-to-

be graduate exit, Nasty vowed “to stick to you like a leech from now on.”

When a job-hunting Linda called in a favor from her newscaster cousin Clark Kent, Nasty was right behind when the young woman flew to San Francisco to interview for a job at WGBS affiliate K-SFTV. Linda’s delight at being hired as a camerawoman was mitigated by the discovery that the office’s other open position was filled by Nasty.

Burned during one power outage, Linda managed to escape a hospital emergency room before she made a miraculous recovery, but she took a quick trip to Kandor to pick more protective outfits that were impervious to harm.

The Kandorians did better than that, providing the young heroine with several new designs, the first of which was designed by fan Anthony Kowalik. Supergirl wore that one when she finally captured Starfire at the end of issue #407, but the confirmation of the Girl of Steel’s presence in San Francisco only fueled Nasty’s suspicions.

With the simultaneous additions of head cameraman Johnny Drew and his boss Geoff Anderson, Sekowsky had a core supporting cast but little time to play with them. Carmine Infantino fired him in early 1971, doing so abruptly enough that E. Nelson Bridwell had to step in to write a second Supergirl story—illustrated by Art Saaf and Dick Giordano—to fill out the partially completed Adventure Comics #409. Along with working in yet another new costume, Bridwell streamlined the Maid of Might’s unwieldy accessories, ditching the Kandorian exoskeleton for a strength-enhancing bracelet and using her preexisting Legion of Super-Heroes flight ring rather than rocket-boots.

Joe Orlando slipped into the editorial chair effective with Adventure #410 (Sept. 1971), installing John Albano and Bob Oksner as Supergirl’s writer/artist team in residence. The farcical Inferior Five aside, Orlando had avoided straight superheroes since becoming a DC editor and there was a sense of his struggle to get a handle on the series in the early issues. Echoing a trick the editor used often on his House of Mystery covers, children in peril appeared on Adventure #410 and 411. At times, Orlando-edited teen humor heroines seemed to be the model, as in Adventure #413’s opening scene wherein Linda rushed to a department store sale … taking care that she not use her powers to unfairly beat other women to the tables.

Supergirl’s vacillating powers were referenced for a time, but the subject eventually died of neglect.

Likewise, the fashion parade was abandoned after two final variations in Adventure #412–413 and 415, respectively. They lost out to issue #410’s design, which would—with tweaks—be the Girl of Steel’s definitive look for the next decade. Created by John Sposato of Edison, New Jersey, it consisted of a puffy-sleeved, low-cut blue blouse with red hot pants, cape, and sandals. Aside from a revision of the footwear to

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A NEW EDITOR

Maid of Might Meets Mighty Moppet Artist Bob Oksner (inked here by Vince Colletta), in an original art page from the first post-Sekowsky issue, Adventure Comics #410 (Sept. 1971). Courtesy of Heritage.

TM & © DC Comics.

slippers in issue #411 and boots in 1974’s Superman Family #165, the new look was a keeper.

Generally, short stories on morality and the human condition peppered the interiors of the early Orlando run. Such was the case with issue #411’s admittedly familiar plot about a misunderstood alien who ultimately died at the hands of armed forces despite the pleas of the youngster he’d befriended. Albano wove a bit of Marvel-style turmoil into the story via a San Francisco councilman who saw Supergirl as a menace and the politician’s cronies who sniffed that she shouldn’t be doing “man’s work” anyway.

Sexism also figured into issues #417’s story, the first in the series written by Steve Skeates. That one involved both Johnny Drew and his misogynistic father being sucked into an alternate dimension where—thanks to the time differential—they spent two years as slaves of a female-ruled society before Supergirl rescued them.

That world’s leader let them leave in peace but refused to consider her stance on males. Since women had taken over, she explained, “there have been no wars […] and very, very little pollution.”

Joining Skeates as a secondary writer on Supergirl was Len Wein, whose contributions included a oneshot villain named Vortex (Adventure #414) and a revival of Batman foe Dr. Tzin-Tzin in San Francisco’s Chinatown (Adventure #418). Taking advantage of the fact that his and Marv Wolfman’s 1968 creation Jonny Double also resided in the city, Wein had the hard-luck detective join forces with Supergirl in the latter. In an interesting touch, Jonny’s involvement came about after Nasty hired him to prove that Linda was trying to kill her. By the end of the story, Jonny had befriended Linda and discovered that Nasty was conning him, unaware that she’d actually hoped to unearth proof that her nemesis was Supergirl.

Having recently been tapped as Diana Prince’s boyfriend in Wonder Woman, Jonny was off the table as a prospective Supergirl love interest.

So was Mike Merrick, a charming thief and killer who formed a mutual attraction with Linda in Adventure #410 … and figured out her alter ego in the process.

Albano revived the character in a standout episode (issue #419) wherein Supergirl began having hallucinations and was reacting to disasters that weren’t there. The culprit was a modern-day witch named Lorelei who’d been casting spells to cover the robberies of her new flame: Mike Merrick. Mike was livid when he found what Lorelei was doing, but he also knew that her plans would only escalate.

After a phone confessional to Linda, Merrick invited Lorelei for a drive in the hills with the remark that “all our friends [are] waiting for us.”

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“Waiting for us?” Lorelei asked. “Where?”

“In Hell, baby—in Hell!!” And then Mike ran the car straight into a cliff.

The story—Albano’s last on the series—also benefited from a strong art combination, one that melded the gritty penciling of Tony DeZuniga with the prettier finishes of Bob Oksner. The combo was back in issue #420 before Mike Sekowsky (inked by Oksner) made an unexpected return in Adventure #421 (July 1972).

The issue opened with the rampage of a sword-wielding steve skeates woman in green who eventually rendered Supergirl comatose and challenged the heroine to a duel on the psychic plane.

Nightflame, as the marauder was called, existed in a dying micro-world within the Girl of Steel’s brain and she hoped to take over her foe’s body before her home was gone. In the outside world, Linda’s boss Geoff was cradling Supergirl’s body in the San Francisco streets and focusing all his thoughts on her recovery. Those intense feelings gave the young woman the confidence to beat Nightflame and she awoke to find that Geoff had been her savior. Thanking him with a heartfelt kiss, she declared, “I can feel a closeness I’ve never felt toward any other man.”

Penciled by Sekowsky from a Marv Wolfman plot, the story ultimately gained notoriety once Steve Skeates got involved. In short, Geoff’s intimate emotional communion with Supergirl had been a metaphor for the loss of her virginity. “By the time I got the finished art and was asked to add in the dialogue,” Skeates told Brian K. Morris in 2006 in BACK ISSUE #17, “things were already pretty much sexed up. I could see, at that point, no recourse but to go where Mike had gone to further emphasize the sexuality. […] I played up Sekowsky’s sexual themes to the point where the explosion on the bottom of page 15 became a way-too-obvious veritable orgasm.”

If there were any hopes of further developments in the Geoff–Supergirl relationship, Adventure Comics #424 effectively quashed them. In another strong DeZuniga/ Oksner-illustrated outing, Linda was hot on the trail of a major San Francisco crime boss with the help of a confidential informant. The situation blew up when a jealous Nasty leaked the mole’s name to the mob and got him killed. Inevitably, Supergirl brought down the killers and exposed their elimination of witnesses in the “frozen graveyard” of space, but the anger she felt toward Nasty wasn’t going An Oksner Peek away. Storming into the K-SFTV offices, Linda angrily tendered her resignation (top) While it’s unlikely that anyone objected to Bob and stormed out.

Primarily plotted by Joe Orlando, the story was one that scripter Steve Skeates Oksner’s playful, darling rendition of Supergirl when described as his favorite Supergirl tale. Linda’s stormy exit from the TV station was these covers were published, the sly artist’s provocative “something,” Skeates remarked in BACK ISSUE #78, “she should have done at least a handful of issues earlier. Finally standing up for herself had (more that I realized it imagery has since raised some eyebrows and chuckles was gonna) just made her an even better character, one I would have definitely enjoyed writing for.” among fandom. (bottom) Linda Danvers’ tantrum on Adventure #424’s conclusion was motivated less by a desire for character the last page of Adventure #424 (Oct. 1972) provides development than editorial fiat. Supergirl was being spun off into her own comic book at last, and new editor Dorothy Woolfolk preferred the heroine as a spunky a send-off to supporting characters Geoff and Nasty— college student. Consequently, Linda acted on a previous unexpressed “secret and sets up her titular spin-off magazine! By Steve ambition” and enrolled in theatrical school at Vandyre University just outside San Francisco. In effect, the series had flipped back to the 1964–1970 Stanhope years, Skeates, Tony DeZuniga, and Bob Oksner. with new boyfriends for Linda each issue and no real supporting cast other than an TM & © DC Comics. ethnically diverse pair of girls who made incidental appearances.

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Short-Lived Series (top left) Supergirl #1 (Nov. 1972). (top right) Prez in an off-beat team-up with the Maid of Might in the last issue of Supergirl, #10 (Sept.–Oct. 1974). (bottom) Courtesy of Heritage, original cover art to Supergirl #8 (Nov. 1973), featuring the JLA. All covers by Bob Oksner.

TM & © DC Comics.

SUPERGIRL, THE SERIES Returning as primary writer, Cary Bates (with artists Art Saaf and Vince Colletta) recalled Linda’s high school best friend Lena Thorul, but the married mother of one didn’t fit the carefree student vibe that the series was aspiring to. Instead, the writer created a different psychic girl as Linda’s dorm roommate, a mysterious female who owned alien sculpture and the strange name © DC Comics. of Wanda Five. Despite aggressive teasing about her origins in issue #1 (Nov. 1972), Wanda never appeared again as new editor Robert Kanigher— arriving in Supergirl #2— immediately dropped her. Bates, at this late date, no longer recalls what he had planned for the character.

The reason for placing Supergirl in her own comic book has been lost to history, but it’s worth noting that Marvel’s release of three female-centric titles— cary bates The Cat, Night Nurse, and Shanna the She-Devil—went on sale at the same time. Those premieres coincided with DC’s short-lived attempt to give Lois Lane, Wonder Woman, and Supergirl a unifying identity, albeit one that was calculated to make them an offshoot of the company’s romance comics. Consequently, Bates’ more adventurous stories like a trip to Kandor (#2) or a fight with a supervillain inadvertently endowed with the Maid of Might’s powers (#4) mingled with covers where Supergirl cried about not having a date (#3).

As the series pushed into 1973, guest-stars became the norm. Zatanna—whose backup feature appeared in early issues—squabbled with Supergirl over a mutual boyfriend in issue #7 before the Justice League (#8) and Wonder Woman’s Queen Hippolyta and Nubia (#9) stopped by for visits. Slated for release in November 1973 (but not published until June 1974), Supergirl #10 featured teen president Prez in a story whose serious tone contrasted nicely with the parodic nature of the character’s own book. Bates also reunited Supergirl with her Silver Age flame Brainiac 5 in a Legion of Super-Heroes story for 1974’s Superboy #204.

SUPER SPECTACULAR FAMILY Internally, no one at DC seemed particularly pleased with the direction of any of its female books and editor Julius Schwartz was charged with getting Supergirl back on track with issue #11. The road to recovery hit a small bump when the fallout from a nationwide paper shortage got Supergirl, Lois Lane, and several other low-selling titles canceled, but Schwartz was able to shift his first issue into the newly created Superman Family. Consolidating Jimmy Olsen (including its numbering) with Lois Lane and Supergirl, the 100-Page Super Spectacular managed to preserve three important properties in a more profitable

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We Are Family (left) Supergirl headlines the second issue of Superman Family, #165 (June–July 1974).

Cover by Nick Cardy. (right) From inside that issue, a rare Clark Kent/Superman cameo in the Supergirl feature.

By Elliot Maggin, Art Saaf, and Vince Colletta.

TM & © DC Comics.

Robin in college. We did similar stuff with Supergirl— package. Each character starred in a new story every third issue while reprints filled those in between. At a bimonthly grew her up a little. But my approach was always to try pace, that meant only two new Supergirl episodes a and incorporate whatever those who came before had done. So we were kind of opposites that way.” year, but the results were worth it.

Preserving the school backdrop of the feature, Maggin The latest writer to pen a new direction for the Girl of Steel was Elliot S. Maggin. “I’m not sure why Julie moved Vandyre “graduate student” Linda Danvers into asked me to do the Supergirl stories,” he tells BACK ISSUE, the role of advisor and mentor to younger girls at © DC Comics.

Santa Augusta, Florida’s New Athens “but he only ever asked me to write Experimental School. The plot also them on a case-by-case basis. I don’t included a shift in the heroine’s think I ever did a series for him characterization, emphasizing as an ongoing assignment. her desire to embrace life as Not even Superman or Green an ordinary woman without Arrow. He just kind of said, the baggage and expectations ‘Your next story is Supergirl. Do of Supergirl that had been placed you know Supergirl?’ It evolved that on her from the moment she arrived I got into a kind of habit of writing on Earth. There was still plenty of about girl heroes. Supergirl, Batgirl, costumed action in Superman Family Wonder Woman, like that. I guess I #165’s first story, but Supergirl’s defeat never thought of them as simply of the powerful Princess of the Golden female versions of male counterparts Sun didn’t mean as much to Linda as and that kind of made them work. Julie elliot s. maggin the life-changing help that she gave caught on that I liked girls, I suppose. troubled teen Eileen Falco.

And I (obviously) had this overactive Maggin also created a nominal fantasy universe kicking around in my supporting cast that included New Athens’ Dean Betsy head, so it was an excuse for me to double-time my girlfriend with impunity. I should have realized that then; Lyman, curmudgeonly Board of Trustees member Benjamin Pierce, Linda’s secretary Marty Hamilton, and would have made life in my 20s a lot less complicated.

“Julie’s intention, whenever he took over any (as of issue #168) Linda’s new roommate Shari Jones. established series, was generally to give it some kind The characters rarely had major roles but, like the San of imprimatur,” Maggin continues. “He made Clark a TV Francisco news crew, their regular presence made Linda’s reporter. He gave Batman that oval on his chest. He put civilian life more real. Older cousin Clark Kent was on

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hand for cameos—and unsolicited advice—and even Lena Thorul returned for a visit in issue #168 as she helped with a girl developing extra-sensory perception.

“I love Lena Thorul,” Maggin declares. “Still. It’s a dumb last name, by the way, and besides it should have been something that started with ‘L,’ but I was stuck with that. I was—and still am—fascinated with anything that has to do with Luthor and the Luthor family. I created this whole backstory about the elder generation in the novels—called the parents Jules and Arlene and brought them to Smallville from Brooklyn. Then with the Smallville TV series (which I thought was outstanding) they ignored all that and made up completely different people. So it goes.”

Batgirl—a character that Maggin had revived in two earlier Superman team-ups— reunited with Supergirl in issue #171 to fight a woman who thought she was Cleopatra. (“I think I was on an Egypt kick that year,” the writer remarks.) That episode offered the two the opportunity to commiserate about establishing their own identities while dealing with the expectations that came with their family names.

After three relatively character-oriented stories, Maggin went Biblical in issue #174 (Dec. 1975–Jan. 1976). Pursued by a mysterious serpent-man, Supergirl ended up in the literal Garden of Eden before she destroyed the potent Eden Rock that he’d craved. Tying in his recent Green Arrow/Black Canary story in Action Comics #450–452, Maggin also included a key appearance by the enigmatic Davy Tenzer, an immortal based on Michelangelo’s statue of the Biblical hero David.

The Girl of Steel was also being pursued in Superman Family #177’s installment, albeit by a fanatical member of an alien warrior race who believed he and Kara Zor-El were astrological soulmates. Complete with a flashback to Argo City and appearances by Zor-El and Alura, the adventure was plotted by Cary Bates and scripted by Maggin. Bates took over entirely with issue #180, Julius Schwartz’s last issue on the series … for a time.

“What I did with Supergirl was what I did with every other character I got my mitts on,” Maggin explains, “which was to make up the most outlandish stuff I could think of and rationalize it so that, given my audience’s level of suspension of disbelief, I could convince everyone that such a thing fits into the real world. The fact that the character recurred only twice a year simply made me work harder to rationalize the crazy.”

As Maggin rebuilt Supergirl as a confident young adult, the look of the feature changed a bit each issue. With inker Vince Colletta as a unifying force, Art Saaf, John Rosenberger, and Curt Swan each stepped in to pencil an issue before former Supergirl artist Kurt Schaffenberger returned to deliver full art on three consecutive episodes (Superman Family #174, 177, and 180). Although his work was as crisp and self-assured as ever, Schaffenberger was an unexpectedly controversial choice for the feature. For readers accustomed to a more realistic look, the cartoonist’s comparatively cartoony style was old-fashioned and issue #177’s letters column was split between pans and raves.

If anyone was unsatisfied with the art, they needed wait only a few episodes and it would change. From late 1976 to late 1979, Supergirl’s adventures were illustrated

by Mike Vosburg and Al Milgrom (SF #182); Bob Brown and Vince Colletta (SF #183); Jose Delbo and Vince Colletta (SF #184–185); Alan Weiss and Joe Rubinstein (SF #186); Don Heck and Bob Smith (SF #187); Jack Abel, variously inked by Joe Giella and Frank Giacoia (SF #188–190); Arvell Jones and Romeo Tanghal (SF #191–193); and Don Heck, variously inked by Joe Giella, Frank Chiaramonte, and Bob Smith (SF #194–198). It was only with Superman Family #199—on sale October 8, 1979— that Win Mortimer and Vince Colletta returned to the series for an extended run through issue #222. (Colletta missed only issue #221, when Sal Trapani filled in.)

There were still more artistic interpretations to be had in Supergirl’s frequent mid-1970s guest-appearances. Those included a three-issue run in 1976’s Justice League of America #132–134 (art by Dick Dillin and Frank McLaughlin), a 1976 close encounter with the Martian Manhunter in issue #450 of her old Adventure Comics stomping grounds (art by Michael Nasser and Terry Austin), a 1977 collaboration with the Atom and the Flash in Super-Team Family #11 (art by Alan Weiss and Joe Rubinstein), and a meeting with Captain and Mary Marvel in 1978’s momentous “Superman vs. Shazam!” (All New Collectors’ Edition #C-58, with art by Rich Buckler

The Girls with Something Extra (top) Maggin brought back Lena Thorul in Superman Family #168 (Dec. 1975–Jan. 1975). Art by John Rosenberger and Vince Colletta. (bottom) Having recently teamed Batgirl with Superman—twice— Maggin revived the Supergirl/Batgirl duo in SF #171 (June–July 1975). Cover by Ernie Chua and José Luis García-López.

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New Format, New Writer (right) Superman Family switched to DC’s all-new “Dollar Comics” format with issue #182 (Mar.–Apr. 1977). (left) Jack C. Harris, Supergirl scribe, debuted in #182’s “The Deadly Treasure of Mars.” Art by Jose Delbo and Al Milgrom.

TM & © DC Comics.

People say, ‘it’s not realistic in the real world,’ but that’s the way it should be, so that’s part of the fantasy.

They’ve just never run across any prejudice.”

A fan of the Maid of Might since her very first appearance in 1959, Harris was delighted to be writing her adventures and the opportunity arose thanks to a big change in Superman Family’s format. Under the direction of new publisher Jenette Kahn, the title was one of four that transitioned into all-new 80-page Dollar Comics and editor Denny O’Neil assigned much of the new Superman Family to talent beyond the usual Julius Schwartz stable.

Courtesy of Jack C. Harris.

The format change also meant that Supergirl and company would star in new stories every issue from that point forward.

Harris opened with a modern spin on a Mort and Dick Giordano). Supergirl Weisinger-style hoax story was always welcome in her involving Lex Luthor and supposed cousin’s own series, too, with her kryptonite on Mars (SF #182), while guest-shots peaking in a long run of his follow-up featured a female 1977-dated issues (Superman #307–309 Phantom Zone escapee named Shyla and #311–315) that were penciled by Kor-Onn (SF #183). The latter unintenJosé Luis García-López and Curt Swan. tionally stole a bit of thunder from the primary Superman books, where A CONSISTENT VOICE jack c. harris a Cary Bates three-parter introducing If there was stability to be found in another female Zoner named Faora Supergirl’s solo series, it came on the began in Action Comics #471 just a scripting end. After a few years as an week later. Denny O’Neil was able to insert a footnote editorial assistant, Jack C. Harris had begun penning stories for DC and immediately became the regular plugging the latter, but the coincidence remained.

“When they split the Superman titles to various writer on Isis and the Supergirl strip. More by accident than design, Harris acquired the reputation as DC’s fore- editors there were quite a few instances where there most writer of women once he picked up the Wonder were conflicting or duplicate storylines,” Harris told Woman and Batgirl series in 1978 and 1979. “I think BACK ISSUE. “It was the editors’ responsibility to coordinate one of the things I liked, and this goes across all the their efforts, but there were times things slipped female characters I did,” he remarked in 2006’s BACK through the cracks. The similar Phantom Zone villains ISSUE #17, “I never made an issue out of equality. They was probably one of those times, but I don’t recall if just were equal. Everyone treated them as equals. there were any specific discussions about it.”

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It was Harris’ third installment that capitalized on the potential that the revamped Superman Family offered: For the first time in years, Supergirl wasn’t limited to standalone stories because of the three-issue rotation. Consequently, the young writer launched a three-part story that included prominent flashbacks to the Girl of Steel’s early years on Earth in the service of a present-day 1977 adventure that reunited Kara/Linda with her parents … all four of them!

Attacked by immaterial beings during a blinding thunderstorm, Supergirl was concerned that they called her by name (“Linda!”) and that her panicked mother Edna Danvers had shown up in Florida immediately afterwards. Unseen since Linda’s 1971 college graduation, the Danvers had been doing well until Fred—an electronic engineer— was hired by mysterious new employers and disappeared. Taking a leave of absence from New Athens, Linda joined her mom in Midvale and soon discovered that her natural parents Zor-El and Alura had been involuntarily thrust back into the other-dimensional Survival Zone that they’d originally used to escape Argo City’s destruction.

As the story played out, Supergirl learned that Fred had been duped into creating a Voodoo Machine—using technology similar to the Survival Zone device—that allowed the masked Visitors to attack a 3-D image of a target and have the real thing affected. It was Fred himself— in a Visitor uniform—who’d tried to warn Linda and he nearly died before Supergirl electrically jolted him back to life and used his expertise to free Zor-El and Alura.

In the aftermath, the Kryptonian couple decided to stay with the Danvers for a while as Mr. and Mrs. Roger Elton to make sure that Fred was okay. “When I was reading the early Supergirl stories,” Harris explained, “I thought it was a brilliant move to reveal her Kryptonian parents were still alive. This immediately made her more than simply a female carbon copy of Superman. I wanted to exploit those differences right away. This is why I made Zor-El and Alura an important part of the Supergirl stories.” He found an enthusiastic supporter for the direction in Superman historian E. Nelson Bridwell, who succeeded O’Neil as editor with issue #185.

Meanwhile, the Visitors were unmasked as a trio of minor alien villains from 1961’s Action Comics #280 (reprinted in Superman Family #168), but they insisted that the details of the Voodoo Machine had just “popped into their heads.” The true mastermind, as revealed in issue #186’s climax, was a disembodied mass of energy with an avowed hatred of Supergirl. The entity was back in issue #187, prodding old Superboy villain Klax-Ar into attacking the Girl of Steel.

The mystery menace surfaced yet again in issues #188 and 189, wherein Supergirl was put on trial in Kandor for having projected Shyla into the Phantom Zone with alleged criminal intent. Shyla contended that she’d discovered Supergirl was actually a villainess and was imprisoned because of her knowledge. The most damning evidence was a Kryptonian mento-tape recorded from the memories of Lex Luthor that depicted Supergirl collaborating with the villain when she was still Superman’s teenage “secret weapon.”

Pleading “no contest,” Kara was imprisoned in the Phantom Zone herself and quickly tracked down Superman’s old friend Mon-El. Projected into the Zone years earlier before he could succumb to lead poisoning, Mon had witnessed the truth about the supposed conspiracy with Luthor. In fact, as first detailed in 1961’s Action Comics #279, “Supergirl” was actually the evil Kandorian villainess Lesla-Lar who’d attempted to replace the Girl of Steel on Earth … and who was subsequently atomized by Phantom Zone criminals in Action #297. With MonEl’s memories recorded on a mento-tape, Supergirl was vindicated … but unaware that the energy force had instigated this latest attack, as well.

By this point, most readers had all the evidence they needed to deduce the entity’s true identity—reader Gary Thompson even correctly identified her as the dematerialized Lesla-Lar in issue #192’s letters

column—but the mystery continued to unfold. When a SupergirlDoom Patrol adventure intended for the canceled Super-Team Family #16 was serialized in Superman Family #191–193, E. Nelson Bridwell was careful to insert panels that established the blob as the force behind the evil Gravitron Man. Meanwhile, Jack C. Harris had been unfolding another subplot that began with Linda’s adoptive father. While Zor-El and Alura were staying with the Danvers on Earth, Fred Danvers accepted an offer to head up the Midvale branch of S.T.A.R. Labs. While interviewing for an assistant, Fred was astonished when a young man named Lucas Carr offered a stack of references that were a veritable who’s who of the Justice League of America. Lucas was, in fact, former JLA mascot Snapper Carr and, after a recent fall from grace, he was looking to rebuild his life.

Lucas had also salvaged the wreckage from Klax-Ar’s space-sled back in issue #187 with an eye toward building a Superboy robot that wasn’t vulnerable to Earth’s pollution as Superman’s recent models had been. The story picked up in the midst of a Scott Edelman story in Superman Family #194 with three isolated pages following the subplot.

“I don’t recall exactly why Scott wrote that fill-in,” Harris tells BACK ISSUE, “but I do know I wrote those pages, or I at least outlined them.

Perhaps Scott or Nelson dialogued them, I don’t recall.”

That story’s cliffhanger was hastily extinguished in Superman Family #195. Possessed by—yes—the energy-being, “Superboy” went berserk and attacked Supergirl only to immediately freeze up on page two.

Pollution had affected the robot after all and the entity was now stuck in its body. The balance of the story involved a different robot created by scientist Paul French, christened by Julius Schwartz after a pseudonym of Isaac Asimov. The anticlimactic opening was all the more puzzling since the issue’s cover had spotlighted the Supergirl/Superboy clash.

Parent Trap Harris’ love of Supergirl lore is in view on this original art page from SF #185 featuring both Kara’s and Linda’s parents! Art by Delbo and Colletta. Courtesy of Heritage.

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Identity Crises Editor Julius Schwartz returned to Superman Family with (left) issue #195 (May–June 1979). Cover by Ross Andru and Dick Giordano. (right) Supergirl meets …

Supergirl?? From SF #203 (Sept.–Oct. 1980), by Jack C. Harris, Win Mortimer, and Vince Colletta.

TM & © DC Comics.

JULIE SCHWARTZ RETURNS Succeeding Bridwell with issue #195, returning editor Julius Schwartz had no interest in the robot or the entity. “I believe Julie wanted a new supervillain at that point,” Harris explains, “so we wrapped up the other storyline quickly. The major difference between working with Julie or Nelson on Supergirl was that Nelson loved stories or villains that delved into the past of the Superman Family legend, while Julie’s constant credo was ‘Be Original.’ The Lesla-Lar storyline was a victim of those differences. Nelson liked the old, established villains, and Julie constantly wanted something new and original.”

Those new scenarios included issue #198’s publicity stunt concocted by famed science-fiction writer Brad Reynolds (based on Schwartz’s old client Ray Bradbury) and issue #197’s time-travel yarn about a man whose hands could make anything older or younger. Delighted with Harris’ proposed “Man with the Eternity Hands” concept, Schwartz—as related in BACK ISSUE #17—declared, “That’s great, write a story with that title. I like that.”

Under Schwartz, Supergirl became Superman Family’s more-or-less permanent cover feature and returned to primarily standalone short stories as Harris began populating the series with additional cast members.

New teacher Valerie Myles became fast friends with Linda in issue #196 despite some initial confusion when an alien gem made the newcomer think she was Supergirl. Valerie’s ex-boyfriend Peter Barton—an ex-Hollywood agent who was reopening the Santa Augusta Theater—debuted in issue #197, and immediately left Linda smitten. Peter, on the other hand, was still hung up on Val and convinced that she was Supergirl.

Harris took another break in the celebratory Superman Family #200 as Gerry Conway propelled the book 20 years into the future where— among other things—Linda Danvers was governor of Florida and now calling herself Superwoman. She also had a mysterious detective boyfriend that many readers suspected was Dick Grayson, but Conway insisted that he had no one specific in mind.

Back in 1980, the Linda/Peter/Valerie triangle only became more complicated in Superman Family #201–202 when Supergirl inadvertently hypnotized Barton into becoming an unhinged superhero called Dynamic.

By the end of the story, Peter was cured not only of his alter ego but his delusion that Val was Supergirl. As of issue #206, Peter and Val were engaged.

“I was inspired by Spider-Man on this one,” Harris details.

“The constant soap opera life of Peter Parker was where the continuity was in the Spider-Man stories. He would meet and defeat a new villain

14 • BACK ISSUE • Supergirl in the Bronze Age Issue

each issue, but his love life involving Betty Brant, Liz Allan, Mary Jane Watson, etc., as well as Aunt May’s medical problems, was the ongoing story. I wanted something like that for Linda Danvers. Her love life and secret-identity difficulties provided enough material to keep the background stories going while Supergirl battled the supervillains.”

“The Supergirl From Planet Earth” (Superman Family #203) offered a change of pace as Linda Danvers came face-to-face with a younger version of herself … or so it seemed. In fact, the doppelganger had been Midvale youngster Ellie Leeds, who’d witnessed Superman’s fateful first meeting with Supergirl when she crashed on Earth. Picking up a piece of X-kryptonite on her way home, the little girl had no idea that the rare isotope—which also affected super-cat Streaky—would endow her with superpowers. Unfortunately, Supergirl theorized, “her young body could not handle the sudden increase in power so she fell into a coma … and the nearness of the X-K kept the situation stable.” Stirred awake when the adult Supergirl visited Midvale, Ellie fashioned a vintage costume at super-speed and briefly thought that she was from Krypton before coming to her senses following her long slumber.

SUPERGIRL’S SUPER FRIENDS Next up was the Enchantress, an obscure magical crimefighter from Strange Adventures who’d had two of her 1960s appearances reprinted in Adventure Comics during Supergirl’s later run there. Now working in New Athens’ parapsychology department in her June Moone alter ego, the mage had aspirations of using a rare lunar alignment to augment her powers in Superman Family #204. The Enchantress was blind to the destructive side effects that her spell was causing to Earth and Supergirl was compelled to stop her.

Harris hoped to expand on the rivalry by uniting the two with Batgirl and the Vixen in a team book called Power Squad. With artist Trevor von Eeden attached, the writer envisioned the quartet as a non-team who’d get together when circumstances dictated without formalizing their status.

DC passed on the proposal and the Power Squad never got off the ground.

The Girl of Steel did find time to reunite with Batgirl for a three-parter in 1981’s Detective Comics #508–510, as well as other major DC heroines in 1982’s Wonder Woman #291–293. On a field trip to Gotham City with a class from New Athens in 1980’s Super Friends #37, Linda was miffed that the kids were awestruck by the JLA but took appearances by their local heroine Supergirl for granted. The last panel punchline had the Gotham media expressing the opposite reaction and devoting all their coverage to the out-of-town heroine.

A much-requested Batman/Supergirl team-up finally appeared in November 1979’s The Brave and the Bold #147, courtesy of guest-writer Cary Burkett and artist Jim Aparo. The story—with Dr. Light as its villain—apparently sold so well that the creative team produced a sequel for B&B #160 a year later, this time pitting the duo against Batman foe Colonel Sulphur to save the life of Fred Danvers.

The Girl of Steel also showed up in her cousin’s team-up title for a massive battle with Mongul’s Warworld in 1980’s DC Comics Presents #28 that required her to attain speeds beyond any she’d ever hit before.

Knocked unconscious by the explosion of the monstrous satellite, she kept right on flying and breaking one dimensional barrier after another in issue #29 until the Spectre had to intervene before she crossed “that golden veil beyond which no living man may pass.” Other family reunions of the period included Superman and Supergirl acting as surrogate parents to a rapidly aging synthetic being (1979’s Action Comics #502) and the Maid of Might attempting to murder her cousin while under the effects of radiation administered by the Superman Revenge Squad (1981’s Superman #365).

SUPER SOAP OPERA The events of Superman #338 (Aug. 1979) had the greatest personal impact on Supergirl, resulting as they did in the loss of her biological parents once again. Scripted by Len Wein and penciled by Curt Swan, the story detailed the momentous day when Superman fulfilled his vow to enlarge the Bottle City of Kandor on a planet of the Kryptonian people’s choosing beneath a red sun. The occasion was marred by a disastrous miscalculation that caused the city’s buildings to turn to dust, but the Kandorian Van-Zee tried to put the best spin on things by emphasizing that his people might rediscover their initiative as they rebuilt.

They could no longer count on Superman and Supergirl to save them, either, because the new planet was a “phase-world” that only appeared in this dimensional plane at intervals.

With Zor-El and Alura now separated from her, Linda was astonished when they seemed to overtake Fred and Edna Danvers’ bodies in Jack C. Harris’ story for 1981’s Superman Family #206. The delusion was part of a final gambit played by Lesla-Lar, now explicitly revealed as the disembodied entity that had stalked Supergirl a few years earlier. Delusional and convinced that she was Kara’s twin sister, Lesla managed to possess the heroine’s body, only to have her resolve shaken by “her” parents’ rejection of her as a fraud.

In that moment of weakness, Linda regained control and “Lesla’s energy was dispersed on the astral plane.” She was never heard from again.

The hallucinatory glimpse of her biological parents presaged Supergirl’s brief reunion with the real Zor-El and Alura in 1981. The Kandorian phase-world—now named Rokyn—rematerialized in Krypton Chronicles [miniseries] #1–2 and included the happy news that the city’s seeming destruction was far less total than had originally seemed to be the case. The visit also included encounters with two of Supergirl’s repentant old enemies—Shyla Kor-Onn and Zora Vi-Lar—but the latter turned out to be less forgiving than she first seemed. Resuming her Black Flame persona, Zora tried to strand Supergirl and Superman on Rokyn,

Some Enchanted Evening Supergirl encounters the Enchantress in Superman Family #204 (Nov.–Dec. 1980). Original Andru/Giordano cover art from the Heritage Comics Auctions archives.

TM & © DC Comics.

but the Girl of Steel stopped her before it was too late.

On the whole, the trip was a far happier one than Kara’s grim jaunt to Argo City in 1981’s Superman Family #207. It seemed that the entire population had been thrust into the Survival Zone, and their ghostly forms pleaded with Supergirl to divulge the location of a super-weapon created by Zor-El that could free them. The Maid of Might realized that she was being misled—by the Legion of SuperHeroes’ nemesis Universo, as it turned out—but she let the situation play out long enough for the villain to show his hand. The occasion also gave Supergirl a chance to chat with the LSH—and especially Brainiac 5— for the first time in six years.

It had also been six years since Linda Danvers began working at New Athens, and she wouldn’t see a seventh. Fed up with escalating badgering from her supervisor Benjamin Pierce, she quit the job and took Peter Barton up on his suggestion that she audition for an entirely different position: soap opera actress! Signed to play Margo Hatton in Secret Hearts— named after the long-running DC romance comic (1949–1971)— Linda was soon on her way to New York City … and so was Supergirl.

By the end of Superman Family #208, the Girl of Steel had saved Rockefeller Plaza’s famed statue of Atlas and received a personal welcome from Mayor Ed Koch.

Once Julius Schwartz had approved the new direction, Jack C. Harris took advantage of a contact at Lincoln Center to observe the production process of a soap opera and realized there was ample opportunity for drama as the backdrop in Supergirl’s series. It was ironic, then, that Harris left the feature immediately after setting things in motion. Marv Wolfman scripted issue #209 from Harris’ plot, Bob Rozakis concluded the story in issue #210, and Martin Pasko moved in to become the new regular scripter with Superman Family #211.

(Rozakis, incidentally, also penned a short story in Superman #373 wherein Clark Kent played himself in a cameo on Secret Hearts.)

Asked what prompted his departure from the feature after nearly five years, Harris tells BI, “I remember one of the reasons was contract obligations with Roy Thomas [who scripted Superman Family #207 from Harris’ plot]. He had been guaranteed a certain number of pages per month, so if they could switch a staff writer off of something, they did.

I stopped doing Supergirl, but immediately picked up a slew of mystery tales and Sgt. Rock backups. I went completely freelance soon afterwards.”

Filling the void was the aforementioned Martin Pasko. “I was one of editor Julius Schwartz’s go-to-guys whenever he got a Superman-related editing assignment,” he explains, “especially after my run on Superman

Supergirl in the Bronze Age Issue

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for him. Julie was never altogether comfortable with the franchise; he felt he didn't know enough about Superman, and had little time to take a crash course in the mythology. He relied a lot on his assistant editor, E. Nelson Bridwell—who had been on the titles since 1964—to fill in a lot of blanks for him and answer his questions. But he also felt Nelson’s taste and judgment were a bit old-school, and Nelson had a stubborn reverence for, and insistence on trying to perpetuate, Weisinger-era continuity elements that Julie found silly and inappropriate to the older readership Julie imagined he had to reach.

“So I was one of the guys he turned to when he inherited Superman Family, in which I had done Superboy for him a few times. He liked that work, but I had to drop the assignment due to other commitments. When Julie offered Supergirl to me, I took it, not so much because I’d ever had a burning desire to write the character but because I really wanted to work with Win Mortimer, whose art I’d liked a lot as a kid.”

Among Pasko’s challenges was trying to get a handle on the feature’s star. “The writing of the Weisinger stuff wasn’t about deep characterization, but rather archetypes: boss, girlfriend, kid brother, kid sister, etc.,” he observes.

“After Weisinger left, all the changes to the work franchise and her supporting cast—sometimes even her backstory—militated against sharply defining her.

“I could never find an internal logic to my predecessors’ creative choices: Linda Lee Danvers went from being a reporter, to a student counselor, then an actress, and so on—and those choices seemed random to me. As a writer, I could never get a sense of what kind of personality would be all over the place like that. The only way I could see to resolve that was to play her as a woman still trying to find herself—confused, restless, struggling with her own place in the world—but when I pitched that notion, it was rejected as being too much of a downer.

“So I’m not sure I was able to get into the character's head, as I had with Superman. And the way I wrote Supergirl in Superman wasn’t relevant to her own strip, because in the Superman stories, she was defined purely in terms of her relationship, and interaction, with Superman. In a sense, this was the reason, I think, for the ultimate failure of the Superman Family title: All of those features, such as Jimmy Olsen and Lois Lane, had presented protagonists who were defined in terms of that relationship: ‘Superman’s Pal’ and ‘Superman’s Girl Friend.’ The mandate for Superman Family was to do stories about the characters on their own—stories in which Superman only fleetingly appeared, if it all.”

Along with Superman’s fleeting appearance to wish his cousin well, the first New York episodes brought in a flood of new cast members. They included producer Alan Ward, director Jeremy Kane, fellow performers Hal Kyle and Cindy Randolph, and scriptwriter—and would-be boyfriend of Linda—Greg Gilbert. There was something to be said for familiar faces, though, and fans were delighted to see Lena Thorul return in Pasko’s first issue (SF #211). Now a widow after her F.B.I. agent husband Jeff Colby had been killed in the line of duty, Linda’s high school best friend was trying to start a new life for herself and son Val. Using her pull, Linda got her a job as Greg’s assistant, and Lena was soon writing soap scripts herself after her new boss blew his deadlines.

The dynamic between the two women had changed, though. After a psychic villain temporarily boosted Lena’s own mental powers, Linda’s superpowered alter ego was a secret no more from her friend. The pleasure of having a confidante didn’t last long once Lena’s recurring headaches culminated in a cerebral hemorrhage. Sitting in the hospital waiting room, Linda discovered from Lena’s mother-in-law that Jeff Colby—thanks to his F.B.I. connections—had also known that his wife was Lex Luthor’s sister … and he’d kept it to himself just as Supergirl had. As far as Mrs. Colby was concerned, the time for secrets was over and she told Lena the truth before Superman Family #214 opened.

Lena didn’t take the news well, feeling betrayed by both Supergirl and her late husband. “How dare you deprive me of the right to my own identity?”

Generally Hospitable (top) Jack C. Harris led Linda Danvers into another career change beginning in Superman Family #208 (July 1981): TV actress, on the soap opera Secret Hearts. (bottom) The DC romance title from which the fictional soap opera took its name. Secret Hearts #114 (Sept. 1966) cover by Gene Colan. (Yes, that Gene Colan!)

TM & © DC Comics.

16 • BACK ISSUE • Supergirl in the Bronze Age Issue

she snapped. “Have you any idea how much anguish that’s caused me all these years. For a long time after my marriage, I was afraid to have children—not knowing what hereditary disease I might pass on to them. But Jeff seemed so confident we’d have a normal child, he convinced me … so we had Val. And now that Jeff’s dead, I find out he knew all along … that I was that madman’s sister!”

The anger faded a bit but not until a man that Jeff had once arrested tried to seek revenge on Lena in an Courtesy of Martin Pasko. elaborate plot involving a Lex Luthor impersonator and the illusion that she’d developed telekinesis. In fact, Lena had lost even her E.S.P. powers following the brain surgery, along with her shortterm memories that included the secret of Linda’s dual identity. Via a the feature due to being overtwo-way video communicator, Lena committed in TV animation before I and the real Lex were making tentative could follow through on my plan.” steps at dealing with their complicated Following the Lena story, Pasko relationship by the end of issue #214. penned a two-parter involving the Supergirl privately hoped that she and Supergirl from 5,000 centuries in the her old friend could reconcile, too. future (SF #215–216) that also martin pasko “As with Superman, I felt that included a subplot about Secret Hearts’ Supergirl needed a broader, more new head writers: husband-and-wife formidable Rogues' Gallery,” Pasko team Herb and Marilyn Silver. Based explains. “The villains she’d fought in recent stories on real-life power couples Frank and Anne Hummert were kind of lackluster and unmemorable—if the stories and Richard and Esther Shapiro, the newcomers intended even had supervillains at all. I thought Supergirl needed to transform Linda’s sympathetic Margo Hatton character her own ‘Lex Luthor.’ I also knew that, for all that I into “the woman America loves to hate.” admired Win’s storytelling, he couldn’t be relied upon Although he had a growing career in Los Angeles as a to design a dynamic, cool-looking costume for a new television writer/story editor, Pasko could bring little of that creation (which is why I brought in a few Superman experience to bear in the Supergirl feature. “Soap opera villains that had distinctive looks). production, which was very different from primetime “So, in casting about for the female Lex Luthor, I episodic production, was out of my line, and, in the remembered the plainclothes Thorul character from my few pages I was allotted, there wasn’t really much room childhood. She had been played sympathetically in the for playing scenes in the work franchise,” Pasko says.

Weisinger era, and my plan was to pick her up that way, “The other problem I had was I couldn’t see how being then flip her into a real bad-ass. But as I recall, I had to leave an actress on TV provided a simple and direct way of Supergirl in the Bronze Age Issue

Crisis in Time (left) Supergirl meets future Supergirl in Superman Family #215 (Feb. 1982).

Cover by Rich Buckler and Vince Colletta. (right) Inside #215, Pasko introduces Secret Hearts’ new writing team, Herb and Marilyn Silver.

Art by Mortimer and Colletta.

TM & © DC Comics.

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Supergirl in Transition Writer Paul Kupperberg was in control of Supergirl’s destiny in 1982 when (top left) Superman Family was canceled with #222. This led to (top middle) Superman #376, which featured (top right) a preview of the Maid of Might’s new series: (bottom) The Daring New Adventures of Supergirl!

TM & © DC Comics.

getting into the melodramatic line, the way, say, Clark Kent being a reporter or Barry Allen a police forensics expert did. But I did know enough about general TV production to fake it till I could do a little research on soaps in an effort to bring a little more realism to the work franchise. But, truth to tell, at the time I had to leave the series, I was still trying a find a pitch for a new occupation for her that would better serve the needs of the series.”

That task fell to his successor, Paul Kupperberg. Already scripting Superman Family’s Jimmy Olsen strip, he was, the writer declared in BACK ISSUE #17, “the right guy in the right place at the right time. […] Superman Family was kind of second tier as far as the Superman franchise went, and I was trying to move up in the rotation in those days.”

Kupperberg opened with a clever set piece that required Linda to be interviewed by talk show host Donny Hughes (a.k.a. Phil Donahue) while Supergirl stopped a mad bomber (SF #217). Higherprofile threats like the moon goddess Hecate (SF #218) and the Master Jailer (SF #219–221) followed, but Kupperberg was about to be offered the chance to take the series in a new direction.

A DARING NEW DIRECTION By 1982, anthology comic books with multiple short features had lost their appeal to a significant number of superhero fans and Superman Family was paying the price in sales. Commercially speaking, Supergirl was the only strip in the book with the legs to stand on its own, so the decision was made to cancel the Dollar Comic and replace it with a solo comic with the unwieldy title of The Daring New Adventures of Supergirl (to distinguish it from the 1972–1973 book), whose logo was designed by Todd Klein.

Hence, Superman Family #222’s “Stop My Life—I Want to Get 18 • BACK ISSUE • Supergirl in the Bronze Age Issue

Kara’s Flashpoint Veteran artist Carmine Infantino joined Paul Kupperberg on The Daring New Adventures of Supergirl, adding—dare we use the pun?—flash to the series by increasing the action and incorporating more villains, like Reactron, seen on this original art page from issue #13. Inks by Oksner. Courtesy of Heritage.

TM & © DC Comics.

Out!” In what was becoming a pattern, Linda got fed up with the direction of her career and called it quits. Continuing in the pages of Superman #376, she talked things over with her cousin—while defusing tornados, incidentally—and announced that she was going back to college, this time in at Lake Shore University in Chicago.

As Kupperberg’s home from 1979 to 1982, Chicago was a locale that was both familiar and underpopulated by DC Universe superheroes.

The writer even named one of Linda’s new neighbors—“weird-o resident actor” John Ostrander—after a Chicago acquaintance, never suspecting that the real guy would become a major comic scripter in his own right.

The initial supporting cast also included Linda’s hyper new pal Joan Raymond, landlady Ida Berkowitz, friends Cheryl Delarye and Daryll Simmons, and eccentric college advisor Professor Barry Metzner. As the series progressed, police lieutenant Gabe Peters—no fan of supervigilantes—was introduced, as was the first serious love interest that Linda had seen in years, symphony conductor Philip Decker. In issue #6 (Apr. 1983), Linda even adopted a stray cat that she immediately named Streaky after “a cat I used to own.”

Luigi Novi / Wikimedia Commons.

Beyond the new backdrop, there was a refreshing new look for the series that paired the adventurous layouts of Carmine Infantino with the romantic prettiness of Bob Oksner’s inks. Along with setting up the new status quo and designing new villains Psi and Decay, the artists also sketched out highlights of Supergirl’s early adventures in Action Comics … but nothing that took place after high school. Indeed, Kupperberg ignited a bit of controversy in issue #1’s text page with his remark that Supergirl was, “for our purposes, a 19-year-old college student.” running in #252 in 1959. As much as I was a fan of The writer’s recollection was that the new direction Superman, my favorite part of Action were those probably originated with Julius Schwartz. “I do paul kupperberg backups by Otto Binder, Jerry Siegel, and Jim remember that he wasn’t happy with the whole TV Mooney, and I eventually acquired the entire run, star/soap opera element and thought she needed to and kept up with her, through good and bad, go back to simpler times,” he noted in BACK ISSUE through the ’60s and ’70s, and, in the early 1980s, I started writing #17. “We probably talked it out and came up with the college student the character in Superman Family. angle together. […] Once you put her in an ‘adult’ situation, make her “Superman and Superboy had stayed fairly consistent across the a TV star or newswoman, why the hell is she still going around calling herself Supergirl? She should’ve become Superwoman, but since that years I’d been reading before I began writing them. The occasional wasn’t about to happen for the expected copyright and trademark reasons, Steve Lombard gag bit or Julie Schwartz-inspired pun aside, Superman and Superboy had been and remained fairly straight-laced strips. it just made sense to keep her a ‘girl.’ ” But Supergirl had been all over the map since she transferred out of Action.

There was a more buoyant spirit to the tone of the series in general, one reflected in the banter between Linda and her friends as well as the She was written and edited by all these Greatest Generation old white wisecracks that Supergirl directed at her various adversaries. The style was guys who had no idea how to portray women characters, so everyone enough of a part of the fabric of Kupperberg’s run that it was conspicuous who touched her had a different take on her. By the time I took over in its absence during issue #13–15’s comparatively heavy three-parter the Supergirl strip, I don’t think anyone, including me, knew exactly who involving a villainess named Blackstarr. The story dealt with the history she was anymore. So when it came time to do our ‘reboot’—bye-bye of Holocaust survivor Mrs. Berkowitz, her long-lost and corrupted soap opera actor in NYC, hello grad student in Chicago—I wasn’t locked into an established character that I felt obligated to stick with daughter, and a virtual neo-Nazi rally in Chicago. “There really didn’t seem any way of interjecting the Supergirl style of humor into the and could go with my natural instincts, which is to throw as much Blackstarr story,” the writer remarked in BI #17, “without it coming off humor, where appropriate, of course, into the mix as possible.”

Adhering to Julius Schwartz’s “Be Original” edict, Kupperberg as callous.” Kupperberg made up for lost time in Supergirl #16, though, wherein Ambush Bug met the Girl of Steel for the first time and became populated the series with a parade of new villains that included Reactron (in a crossover with his new Doom Patrol in issues #8-9), convinced that his “ol’ pal” Superman had become a female.

Reflecting on his approach, Kupperberg told BACK ISSUE, “I think the colorful quartet known as the Gang (issues #4–5), and the towering it’s probably got something to do with the connection I felt with the robot Matrix-Prime (issues #6–7, 10, 17). Reactron aside, they were all in Supergirl character. As a kid, one of the first titles I started going the employ of a shadow organization called the Council that successfully after back issues of was Action Comics, beginning in the mid-1960s, captured Supergirl in issue #10, creating a batch of doll-size clones that and I collected it because I loved the Supergirl backup that started gave the heroine fits over the next two issues.

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ANOTHER COSTUME CHANGE By the end of her title’s first year, the Girl of Steel was ready for a makeover, but it came by way of Alexander and Ilya Salkind. Hoping to refresh their Superman movie franchise, the duo now had plans for a Supergirl film and the hot pants and low-cut blouse of her comic book incarnation didn’t fit their vision. Instead, a new costume was created, one that replaced the hot pants with a red skirt and the blouse with a more modest shirt whose trademark “S” was at the collar rather than centered. The traditional red cape seemed to actually be part of the shirt.

In August 1983, the new look appeared with great fanfare in Supergirl #13, its design attributed to Linda’s mom Edna, who confessed to a long held desire to be a fashion designer.

Dropping the “Daring New…” prefix with that issue (not reflected in the indicia until #14), Supergirl also sported the movie-created logo from that point on. Issue #17 belatedly added a headband to the costume design but the situation left Julius Schwartz exasperated.

“We redesigned the whole costume, went to a lot of trouble, and they insisted we put a headband on her!” Schwartz declared in 1984’s Comics Feature #30. “Because it was very upto-date. ‘I think that’s terrible,’ I said. ‘It stinks, it’s no good.’ Sure enough, when they made the movie, they left the headband out. In the meantime, in my magazine, I have the headband!

So I gave as the explanation for the headband that the people on Krypton used to wear them.

But it was only the males, really…”

Along with the headband, Supergirl’s shirt design only appeared in former comics artist Mike Ploog’s storyboards and in test footage but not the completed movie. There was one other detail in issue #17 that was also unique to the comics: Linda abandoned her wig in favor of a specially treated comb that instantly changed her from a blonde to a brunette and vice versa.

“I believe the comb replacement for Linda’s wig was Julie’s idea,” Kupperberg told BACK ISSUE. “We all thought the wig thing was clumsy, but what was the alternative? Well, Julie came up with one. It was as bad a science-fictiony comic-book fix as the earlier idea of Clark Kent’s ‘hypnotic eyeglasses’ [1978’s Superman #330] that amplified his super-hypnosis and made people see him as scrawny and pale and very

un-Superman-like, but it got rid of the wig.”

It had been 25 years since the orphan from Krypton had first put on that wig and the events of 1959’s Action Comics #252 celebrated in a novel crossover, one conceived by Julius Schwartz. Action Comics #555 and Supergirl #20 (on sale in February and March 1984) involved Superman and his cousin facing separate but simultaneous attacks by the Parasite and devising different solutions to the same deathtrap.

The latter issue revealed that the villain had detoured the heroes from a very special ceremony near Midvale, where a floating statue of Supergirl was unveiled in a plaza to commemorate the anniversary of her arrival on Earth.

The Kryptonian cousins immediately got together again in another crossover that began in Superman #397 and ended in Supergirl #21.

Featuring an Ed Hannigan-created villain called the Kryptonite Man, both installments were written by Kupperberg and illustrated by rising star Eduardo Barreto.

Then it was back to the future when the Girl of Steel guest-starred in 1984’s Tales of the Legion #314–315. Having renewed her friendship with Brainiac 5 in 1983’s Legion of Super-Heroes #300–303 and LSH Annual #2, Supergirl was back for a visit as her 20th-Century romance with Phil Decker was turning rocky. Impulsively taking Brainy and Sun Boy on an impromptu mission, Kara was disappointed with its outcome. “Maybe I don’t fit in with the Legion anymore,” she sighed before leaving a still-smitten Brainiac 5 to wonder if he’d ever see his perfect woman again.

“It was fun to write the relationship between her and Brainiac,” Paul Levitz observed in The Legion Companion (2003), “ ’cause it was such a perfect counterpoint moment for Brainiac.

He was this enormously controlled, all intellect person, succumbing to a set of emotions that were completely beyond his control.”

The Tales issues appeared alongside Supergirl #22 and 23, where Dr. Metzner was evolved into a futuristic menace. The capper was a fourpanel epilogue in which Linda was hailed by her long-forgotten boyfriend Dick Malverne, last seen in a cameo in 1970’s Adventure Comics #393. “It’s great to see you, Linda,” he gushed.

“Really great!” And he kissed her.

“It is at this dramatic moment that we reluctantly suspend publication,” Julius Schwartz declared at the bottom of the page. “In the near future we hope to announce the reappearance of the Maid of Steel in a new magazine.”

Headband Headaches (top) Supergirl got new duds at the beginning of her second “season,” but by 1984 (middle) a moviemandated headband was added, confounding poor editor Julie Schwartz. (bottom) Supergirl cuts her ties with her future friends in Tales of the Legion of Super-Heroes #315 (Sept. 1984).

TM & © DC Comics.

20 • BACK ISSUE • Supergirl in the Bronze Age Issue

DOUBLE TROUBLE That was certainly the plan. As covered in more detail in BACK ISSUE #17, the Supergirl and Superboy solo stories were intended to continue in the 48-page DC Double Comics. Paul Kupperberg would continue to write each feature but Infantino (now inked by Klaus Janson) would move to the Boy of Steel while Eduardo Barreto was slated to draw the Girl of Steel’s new adventures.

As the story resumed, the reunion of the high school sweethearts hadn’t gone so well. Now working in the computer field, Dick had transferred to Chicago specifically to reconnect with Linda, but she found his adoration of her to be more than a little unnerving. Hoping to get her head straight, Supergirl flew into space for an extended visit with her parents on Rokyn, which was currently back in phase. The trip did Kara good, not only offering her heart-to-heart talks with her mother but the opportunity to work on the physical and mental disciplines of the Kryptonian martial art called Klurkor. There was trouble, too, in the form of living fire-beings who burst from beneath Rokyn’s surface and were converging on Kandor.

That’s where Kupperberg’s story stopped. Barreto’s story for DC Double Comics #1 had been penciled and the script for issue #2 was in progress when word came down: Supergirl was slated to die in 1985’s Crisis on Infinite Earths #7 and there was no point investing resources in a solo series that would have to be immediately canceled.

“Supergirl was a great character,” Kupperberg observes, “but she was created at a time when being a girl character meant that she was portrayed as a girl … weaker and less capable than her male equivalent and limited by her sex. I mean, right off the bat, she’s not even given the courtesy of being allowed to take center stage as a hero on her own but is hidden away in an orphanage and kept under wraps as Superman’s ‘secret weapon.’ Hell, Batman trained Robin, who was five, six years younger than Supergirl, in a few months and took him out into the streets … and Robin wasn’t even invulnerable like her. I think my contribution to the character was to finally make her a hero who stood on her own two feet … and then, of course, once we finally got her right, they killed her off in Crisis.”

For his part, Martin Pasko believes that, “purely from an editor’s or publisher’s perspective, killing off Supergirl in Crisis made sense. By that point, she had become redundant with Superman, and by the mid-’80s, she’d gone through so many changes in direction—most of them not lasting long enough to build a devoted readership—that no one knew what the character was supposed to be or what purpose it served.

“She was, arguably, a product of a bygone era—the late ’50s—in which the readership was assumed to be preteens exclusively, and Mort Weisinger had learned, from the success of Lois Lane, that the Superman family of books could accommodate stories with girl appeal. And so Supergirl was created to bring little girls into the Action Comics fold.

“Making her much younger than Superman—a teen with all the traditional bobbysoxer concerns of the era— boyfriends, pets, fashion, rivals in school—was a good choice as far as it went,” Pasko continues. “And the concept that she was an orphan, longing for the acceptance of an adoptive family (before the Danverses came along), added an ‘emo’ note that was pitch-perfect for the romance comics crowd.

“But the strip needed—and got—an even stronger value-added element that made it unique and prevented the reader from dismissing Supergirl as the Man of Steel in drag.

In addressing that, the original format was very clever for the time: the idea that Supergirl was, at first, Superman’s secret weapon, whose very existence had to be concealed from the world. That was what kept her stories tonally different from Superman’s, and made the very nature of the central

conflicts, and the way the action had to be staged, unique: She did everything from behind the scenes, and, occasionally, suffered pangs of resentment when she got no credit for what she’d accomplished. This, I think, was the reason the original backup series was thought to have increased Action’s sales; the secrecy conceit challenged the writers to find surprising plot turns and twist endings of the sort that couldn’t be found in any other Superman family series.

“Once Weisinger thought he’d milked that gimmick dry, and her identity was revealed to the world, the series sort of fell into a rut, because they couldn’t come up with some new element that defined the series as well as the secret weapon trope had. All the flip-flops and retconnings and endless costume redesigns that followed seemed to be the desperate flailings of creatives trying to justify the existence of a character that had, for all intents and purposes, become superfluous to the mythology.

“I know I certainly wasn’t able to solve that problem in my Superman Family run on the feature—though, to be honest, I wasn’t trying to reinvent the wheel, and probably wouldn’t have been allowed to if I’d tried.

“So, once DC came to realize that the core readership demo had shifted older, to comprise teenagers, college students, and even adults, their editors and writers had trouble, I think, keeping the feature fresh and making the character relatable to older readers.

“Moreover, by the ’70s, feminism was working against the property,” Pasko adds. “She had to be

Supergirl in the Bronze Age Issue

The Girl and Boy of Steel When Dick Giordano illustrated this Supergirl/Superboy poster in 1978, he had no idea that a few years later the super-pair would be slated to co-headline DC Double Comics, a title that would never see the light of day.

TM & © DC Comics.

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As Seen on the Silver Screen (right) The gorgeous García-López/ Giordano cover to DC’s adaptation of the 1984 Supergirl movie, and (left) the original art to its splash page (courtesy of Heritage), illo’ed

by Gray Morrow and adapted by Joey Cavalieri.

TM & © DC Comics.

Supergirl because that was the trademark that DC had registered and was forced to exploit, but the character was, rightfully, Superwoman.”

“One of the biggest deals with regard to Supergirl in the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s was that the most significant thing about her development was her origin,” Elliot S. Maggin believes.

“She was this Kryptonian orphan with a tragic past and a famous cousin and her training and public debut were a long, milky process. What Mort Weisinger, the old Superman series editor, used to do was conjure up something—pretty much anything—to do as a special event every six months.

Some of these special events worked; some of them didn’t.

But it was a pretty good way to keep the Superman titles all integrated and fresh. So he’d throw in a super-dog here and a new color kryptonite there and a legion of teenagers from the future and a mermaid from Atlantis and so forth.

So when I was nine, what Mort gave me to get all excited over was a hot cousin from an irradiated island in space.

“But after that, no one much paid attention to her character development in a long-term sense—and, of course, that was an ongoing issue. So the next really significant thing to happen to her was that she died. Sure, before that happened we found her foster folks and sent her to college and even made her a faculty member, but all the things that befell her, unlike the timeline of her more

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prominent cousin, were pretty much conventional life events.

There was a mer-guy at some point, I think, but still…

“I always thought this was a character who needed more boogie. Hope she’s getting it now.”

When the Supergirl movie made its US premiere on November 21, 1984, the only comic book on the stands in support of it was a one-shot adaptation written by Joey Cavalieri and drawn by Gray Morrow. “We were sent three or four versions of the script, from which we did the story,” Julius Schwartz detailed in Comics Feature #30. “Then the fella from England, where it’s being finished, looked it over and said, ‘Oh, that’s been cut out of the movie … and that …’ ” The end result was some unexpected bonus content in the comic book.

Even with those extra scenes, the movie couldn’t have been saved, though. Despite actress Helen Slater’s fine realization of Supergirl herself, the film as a whole was a campy trainwreck that opened to horrible reviews and poor box-office results. “Julie was one of the few DC execs invited to a small, private screening of Supergirl,” Robert Greenberger tells BACK ISSUE. “When he got back, he told us it was not very good. He met Helen Slater there and when the lights went up, she was in tears, clearly aware she was featured in a bomb. Good thing she had a career after that.”

The movie version of Supergirl’s costume made its only newsstand comic-book appearance in the adaptation, although it was also used in a pair of Honda-sponsored giveaway comics. Produced in support of seat-belt usage for the US Department of Transportation, the 1984 edition was the more elaborate of the two with a story that involved the Maid of Might entering the dreams of a teenage car accident victim. Illustrated by Angelo Torres, the story was a collaboration of plotters Joe Orlando, Barry Marx, and Robert Loren Fleming and scripter Andy Helfer. A reported one million copies of the issue were distributed in January 1985 to 22,000 schools across the country. A 1986 sequel was once again plotted by Orlando (with Helfer and Marx as scripters), with a penciling collaboration by Jose Delbo, Orlando, and Dave Hunt, with inks by Bob Oksner.

SUPERGIRL IN SUMMATION By that time, Supergirl had been dead for a year. From a licensing standpoint, a Supergirl had to return and, of course, one did in 1988. This version, though, was an artificial being from a parallel reality—created by John Byrne—rather than a Kryptonian.

Alternately known as Matrix, this new Supergirl became an increasing presence in the Superman titles during the first half of the 1990s before acquiring her own comic book, scripted by Peter David from 1996 to 2003.

“Peter David probably came closest to defining [the post-Crisis Supergirl] in relatable and believable terms,” Martin Pasko opines, “but he was burdened by having to untangle all that post-Crisis ‘she-died-but-was-recreated-in-the-PocketUniverse-as-Matrix’ nonsense for many issues before he found his footing and made the feature really take off (though, for me, personally, all that Earth Angel stuff was head-spinning and difficult to follow). After that, because of the mania for retconning everything every five minutes, that has dominated the editorial thinking on superhero comics from that day to this, everything Peter David did was swept away by his successors, to the point where the Supergirl persona was adopted by characters other than Linda Danvers!

“Supergirl is what I call a ‘doorknob character’: Everyone’s taken a turn,” Pasko concludes. “And, as a result, I think that today, there’s no real consensus on what the character is supposed to be and what purpose it serves.”

Peter David’s run aside, a proper secret identity for the heroine was largely a thing of the past. Linda Danvers had ceased to be part of the heroine’s mythology. Whether or not that factor has made an impact on Supergirl is open to debate.

“Sometimes it’s more fun and interesting to write the secret identity than the costume,” Paul Kupperberg observes. “Yes, superheroes can do anything, pull the solution to any problem out of their butt, beat up anyone, and that gets really dull to write after a while, especially with characters as powerful as the ones in the Superman family … and at the time, I was not only writing Supergirl but Superman, Superboy, issues of DC Comics Presents, and the Superman newspaper syndicate strip, so any deviation from all that Kryptonianess was a relief.”

Elliot S. Maggin agrees, remarking, “I think Linda Danvers should have been more important to the Supergirl persona than she was. But once she was out on her own, no longer had parents (or an orphanage) to report back to, we never really did much with her personal development. A character like Supergirl needed a graphic novel or a limited series to flesh her out, but we didn’t think that way then. Everything was about what are we going to do this month with this story and long-term thinking was just something you had to bring in from home. Good thing I didn’t have to punch a time clock.”

Jack C. Harris, on the other hand “liked any development that took her further and further away from being a parallel to Superman’s origin and background. Sans secret identity was a good move along those lines. When I first began reading comics, the introduction of Supergirl was the first big change in the comics I had been reading for about four years previous. When I later got to write some of her adventures and, for a brief time, got to shape her destiny, it was a thrill. I was saddened when she died during the Crisis and will always have a soft spot for any version of the character.”

Forgotten in the story of Supergirl’s passing is a detail that no one had the opportunity to exploit before DC rebooted its history: Linda Danvers was still alive … sort of. That revelation had its roots in the 1983 story wherein Supergirl was attacked by six miniature clones of herself (Daring #10–12). Stripping them of their powers with Gold Kryptonite, the Girl of Steel left them incubating in the Fortress of Solitude. As revealed in Supergirl #19, the sextet escaped, merged into a single full-sized woman, and—still powerless— used a shuttle to travel from the Arctic to Chicago. Stripping Supergirl of the memories of her civilian identity, the mortal clone intended to step into her life as Linda.

The trauma of the experience caused “Linda” to forget her origins, too, and confusion reigned for much of the story before Supergirl awakened and snapped her double back to her senses. In tears, “Linda” explained that she wanted nothing more than the normal life in the memories she shared with the real Kara. “It’s a big world out there,” Supergirl compassionately assured her clone, “with plenty of room for two people with this one face. We can find a place for you … a name of your own.”

Given Supergirl’s heroic fate just months later, one can’t help but wonder what ever became of “Linda.” Did she slip into her counterpart’s life in Chicago with no one—save the grieving Fred and Edna Danvers—the wiser? Or did she remain a “secret weapon,” hiding in plain sight with the memories of a Kryptonian orphan who saved the world? Whatever the answer, she—and countless readers—would never forget the legend of Supergirl.

DC Comics historian JOHN WELLS is the author of TwoMorrows Publications’ American Comic Book Chronicles: 1960–1964 and 1965–1969, both of which you really should read.

Buckle Up with Kara Two Supergirl oddities, the Honda-produced giveaways, with cover art by (top) Angelo Torres and (bottom) Joe Orlando and Bob Oksner.

Supergirl TM & © DC Comics.

Supergirl in the Bronze Age Issue

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Supergirl in the Bronze Age Issue

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by

Chris Franklin

Pose and Play Supergirl and her DC fabulous femmes, from the 1974 Mego catalogue.

Supergirl TM & © DC Comics.

The Maid of Might may have made quite an impression on comic readers when she debuted in Action Comics #252, but it took her awhile to catch on outside of those pulpy pages. Supergirl would have to wait until issue #285 before Superman revealed her existence to the world, and it would take even longer for the real world to notice the Last Daughter of Krypton.

THE IDEAL GIRL Her famous cousin returned to TV in 1966 via The New Adventures of Superman animated series produced by Filmation. Surprisingly, Kara never appeared on that show, and therefore had no outside media exposure during the Silver Age. She did manage to appear in Topps’ rather strange Comic Book Foldees cards and a set of Superman temporary tattoos produced that same year. While she missed out on the DC Comics figure sets produced by Ideal Toys and Multiple Toy Makers at this time, there was a Superman and Supergirl Push Button Puppet set produced by Kohner in that fabled year when superhero merchandise flooded the shelves in the wake of the meteoric rise of the Batman television show. Although the box features a beautiful portrait of the young Girl of Steel, the puppet itself leaves much to be desired, with huge, ropey bare arms, and a very blank expression on her face.

The following year, the fad had begun to die down, but that didn’t stop toy manufacturer Ideal, fresh from the initial success with their male superhero action figure, Captain Action. The good Captain could be outfitted with the costumes and accessories of comics’ and TV’s most popular heroes. Ideal utilized those licenses, and their existing Tammy fashion doll molds, to create the Super Queens. Also known as Comic Heroines, this line included Wonder Woman, the only female superhero to survive from

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the Golden Age in her own title; Batgirl, the Silver Age version then currently seen on the above-mentioned Batman TV series; Mera, wife of Aquaman and frequent co-star on The Superman/Aquaman Hour of Adventure (the Filmation Superman series’ new vehicle); and Supergirl.

The Girl of Steel came in a mostly accurate outfit, and with traditional blonde hair, unlike Wonder Woman and Batgirl, whose tresses varied from their comic portrayals. Rather than her cat Streaky, Supergirl came packed with Krypto the Superdog. Frugal Ideal just threw in a Krypto identical to the one seen in the Captain Action Superman uniform set. Although the gorgeous Murphy Anderson box art depicted an image of “Linda Lee Danvers, College Coed,” only a generic halter dress was included for changes into civilian clothes.

(Brunette wig not included.)

While the Super Queens are considered by many as a sister line to Captain Action, it is interesting to note that the female dolls were of the characters themselves, not an “actor” doll portraying the superheroes.

Despite this, they didn’t catch on with boys, or even girls, and the line flopped. The series was discontinued, and costume parts were discarded as girls absorbed the basic dolls into average Barbie fashion doll play.

Boxed examples are holy grails amongst superhero toy collectors in general, and Captain Action completists in particular.

The late ’60s and early ’70s were an extremely dry period for any superhero merchandise. The mania of 1966–1967 had burned bright, but apparently burned out the general public, or at least fickle toy manufacturers. There was little chance for a struggling young ingénue like Supergirl to make a splash with kids outside of comics— but that was about to change.

FROM ARGO TO MEGO In 1972, the Mego Toy Corporation introduced its World’s Greatest Super Heroes action-figure line. Initially consisting of four 8-inch representations of DC’s most widely known male heroes—Superman, Batman, Robin, and Aquaman—Mego soon expanded the line with Marvel heroes, villains, and female characters. In 1974, Mego released a subset branded as Official World’s Greatest Super-Gals, which included Wonder Woman, Batgirl, Catwoman, and Supergirl. Even Catwoman had become a media star thanks to the Batman television series, which was still in heavy syndication by this point.

Supergirl had yet to crack the airwaves.

Mego had pioneered the practice of using one body style across multiple action-figure lines and continued its cost-saving practices by using one face sculpt for all four females. Different paint applications and rooted synthetic hair provided the distinct features of each character.

Supergirl featured piercing blue eyes and a blonde flip hairstyle, creating a convincing parallel of her comic counterpart. By the time Mego introduced their figure, Kara had abandoned her very ’50s one-piece dress for a variety of “far-out” uniforms, some designed by comic readers. She eventually settled on a version consisting of a blue v-neck blouse with puffy sleeves and small “S” symbol over her left breast, red hot pants, red ballet slippers with straps, and a red cape with choker. This is the costume Mego immortalized in action-figure form, minus the slipper straps. The first releases of the Super-Gals vary from the majority of the figures produced over the course of the line. Early figures of all four, including Supergirl, feature screen-printed costumes, with few accessories. For instance, Supergirl’s “S” insignia, belt, shorts, and slippers are all printed on a one-piece outfit. Later releases feature removable belt and slippers, a sticker to simulate the “S” shield, as well as individual fabric pieces stitched together to make her blouse, shorts, and leggings. All versions feature a removable nylon cape, although there are some cape variations made out of a stiffer and far more durable vinyl. The very small plastic slippers have haunted Mego collectors for years, as they are easily lost, due to their tiny size and ill fit over the bodysuit.

Mego produced the Supergirl figure for several years, packaging her in a variety of ways. The original box featured Bob Oksner’s full-body portrait of Kara from the corner icon of contemporary Adventure Comics and Supergirl issues. Later Mego packaging featured portraits of Supergirl on the front of the package, alongside heavy hitters like her cousin Superman, Batman, Robin, and Shazam! (Captain Marvel). These characters were regularly seen on TV, thanks to the various versions of the Super Friends animated series, the live-action Shazam! show, and reruns. Except for Supergirl, that is. It’s interesting that Mego chose to add her to these media darlings.

These Supergirl portraits included a reuse of the Bob Oksner art and two different headshots, at least one of which was lifted from the art of Dick Giordano. By the time the last two card variations were released, Mego had discontinued production of the Supergirl figure, but like other canceled characters, she continued to appear on the cards, perhaps to move existing stock.

One of the rarer figures in the fabled World’s Greatest Superhero line is the “peace belt” Supergirl released by Mego’s French distributor, Pin Pin Toys.

This figure substitutes the standard Supergirl belt for one with a peace-symbol belt buckle, culled from Mego’s defunct Dinah-Mite fashion doll line. A unique variation of the Mego Supergirl comes from manufacturer Lil Ledy in Mexico. While based on the Mego designs, due to Mexican laws, the Lil Ledy figures use parts unique to Mexican production. Their Supergirl, or “Supernina,”

’70s Supergirl Stuff

figure features tall boots instead of tiny slippers.

Supergirl as drawn by Neal Adams makes an appearance on the outside of Mego’s vinyl and cardboard Hall of Justice playset for the 8-inch WGSH figures.

While Mego offered many of their comic characters in a variety of formats, Supergirl only received one other figure from the company. She joined the other Super-Gals in the Bend ’n Flex line around the same time as their 8-inch figures were introduced. These were simple wireframed bendies, and were only in production for a short amount of time. Supergirl was never offered in Mego’s later 12-inch or 3 3/4-inch lines, unfortunately. Of the Super-Gals, only Wonder Woman, by then a TV star, received that honor. A replica of the Mego 8-inch Supergirl was released late in 2014 by Figures Toy Company.

Supergirl in the Bronze Age Issue

A grab-bag of Supergirl items from the 1970s. Mego images courtesy of the Mego Museum.

Supergirl TM & © DC Comics.

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For the Super-Thirsty (top) Pepsi’s Supergirl glass, and (bottom) courtesy of Jim Tyler, a prototype for the unproduced second Supergirl glass.

Supergirl TM & © DC Comics.

SUPER THIRST AND HUNGER Despite never making an appearance on the longrunning Super Friends cartoon series, if a large group of DC characters appeared on products, Kara was there.

Among these were two fondly remembered series of drinking vessels. The first were plastic cups available in 7-11 stores, promoting their frozen Slurpee drink, and released in 1974. Once again, the Girl of Steel appeared via DC cover corner art by Bob Oksner. Kara joined not only her cousin and his supporting cast, but her teammates in the Legion of Super-Heroes, some of whom made their first product appearances here.

Two years later, a slightly more prestigious series of DC superhero drinking glasses debuted, courtesy of the Pepsi Corporation. These glasses were available at participating restaurants that served Pepsi fountain drinks. The first series produced in 1976 is commonly referred to as the “Moon Series” due to the large circle, or “moon,” behind each character. Supergirl is depicted in her hot-pants outfit, with hands on hips, but by this point in the comics, she had ditched the dainty slippers for her original, Superman-like boots.

She stands before a large yellow circle, and her classic logo appears beneath her. The image is printed twice on the glass. This artwork, which appears to be the work of Dick Giordano, would replace the Orlando piece as the standard licensing stock shot for Supergirl for the rest of the decade.

In 1978, DC and Pepsi partnered for another series of glasses, but the variety of offerings was significantly smaller. This time, Supergirl was left out of the actual release, but prototypes do exist of a glass featuring the Maid of Might. The unknown artist depicts a rather chesty Supergirl rearing back as she breaks a heavy rope bound to both wrists.

If you wanted a sandwich with your Supergirl glass, you could always pack it in your 1976 Super Friends lunchbox by Aladdin. This box featured a bevy of DC super-stars, with the female heroes taking the most prominent spots, probably due to the success of the Wonder Woman TV series which began that year. Although the Amazing Amazon and Batgirl get the prime placement on the box lid and back, Kara is represented via a bust shot on the left side panel.

In 1998, Hallmark released a smaller replica and a holiday ornament based on this lunchbox.

If your mom bought Sunbeam brand bread to make that sandwich, you may have found a Supergirl sticker in the wrapper! In 1978 offered DC stickers in marked Sunbeam packages, and while Supergirl had to share a sticker with her more famous cousin, at least she was well-represented, once more with artwork by Dick Giordano.

For culinary comic fans, The DC Superheroes Super Healthy Cookbook provided some tasty ways to mix your favorite heroes with your favorite foods. Authors Mark Saltzman, Judy Garlan, and Michele Godner share Supergirl’s recipe for “Heat Vision Chicken.”

The illustration inside shows Kara zapping a pan of chicken, as drawn by Ross Andru and Dick Giordano.

STUCK ON THE GIRL FROM KRYPTON In the ’70s, Supergirl fans had several options for decorating their rooms with their favorite heroine.

Fans of Bronze Age DC Comics no doubt remember the ads for Super Big Superhero Stick-Ons, which ran in 1974. For only $2.50 (plus 45¢ shipping and handling) you would receive a 14-piece sticker set featuring DC’s brightest stars, including Supergirl, in her standard Oksner cover corner pose. The ad showed the larger stickers stuck on a living room

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wall, while the smaller Supergirl sticker was relegated to a lunchbox. Hey, at least she edged out Batgirl by making it into the set at all!

Supergirl led a parade of DC’s famous females on the September image of the 1976 Super DC Calendar. For that month, Kara is shown in the center, arm and arm with Black Canary, Mary Marvel, Lois Lane, and Hawkgirl, in a lovely drawing by Dick Giordano. This artwork would be repurposed on the last series of carded Mego packaging previously mentioned. The calendar shows September to be a huge month for the Girl of Steel, with her birthday falling on September 22nd, and her famous public debut happening on September 30th. Supergirl is also selected to represent her birth sign, Virgo.

The 1978 DC Super Heroes Poster Book featured Kara running forward with some of DC’s bravest (and most villainous). She was relegated to the back cover, and had to settle for a repeat of the cover image inside; no solo poster for her this time.

SUPER SLUMBER PARTY For girls planning a ’70s sleepover with lots of records and sleeping bags, Supergirl had you covered. In 1976, Publications, Inc. released its Super Case, a vinyl and cardboard carrying case plastered with large images of some of DC Comics’ biggest and brightest.

A yellow oval sticker tells the owner that this is a “washable record & toy carry case,” meaning it was also okay to store your Megos inside! Another good option for inclusion in the case were the Power Records releases by Peter Pan Records. Power Records included audio adventures (sometimes with readalong comics) of DC’s top stars … but no Supergirl.

The Maid of Might was once again left out in the media cold. But she was allowed on the carrying case.

Although the Batman Family takes up the prime real estate on the front of the case, a large image of Supergirl, hands on hips again, appears alongside her cousin Superman, and Wonder Woman, on the back, with her classic logo appearing on the side.

It’s that same image of Supergirl that appears again on the Wonder Woman sleeping bag released that same year. A large, Murphy Anderson-drawn image of Wonder Woman dominates both sides of the bag, but some support heroines, and one villainess, make a large impression as well. A large figure of Supergirl stands proudly in the upper left corner, while Batgirl, Catwoman, and even Wonder Girl join the Maid of Might in flanking the Amazing Amazon, along with their logos. The bag came in both yellow and green colors, for those discerning girls who didn’t want to make a slumber party fashion faux paus by bringing the same sleeping bag!

CLOTHES MAKE THE GIRL As the ’70s rolled into the early ’80s, Supergirl would soon find a merchandising niche she would one day thrive in; apparel.

In 1974, a few pages over from the Super Stick-On ads, DC fans could find a mail-in order form for 4-inch embroidered patches featuring a bevy of DC heroes and bad guys. Supergirl was one of the chosen few, with artwork lifted from the Art Saaf/Vince Colletta splash page of 1972’s Supergirl #1. At only $1 a patch, they were a steal.

If girls wanted to wear their love for Supergirl a little closer to their heart, there was always Underoos.

With the famous tagline of “Underwear That’s Fun to Wear,” Underoos were character-themed underwear for girls and boys, featuring their favorite media properties.

The DC superheroes were well represented, and

Supergirl was right there with them. The initial Supergirl release was a bikini top and bottom that simulated Kara’s then-current “hot pants” uniform, complete with small “S” symbol on the left.

The packaging art seems to be an in-house design and not any of the usual DC-generated artwork. Underoos also released a thermal underwear set featuring Supergirl, with long sleeve blue top (with small “S” shield), and red bottoms. The packaging art on this one looks to be a new piece, with at least inks by Dick Giordano. The ad campaign for Underoos may have given Supergirl her first television appearance, as an animated version leads a commercial showcasing other superheroines, including Wonder Woman, Batgirl, and even rival characters Spider-Woman and Betty and Veronica! These commercials with young girls in their underwear, interacting with animated versions of their heroes, are a nostalgic time capsule of a somewhat more innocent time.

It’s doubtful we’d see commercials like this today.

If you wanted to dress as Supergirl in public, and perhaps get some candy, Ben Cooper had the costume for you. The famous maker of Halloween costumes included Supergirl in their lineup at various times from the ’60s thru the ’80s. Cooper was known for making some rather … interesting choices when interpreting licensed characters, but their Supergirl masks and costumes were pretty accurate, for the most part. In the mid-’70s, the Girl from Krypton even managed to make it onto the box art of all the female superheroines, along with her perennial co-stars Wonder Woman and Batgirl. Later editions of the Supergirl costume reflected her early ’80s costume change, with the addition of the infamous headband, molded right on the vinyl mask.

Order Yours Today!

Comic-book house ads for DC superhero stickers and sew-on patches, both featuring Supergirl and using pre-existing comic art.

Supergirl TM & © DC Comics.

ALWAYS A BRIDESMAID OF MIGHT… A quick overview of Supergirl merchandise thus far will show she was somewhat of an also-ran, appearing amongst other DC heroes, but rarely on her own. In addition to the items mentioned above, a toddler-version of Supergirl also took part in the Super Jrs. merchandising campaign, detailed in BACK ISSUE #76. The adult version of the Girl of Steel made several appearances in the Super Friends Action Valentine Playbook by Valentine card staple Cleo. This book featured cut-out Valentine cards and activities, with most of the art newly drawn by Dick Giordano for this project.

To add insult to injury is the tale of Supergirl’s involvement in the Super Powers toy line from Kenner. The Ohio-based toy company was one of many who pitched to become the new manufacturer of DC Comics action figures when Mego went bankrupt in 1982. As revealed in the Aug.–Sept. 1995 issue of Tomart’s Action Figure Digest, Kenner mocked up several characters to present to DC, utilizing their popular Star Wars figures for the males, and their Glamour Gals small fashion dolls for the two females, Wonder Woman and Supergirl. A rough paint job over a blonde 3 3/4-inch figure represented Kara in her soon-to-be revamped hot pants outfit once more. Kenner proposed a “power action feature” in each figure, and DC bought the concept.

The line went through several years of development before debuting in 1984, and lasting for three series of figures. Nowhere among those releases was a figure of Supergirl. She had helped to open the door, only to have it slammed in her face. This is doubly ironic when you consider that the very year the Super Powers figures hit the racks, Kara Zor-El became a movie star.

(As a consolation prize, Supergirl starred in Archway/Pocket Books’ Super Powers-branded Which Way Book #2, written by Andrew Helfer and drawn by Jose Delbo.)

FLYING SOLO AT LAST Having been left out of the first three Superman films produced

by Alexander and Ilya Salkind, the Girl of Steel finally got her chance to shine when Supergirl debuted in American theaters November 21, 1984. To say the movie didn’t connect with audiences is an understatement, and history has almost universally decreed it as an odd mish-mash of a film that doesn’t quite know what it wants to be. Two things are certain, however: actress Helen Slater made a great Supergirl, despite the material she was given, and the film finally gave the character some merchandise she could call her own.

Supergirl in the Bronze Age Issue

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’80s Supergirl Stuff Supergirl Cookies, courtesy of CollectingSuperman.com, and the Which Way Book, courtesy of John Wells.

Supergirl TM & © DC Comics.

DC’s licensing arm had high hopes for the film, given the pedigree of its predecessors starring Christopher Reeve as Kara’s big cousin.

There was quite a push of tie-in merchandise waiting for the film’s debut. Nabisco began producing a series of Superheroes Cookies in 1982, with front box art by George Pérez, featuring an army of DC heroes and villains racing toward the hungry kid begging his mom for a box. The backs of the boxes featured different portraits of a DC hero or villain, often drawn by José Luis García López and Dick Giordano.

Inside, kids would find animal cracker-like figural cookies of these DC super-stars. For the first two years of production, Supergirl was nowhere in sight. But in 1984, the Maid of Might, replete in her new outfit with red tennis skirt and headband, led the charge on the box, which were now marked as “Superheroes Cookies now with SUPERGIRL COOKIES.” The Supergirl logo dwarfs the old Superheroes one, and Kara is front and center on the box, even pushing Batman and Robin off to the side! Dick Giordano’s pen seems to be involved with this revised artwork as well, as some elements recall his art for the DC Super Heroes Poster Book mentioned previously. Not content to take just the front of the box, the Supergirl movie usurped the back as well, with 15 cut-out trading cards available, showcasing scenes from the film.

Publisher Grosset & Dunlap released a series of coloring and activity books based on the film. The covers featured stills from the movie, and the artwork inside captured the likenesses of Slater, Faye Dunaway, Peter O’Toole, Marc McClure as Jimmy Olsen, and more. Such books rarely feature credits, but the activity book actually denotes that is written and illustrated by Tony Tallarico, a veteran comic artist most famous for his work at Gold Key. Even more interesting is the Supergirl Cut-Out Paper Doll Book by artist Tom Tierney, which features painted full-body shots of the film’s actors … in their underwear. Where are Underoos when you need them?

Not to be outdone, publisher G.P. Putnam’s Sons released The Supergirl Storybook, where author Wendy Andrews tries to make sense of the film’s rambling plot. This lovely book is packed with full-color stills from the movie, and goes a long way toward showing how the end product seemed to fall far short of everyone’s expectations.

A GIRL IN CRISIS And then … she was gone. Despite her heading toward film stardom, by 1984 the DC brass had earmarked Supergirl for the dustbin in the 30 • BACK ISSUE • Supergirl in the Bronze Age Issue

planning stages for their epic Crisis on Infinite Earths maxiseries. Oddly enough, a few years earlier, DC was so swayed by early test footage of Slater in a revised Supergirl costume with red patterns on her shoulders, and that infamous headband, that they changed the comic version’s costume to match. The burn is the film’s production team changed their mind, and went with a much more traditional look, leaving the comics flapping in the wind. It was this Olivia Newton-John-like look that followed the character into any nonmovie merchandise she appeared on from 1983 into the early ’90s, well beyond her death in Crisis #7 (Oct. 1985). Despite that death, and her subsequent erasure from DC continuity, Kara, with headband, would still appear on merchandise as if Earth-One lived on in toy aisles, on sticker sheets, and even collector coins, advertised in postCrisis DC Comics!

SUPER FASHION PLATE With such a rocky past in merchandising, it’s amazing to see the amount of Supergirl product that is available at retail today. Walk into a store with a clothing department and you may very well find a T-shirt, pajama set, or pack of underwear with Supergirl and/or her logo on it.

And make no mistake, this isn’t just Superman clothing marketed toward girls. Many of these items feature tags marking them as official Supergirl brand merchandise. It’s doubtful many of these young girls and women even knew who Kara is beyond being a female equivalent of Superman—at least until 2015’s new Supergirl TV show. But it doesn’t really matter.

From her comics ups and downs, countless reboots, relaunches, new identities, and even struggles with media success, the Maid of Might endures. So long as any little girl … or grown woman … dreams of taking flight, Supergirl isn’t far away.

CHRIS FRANKLIN hosts the Super Mates podcast with his wife Cindy, at www.supermatescomic.blogspot.com.

He would like to thank his friends at www.megomuseum.com and www.aquamanshrine.net for supplying great resources. His little girl has plenty of Supergirl pajamas.

TM

Superwoman is not Kara Zor-El. She is also not Luma Lynai, the Superwoman of planet Staryl, nor is she the Superwoman of Earth-Three and member of the Crime Syndicate. No, this Superwoman is also not Lois Lane, her sister Lucy Lane, nor is she from a parallel world, nor is she a magical creation. This Superwoman is a time traveler. This is the story of Kristin Wells, created by writer Elliot S. Maggin.

THERE’S A NEW GIRL IN TOWN

by

Jim Ford

Kristin Wells was an intense, liberated woman who believed that the Equal Rights Amendment should be ratified immediately. She deplored the exploitation of women in contemporary magazines, though she chose to redo her hair every month in the fashion of the model on the cover of Cosmopolitan. Kristin was nothing if she was not “with it.” She loved disco dancing, Sonny and Cher, and was into astrology. Kristin possessed a knowledge of the Second World War that amazed even Lois Lane, whose father was a colonel in the Army. In turn she could not be bothered with politics. Kristin was fascinated by the chest hair Steve Lombard exposed from behind his unbuttoned shirt. It was as though she had never seen such a thing.

She was a typist fast enough on her Olympia portable typewriter to support herself by transcribing both Lois Lane’s true-crime novel and the anonymous autobiography of Lena Thorul, a telepath whom, at Lois’ suggestion, was writing her own book, A Burden of Prophecy.

Kristin Wells was above all else “outrageously foxy,” with a freckle at the tip of her nose that Clark Kent was sure drove Jimmy Olsen crazy.

She rented a small but fashionable second-floor studio apartment on the Upper West Side of Metropolis. It was, Kristin supposed, “très chic.” Dozens of spider plants, wandering jews, and ferns of all sorts hung from the ceiling while philodendron, caladia, and fecund coleus jammed every other space in the room, nearly concealing a poster proclaiming “Shower with a Friend.”

It was this lone apartment that C. W. Saturn, the agent of the Underworld, chose to preserve while the remainder of the building crumbled around it. He destroyed the building solely to attract the attention of Superman.

C. W. Saturn chose to possess the body of Kristin Wells because she quite simply did not belong in that world.

Kristin was new in town. Not as new as some, who crowded into every available hotel room during a time of unprecedented chaos for a glimpse at the very first Miracle Monday: time travelers, all. Kristin was herself a time traveler from the year 2857, a graduate student in history at Columbia University whose fellowship project was also to learn the events that transpired on the third Monday in May. No one knew why, on this particular Monday, that the people of the world felt immeasurable joy at simply being alive. They only knew that somehow Superman was responsible, and so the day became holy.

It was Kristin’s genius that led her to travelling backwards several months before the actual day in May to ingratiate herself into Superman’s circle of friends,

Meet Kristen Wells Superman introduces Superwoman. Cover to 1982’s DC Comics Presents Annual #2 by Gil Kane.

TM & © DC Comics.

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so that she could witness it from their perspective. She was successful in her plan, even meeting Superman himself in his Clark Kent identity. What her plan did not call for, and what she could not anticipate, is that she would become the very focus of events winding their way toward Miracle Monday. What Kristin could not anticipate was that every person on the face of the Earth would come to know her name and despise her for her actions, though she was clearly not the cause.

What Kristin could not anticipate was that even those among Superman’s closest friends would call for her death.

THE NOVELS

This is a Job for… …Superwoman! An electrifying debut, from DC Comics Presents Annual #2 (1983). Art by Keith Pollard and Mike DeCarlo. (inset) Cover to Maggin’s Superman: Miracle Monday novel.

TM & © DC Comics.

Christopher Reeve is the very personification of Superman as he flies over the burning streets of Metropolis on the cover of Superman: Miracle Monday (Warner Books, 1981), the second paperback book in a short series of Superman novels written by Maggin. It was in this novel that Kristin Wells first appeared. The novel was published to coincide with the release of the new movie Superman II and was marketed as a direct tie-in. The cover adapted a scene from the movie and included eight pages of black-and-white stills also taken from the movie, but Superman: Miracle Monday, like its predecessor Superman: Last Son of Krypton (Warner Books, 1978), had nothing more to do with the movie other than the familiarity of its main characters.

Superman: Last Son of Krypton began life as a movie proposal. “It was around 1974,” Maggin told John Siuntres in a recent interview on the Word Balloon podcast, “I wrote a four- or five-page memo and gave it to [Superman editor] Julie [Schwartz] and gave it to [publisher] Carmine [Infantino]. I made the case to Carmine that—you know, I had studied sociology in college—and I thought it was a time for heroes to return. We were in cycles. It was the period when Nixon was president and everyone was suddenly remembering John Kennedy and a time when the people we admired most we elected for president.

Well, I thought, it was a time for Superman. I said we’re going to have to make a Superman movie because if we don’t make it somebody else will make something like it with another character and we’ll be out in the cold.

So I wrote this treatment—big, high-flying space story, science-fiction-y thing—and Carmine got all excited about the idea of making a Superman movie.”

The assignment to prepare the first draft of Superman: The Movie eventually went to novelist and Academy Awardwinning author Mario Puzo.

Even though Superman: Last Son of Krypton did not become the movie for which it was intended, it was a bestseller nonetheless. It was not received by the broad audience that a movie would have reached, or that Maggin would have hoped for. “I rarely met anybody that read anything I wrote and now I remember that when I wrote the Superman books, the novels, they were bestsellers—for heaven’s sakes—and I must have been forty before I actually ran into somebody who was reading one,” Maggin continued in the Word Balloon interview. “I sold half-a-million of those first books, it was four-fifty, four hundred and fifty thousand copies of that thing sold and I didn’t know who read them until they grew up and told me. I always had this vision of sitting on this—there was always this, you know, book-ofthe-month—you get on the subway and there was this row of leggy secretaries reading the same book across from you and I always wanted the row of leggy secretaries to be reading my book, but I never wrote a book that was of that sort.”

Warner Books asked Maggin to write a second novel to tie into the second Superman movie. “For me at least, Miracle Monday is a real holiday,” Maggin wrote in the postscript to DC Comics Presents Annual #2 (1983). “As it happens, here in the real world, I received my first copy of Superman: Miracle Monday in the mail from my editor at Warner Books on May 18, the third Monday in the month of May 1981. It was a special day, totally coincidental, and I’ve never really told anyone that before … so along with my birthday, Einstein’s birthday, and the first day of summer, Miracle Monday is a day that I will probably continue to set apart.”

Unfortunately for Superman fans, there was no third Superman novel written

by Maggin, as he told John Siuntres: “And actually they asked me to do the novelization of the third movie. They gave me a script and I read it and I said, ‘No, I don’t want to do this.’ They didn’t want an original story. They wanted an adaptation and I said, ‘Jeez, that sucks.’ And that was probably not a great career move. That’s what I did.”

32 • BACK ISSUE • Supergirl in the Bronze Age Issue

Lots of Luthors Eduardo Barreto’s painted cover to the Superwoman sequel, DC Comics Presents Annual #4 (1984).

TM & © DC Comics.

THE COMICS Much as Maggin used one of his earliest comic creations, Towbee the Minstrel of Space from Action Comics #420 (Jan. 1973), for Superman: Last Son of Krypton, Maggin expanded on another of his own Superman stories for Superman: Miracle Monday, this time from Superman #293 (Nov. 1975, inset) and a story called “The Miracle of Thirsty Thursday!”

There, Joann Jaime from the year 3475 travels back in time to witness this single historical event of Thirsty Thursday, a day when the city of Metropolis was cut off from the rest of the world and none of its citizens recalled what occurred. Far from being an integral player in the events of Thirsty Thursday, Joann Jaime is merely a witless bystander.

Still, the key plot devices of Superman: Miracle Monday are evident: a time traveler sets the stage and reports on the events of a day no one remembered and Joann Jaime inserted herself, however briefly, into Clark Kent’s life.

“Who is Superwoman?”, Kristin Wells asked her class of early American history students during her first four-color appearance in the pages of DC Comics Presents Annual #2. Superwoman was, Kristin continued, “quite possibly the greatest heroine of the 20th Century.”

Maggin introduced Kristin, now a professor of history at the Metropolis campus of Columbia University in the year 2862, to a new audience in this story, with artwork by Keith Pollard and Mike DeCarlo. Kristin again travels back in time to the 20th Century to learn the “Last Secret Identity.”

Not surprisingly, Kristin is thrust into a situation demanding that she put on a Superwoman costume to save Metropolis after Superman, Supergirl, and the entire Justice League are struck down by a time traveler called King Kosmos. Using her futuristic technology to render herself immaterial, Kristin is immune to the effects of the tyrant’s devastating concussive forces.

Her powerful technology also allowed her to duplicate other abilities like flight and super-strength. Together with Superman, Superwoman defeated King Kosmos, sending him spinning lost through time.

The solution to her mystery resolved, Kristin returned home to record that she was in fact Superwoman.

Kristin Wells was celebrated as Superwoman in the far-future year 2865, but Superwoman was a hero from the distant past. In a paradox of causality Kristin had not yet performed most of the deeds for which she was renowned. She resolved at the beginning of DC Comics Presents Annual #4 (1985), in a story “Welcome to Luthorcon III!” by Maggin, Eduardo Barreto, and Jerry Ordway, to finally fulfill her destiny as the Woman from Tomorrow.

Crisis on Infinite Earths #7 (Oct. 1985), featuring the death of Supergirl, was released in the week prior to DC Comics Presents Annual #4, reaching the stands on July 18, 1985. Clearly, if a character with as rich a publishing history as Supergirl, who was even the title character in her own big-budget Hollywood movie, could succumb to the editorial axe, there would be absolutely no place for Superwoman in DC’s future.

A short year later, the Silver/Bronze Age of Superman came to an end in a two-part story beginning in Superman #423 (Sept. 1986).

Written by Alan Moore with art by Curt Swan, George Pérez, and Kurt Schaffenberger, “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?” concluded the life story of Superman that had been told since editor Mort Weisinger expanded the Superman family of titles in the 1950s.

This story paid tribute to the very best concepts that made the Man of Steel legendary, and Superwoman had a role as she, along with Superman’s long list of allies, came to his aid during his darkest moment. “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?” also concluded

the story of Earth-One. Although it had officially ceased to exist in the pages of Crisis on Infinite Earths, stories told in the confines of this universe lingered on until the disappearance of Superman at the end of Action Comics #583 (Sept. 1986). The general tone of comic-book storytelling was changing, becoming driven less by fantastical plotting and driven more by character dramatics.

Superman had to change. There would be no more stories of Elastic Lad, the Kryptonite Man, or a superpowered Lana Lang.

There would be no more stories of a time-travelling history professor given superpowers by futuristic technology, except for those that we, the readers, could imagine.

With Supergirl dead and Superman missing, Superwoman would have been the last hero standing to bear the “S” mantle. There was plenty of time for the Woman from Tomorrow to become “quite possibly the greatest heroine of the 20th Century.” A handful of montage pieces in the two DC Comics Presents Annuals revealed the stories that might have been—thrilling rescues, exciting fights with villains unknown, leading the Green Lantern Corps, receiving the accolades she deserved— the history yet to be written that never will be. Kristin’s destiny, known to all in the 29th Century, will never be known to us.

Superwoman, like Supergirl, was a victim of the Crisis on Infinite Earths.

All that we know for sure is that eventually Kristin Wells returned to her own time. The bloggers at comicbookresources.com asked Maggin if he had anything more planned for Superwoman. Maggin answered simply, “I want to live long enough to have a mad torrid affair with Kristin Wells.” Kristin was, above all else, outrageously foxy.

JIM FORD is married and has two great boys, one of whom wants to be Superman when he grows up.

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Global Guardian The British poster for the 1984 Supergirl movie. Collectors, take note that a variety of poster variations exist from different countries, many with painted art (see another on page 43). © 1984 DC Comics and Cantharus Productions N.V.

the rights, if I recall, to use any character that appeared in a Superman comic book! For example—and this is, of course, the big bomb—we could’ve used Batman in a Superman film! We had those rights.”

The Salkinds produced the feature films Superman in 1978 and Superman II in 1980. Both were critical and financial successes, and they established relatively unknown actor Christopher Reeve as Superman for a new generation. When Alexander passed on using Batman in Superman III, Ilya came up with the idea of incorporating Supergirl into the film mythos. A November 7, 1980 and March 27, 1981 treatment

by Ilya—labeled Superman III—is essentially a Supergirl film guest-starring the Man of Steel. The odd concoction drops Lois Lane, reintroduces Lana Lang, and finds that Supergirl was raised on an Earthlike planet SECRET ORIGINS OF THE FILM

by Brainiac to be his bride. Superman and Supergirl Film producer Ilya (pronounced ILL-yuh) Salkind had ilya salkind have a romance (they’re not related in the treatment), convinced his father, Alexander Salkind, to purchase Superman comes under the control of Brainiac, the film rights to the Superman franchise in 1973 from Mr. Mxyzptlk causes problems, Superman leaves National Periodical Publications (DC Comics). When the deal was Earth and ages preternaturally, and at the end … hints are that finalized in 1974, the Salkinds were free to develop film projects based on Superman and Supergirl may marry! any concept in the various Superman titles. In a 2015 interview with BACK “So that script Warners didn’t like,” Ilya laughs. “It was wild and ISSUE, Ilya laughs when he tells me of a grave mistake he felt he and his Warners didn’t go for it… And at that point, okay, we went for a different father made: “With hindsight, an enormous mistake was made and I can script, which, frankly, it’s difficult to judge.” The script for Superman III say partially by me, but I think my father was more responsible. We had

“You will believe a girl can fly!” It could have been the tagline for the 1984 Supergirl theatrical film, and perhaps should have been. After all, “From the producers of the Superman movies” and “Her First Great Adventure” didn’t turn out to be quite as enticing as Tri-Star Pictures hoped. Supergirl had many of the same ingredients as the hit Superman franchise: an attractive unknown in the lead, a big-name actor as the scenery-chewing villain, and many of the same production personnel who had so convincingly made Christopher Reeve seem superpowered in this pre-CGI era.

So, why wasn’t Supergirl a hit in theatres? And why is it remembered so fondly today by many fans, including the creators of the new CBS series? Success or failure, now you can get a look into the secrets of Supergirl…

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A “Physical” Role Four shots from Helen Slater’s December 1982 screen test, including (top left) Slater as Linda Lee, with director Jeannot Szwarc, and (others) Helen in the makeshift Supergirl costume with the infamous headband. © 1984 DC Comics and Tri-Star Pictures.

was much more comical in nature, co-starring comedian Szwarc (pronounced Zhah-no SVARK). He was a ParisianRichard Pryor. Although no one argues that the film didn’t born film buff, who says that he always wanted to direct: “It was very difficult. People discouraged me. I never went please critics or audiences as much as the first films, Ilya bristles at the idea that Superman III was a total failure. to film school. I was completely self-taught. I just saw 300 “This I want to correct a bit because it did actual rental movies a year when I was young so that kind of was of $60 million which, today, give me a movie that’ll my education.” Making his way to Hollywood post-1963, Szwarc eventually wrote for television make $60 million and I’ll be very before finally getting the job of happy! It wasn’t at all a disaster.” directing a few episodes of But Ilya didn’t want to give Ironside and It Takes a Thief, up on the idea of incorporating as well as 20 episodes of Supergirl into the film mythos, Rod Serling’s Night Gallery. so he decided to produce a “Eventually I said, ‘This is all I standalone film with the Girl of wanna do,’ which was kind of Steel. In the fall of 1982, “David risky. But it worked and that was it.”

Odell wrote, in my opinion, a very Szwarc moved into film, eventually good script,” Ilya says. “It was a bigger delivering a hit with Jaws 2 (1978), script. It had more stuff and it even had which gave him some studio leverage a cameo with Superman himself.” In it, to helm a passion project of his: while fighting a magical monster created Somewhere in Time (1980), a timeby the witch Selena, Superman is jeannot szwarc travel love story that starred injured and must leave Earth to go to Superman’s Christopher Reeve. “I the Planet of the Healers. Eventually, knew [Superman: The Movie director] Supergirl saves him. “It was a bigger Dick Donner very well from our New York Kojak days, film in scope,” says Ilya. Odell certainly knew bigger, having recently written The Dark Crystal (1982), and he so I asked him about Chris and he told me he’s very incorporated thematic elements from Snow White and intelligent and I told him, I said, ‘You know, I have a feeling that he really would like to do something where he The Wizard of Oz into the tone of his Supergirl story.

The Salkinds reportedly attempted to get Richard could show himself as an actor.’ And he said, ‘You’re Lester or Robert Wise to direct Supergirl, before another absolutely right!’ And then Stephen Deutsch, the producer, option came to their attention: French filmmaker Jeannot and I went to Chris and he loved the material and he

36 • BACK ISSUE • Supergirl in the Bronze Age Issue

said yes.” Szwarc felt the film should have had a small release and grow by word of mouth, but the studio disagreed and Somewhere in Time opened nationwide in 1980. It didn’t do well originally, though in the years since it has become a cult classic.

While in Los Angeles in 1982, Szwarc got a call from Supergirl producer Timothy Burrill, asking him if he’d like to direct the new film. “I said, ‘Are you sure you have the right person?’ and he said, ‘Yes.’ And then he flew me to London and I met the Salkinds and I got to like the concept and the idea of doing a superhero for girls.

It’s always been men, so that was kind of what intrigued me. There was some kind of possibilities for some poetic stuff and I said yes.”

Szwarc remembers that, “When I came on board there was a sequence with Superman to kind of introduce the Supergirl to Earth, and I thought that was terrific. It was like a flying sequence. And then I guess Chris was fed up.

He said, ‘I’ve done Superman enough,’ and he didn’t want to do it. He changed his mind, and then that sequence was taken out.” The second draft script with Superman was dated November 1982.

In the revised Supergirl screenplay dated January 17, 1983, the Man of Steel was nowhere to be found.

Although this draft was credited to David Odell only, Ilya reveals that another writer came in to rework the script.

“There was a guy from Warners that got involved, and it was revised, and a lot of things were cut down,” Salkind says. “We gave in to different opinions, and that caused the Odell script to be ruined. The guy came up from Warners and he rewrote it without credit.” Salkind reveals that the uncredited writer was W. D. Richter, who was concurrently working on his directorial debut, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension.

According to a 1984 Starlog interview with Richter, his lack of credit was his own contractual choice.

Most important to Szwarc as the script headed toward filming was the idea that Supergirl was not the same as her male counterpart. “I sat down and said, ‘Okay, what can I do about a woman superhero which is not like the guy superhero?’ I naturally drifted to a kind of grace and intelligence. Instead of doing only stuff with force, there was kind of an opportunity to do something more graceful. That’s why I wanted that aerial ballet when she flies over the city for the first time.”

The resulting combined Odell/Richter script introduced viewers to a teenage Kara Zor-El, who lived in Argo City, a remnant from Krypton that survived within transdimensional “inner space.” While working with the rule-bending scientist Zaltar, Kara accidentally loses the city’s power source, the Omegahedron. In order to retrieve the powerful sphere, Kara follows it from inner space to Earth; when she exits inner space, she’s been magically transformed into Supergirl, complete with the same Kryptonian superpowers as her cousin.

Unfortunately, the Omegahedron is now in the hands of a power-hungry would-be-sorceress named Selena, who realizes the sphere can give her real magic. Tracking the Omegahedron, Kara takes on the identity of Linda Lee to blend in at an all-girls school in Midvale, near Selena.

Linda becomes roommates with Lucy Lane, the younger sister of Lois Lane, and is smitten with hunky school groundskeeper Ethan. Unfortunately, Selena has her eyes on Ethan as well, but a love potion-gone-wrong means the hunk falls in love with Supergirl instead of the witch.

Selena attacks Supergirl and the town of Midvale repeatedly, and eventually banishes Supergirl to the Phantom Zone, but the now-depowered heroine is saved by the sacrifice of an exiled Zaltar. Supergirl returns to Earth, defeats Selena, and finally, returns the Omegahedron to Argo City.

Helen Slater, Now and Then (top) Courtesy of HelenSlater.com, a recent headshot of the actress. (center) Szwarc, Slater as Linda Lee, Salkind, and producer Timothy Burrill. (bottom) Of course, with super-speed, the Girl of Steel was a quick study! © 1984 DC Comics and Tri-Star Pictures.

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Heavyweight Cast (top left) Peter O’Toole as Zaltar and Helen Slater as Kara. (bottom left) Hunky Hart Bochner catches our heroine’s super-eye. (right) The fetching Faye Dunaway as Selena, with the Omegahedron (which is not made of wire hangers). © 1984 DC Comics and Tri-Star Pictures.

CASTING THE GIRL OF STEEL As noted, Christopher Reeve, who would have been the first person cast for the film, dropped out before filming began, even though he was finishing filming scenes for Superman III at Pinewood Studios. He does, however, make a cameo appearance on a Superman poster in Lucy Lane’s dorm room, and a news broadcast makes it clear that the Man of Steel is on a mission of peace in a distant galaxy. In addition to those mentions, and the nod to Lois Lane, Marc McClure reprised his role of Jimmy Olsen from the three Superman films.

Although Alexander Salkind wanted Brooke Shields in the title role, Ilya eventually convinced him that an unknown would work better. A casting call went out for Supergirl, and Lynn Stalmaster’s casting offices at 86th Street and Lexington Avenue were soon deluged with hundreds of applicants who wanted the role. “We saw a lot of girls, okay?” says Szwarc, sighing. “I interviewed really every one of them we saw, but I can’t remember names now. Demi Moore was one of the girls. I kept seeing girls and you know, they had something but they didn’t have the other thing or … nobody kind of struck me.”

Stalmaster winnowed the potentials down to eight girls, but he had his favorite—sent to him by casting agent J. Michael Bloom—and he placed her first on the docket on a fateful Tuesday in Fall 1982 at New York’s Mayflower Hotel. “The casting director said, ‘I’ve got someone,’” says Szwarc. “Then he showed us Helen Slater and I said, ‘This is it.’ When Helen arrived, she had what I was looking for in terms of the brains, the innocence… We wanted someone that was not known.

But in a way, we wanted with her what Christopher Reeve did with Superman.”

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Complicating matters was the fact that auditionees were asked to bring in an approximation of the Supergirl costume for scenes. “When they came to the interview, we asked them to bring a change of clothes.” The girls would audition as Linda Lee first, then change into “their” Supergirl and come back in. “Quite a few brought their costume ideas, which was very similar to Superman, basically. Helen was the best … and the sweetest.

She really played the game.” Slater used a pair of glasses as Linda, and a leotard and skirt as Supergirl, delivering her first line—“You’ve had your fun, Selena. The game is finished.”—while feeling terrified and ridiculous.

Slater was next flown to London, to film two screen tests: one as Linda Lee, and one as Supergirl. The costume created for the scene was different from the current comic-book outfit; it featured a skirt, a different chest symbol attached to the cape at the shoulders, curly hair, and an ’80s-era headband. The screen tests were shot over two weeks in mid-December, during which time Slater had her 19th birthday (December 15, 1982), far from home. On the day she was headed to Heathrow Airport to depart for New York for Christmas, Slater was asked to stop at Pinewood Studios; there, she was told she had the part of Supergirl.

Long Island-born Slater, who had graduated two years prior from the High School of the Performing Arts (a.k.a. “the Fame school”), embarked on a three-month training regimen with former Marine commando instructor and stuntman Alf Joint to add muscle tone and stamina, as well as adjust to flying harnesses. She also ran three to ten miles a day, lifted weights, swam, rode horses, learned fencing, and did trampoline exercises. She trained in flying exercises two days a week with specialist Bob Harman,

dyed her hair blonde, and attended endless costume fittings. “She was great in terms of the training,” says Szwarc. “There was a lot of training in terms of the cranes, in terms of all the physical things, and she was very good at that.” By the time of filming, Slater had added eight pounds of muscle to her 112-pound body; her legs were already strong from her dance training. She also got to have a brief meeting with Christopher Reeve, who was completing work on Superman III; he gave her a few words of advice, then was gone.

Runner-up Demi Moore was offered the role of Lucy Lane, but decided to film Blame It on Rio with Michael Caine in Florida instead. The part went to tomboyish Maureen Teefy.

To play the lead villainess, Selena, the producers went to one of their favorites: Faye Dunaway. When Szwarc and Ilya met with Faye, Szwarc recalls that, “There were a lot of tales that she was difficult and this and that. I never paid too much attention to them. At the end of the meeting, I sort of relaxed and I said, ‘Hey, I’d heard…’ whatever, and I phrased it politely. She smiled or laughed or whatever, and I said, ‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do. You can have two hours a day when you can do whatever you want. You can do it by 15-minute installments, or half an hour installments, but after those two hours are over … no more.’ She loved it. Her husband told me, ‘My God, that was brilliant.’ It’s control. I had no trouble with her whatsoever. She was terrific and she had a great time.

And she and Brenda Vaccaro became very good friends.

Brenda is very down to earth so I think she was very good in terms of Faye.” Vaccaro had gotten the role of Selena’s sidekick Bianca when Dolly Parton turned it down; reportedly, the country singer didn’t want to play a witch. The dry-witted Peter Cook was cast as Nigel, a rival warlock who got on Selena’s bad side.

It was important to all involved that Selena be a great villainess, as Gene Hackman’s Lex Luthor was in the Superman films. “It was the opposite of Superman,” says Szwarc. “Here, the archvillain was a woman, and it’s against Supergirl. And Faye was great, because I said, ‘You know, it can’t be a stupid, bad person.’ She also brought a side of beauty to the character. It was evil, but it was not an evil that was repulsive. It just fit the concept of the film.”

Although relatively unknown (at the time) actor Peter Gallagher was strongly considered for the role, Hart Bochner was cast as Ethan, the male object of lust.

Szwarc and his family became close to the young actor.

“When I was staying in London, I had an extra room, and at one point, he was moving, so he stayed upstairs.

I just worked with him again last year on Grey’s Anatomy.

He was great! We did a lot of reminiscing.”

The Kryptonian/Argonian cast was rounded out by respected actors Simon Ward as Zor-El and Mia Farrow as Alura In-Ze. Peter O’Toole was Zaltar, and the Shakespearian actor took young Slater under his wing.

“There was a great chemistry between her and Peter O’Toole,” Szwarc says. “He worked. He was the only choice. We never considered anyone else.”

Speaking of only choices, Ilya Salkind wants to correct an impression he had made in an interview in 2000, in which he stated that he thought Slater was miscast and that Brooke Shields would have been a better choice. “I went from this phase in the beginning where we were talking about Brooke Shields and … I thought she was more sexy, frankly. With insight, Helen was perfect! She was great! There is no question now.

Would Brooke Shields have been better? Would she brought more of a certain audience? I don’t know.”

He pauses, then emphatically adds, “I want to change the fact that I said that Helen was not right. She was right. That was one of my outbursts of madness!”

Supergirl in the Bronze Age Issue

Love That SuperChick at Popeye’s (right) Not-so-subtle product placement. (left) A bewitching publicity still featuring Supergirl’s two female leads. © 1984 DC Comics and Tri-Star Pictures.

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BACK ISSUE • 39

FILMING BEGINS Supergirl began production on April 18, 1983, mostly at England’s illustrious Pinewood Studios, the same site at which the Bond films and previous Superman films had been shot. Seven large sound stages housed the Argo City interiors, Selena’s amusement park, the Phantom Zone, and Selena’s castle; Pinewood’s other stages were being used by Ridley Scott for his fantasy film, Legend. The entire town of Midvale was constructed outside, on a ten-acre backlot.

The one major location exception in filming was many of Supergirl’s flying sequences incorporating trees and beaches, which were shot in the western highlands of Scotland, with an 82-person crew on hand. Slater was one of only two cast members there, along with Hart Bochner. The final shot, on the beach, was on August 11, 1983.

Regarding the designs for Argo City by Richard MacDonald, Szwarc says that it was created as a rounded, serene environment that could almost be seen as a kind of harmonious, communal living. “We liked it because it was different.

It was kind of fun for us to [be opposite from] what had been done with Krypton.

It was softer… and very stylized so we could shoot all those different layers. I think that fit better with Supergirl. I think also it was something where we needed to understand when she left home, that it was a sacrifice for her to leave it.”

Perhaps the toughest scene for Szwarc was the outdoor bulldozer battle and rescue scene in the center of Midvale, which featured hundreds of extras, dozens of stunts, flying, electrical explosions, and other effects. “It was so hard!” he says. “There were so many difficult things for that big sequence where she saves Hart Bochner. I had a set at Pinewood which was outside and, of course, I needed like 20 days of sun, and some of the Brits said, ‘In general, there haven’t been 20 days of sun in the history of England!’ But we got lucky and we got them. When she comes in and Hart Bochner is in that contraption and she lifts it and flies away, that took almost a day. All that was done with cranes and wires. Today everything would be CGI. Much easier.”

Most of the film was storyboarded by comic-book artist Mike Ploog, who helped shape the naturalistic look of Supergirl’s aerial ballet, among other scenes. “He is phenomenal, by the way,” says Szwarc. “I hadn’t worked with him before that. If I remember correctly, I think he ended up marrying someone that he met on Supergirl.”

Another comic-book connection came in a scene in the dorm, wherein Lucy Lane is reading a comic book. Oddly, the comic book is Marvel’s The Incredible Hulk #271 (May 1982), the first appearance of Rocket Raccoon.

This means that Szwarc is responsible for Rocket’s first film appearance, decades before the Guardians of the Galaxy movie! Szwarc laughs when told this, and says he never got any real notes or interference from DC, including this Marvel-ous inclusion. “I don’t remember any interference from DC Comics. I was kind of sheltered from them.”

That doesn’t mean that DC didn’t have some problems, even before the movie was finished. Since Supergirl’s skirt, revised chest symbol, and headband were first used in the screen test in December 1982, and DC didn’t change the comic costume until Supergirl #13 (Nov. 1983), and didn’t add the headband until #17 (Mar. 1984), it can be posited that the comic costume designs came entirely from the film production. In an interview with John Peel in Comics Feature #30 (July–Aug. 1984), comics editor Julius Schwartz said that the producers of the film originally planned to include the headband, which DC hated. “Sure enough, when they made the movie, they left the headband out,” Schwartz griped.

In a magazine interview with costume designer Emma Porteous (source unknown), she said that the hot pants of the comic version did not “look at all graceful,” and the comics’ puffy sleeves similarly would not work. The final costume had some chest padding, even though the workouts had changed Slater’s bust and chest measurements from 29" to 34.5", and the leather boots had added soles to give the 5'8" actress a bit more height. Interestingly, the leg tights worn had painted-on boots, in case the real boots slipped down.

As with Christopher Reeve’s Superman, multiple lengths of capes were worn, fastened at the shoulders with studs; some were wool, while others had spokes like an umbrella to fan out in certain patterns during flight.

Storyboards by Night Samples of Supergirl storyboards by artist Mike Ploog, best known to Bronze Age Marvelites as the original artist of Werewolf by Night and Ghost Rider. Note the prelim costume in the lower frame. © 1984 DC Comics and Tri-Star Pictures.

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TAKING FLIGHT As with most people involved with the Superman films and Supergirl, Ilya Salkind is most proud of the flying sequences, many of which were done with “practical” real-time effects.

“All these films were before CGI,” says Ilya. “Now, with perspective, it is very pleasant because we achieved a certain thing. We actually got an Academy Award for the special effects on Superman which, I think, was the first Academy Award they gave for Visual Effects. That was, of course, a true compliment. Sometimes it looks good, sometimes it looks a little less good. We had a lot of problems. We had real flying, with wires, and then we had a special system that we invented to close the camera to the frame and the flying became literally perfect!”

In addition to the live flying on Supergirl, done with a leather harness that hooked at Slater’s hips and which involved a complicated series of piano wires and ropes which a trio or quartet of crewmen pulled, there were those flying scenes shot with a new system. The revised flying process—created by Derek Meddings, optical visual effects man Roy Field, front projection technician Roy Moores, and second unit and flying director David Lane— involved front projection, and doubly-large background plates, providing a clarity and sharpness that had been missing on the Superman films. “A movie is trial and error,” says Ilya. “And, of course, after three Superman films, you get the right guys, they know their craft. In Supergirl, the flying was perfected and worked very well. Some of the most beautiful flying is in Supergirl! When she dances in the air and all that, it’s pretty fantastic!”

The infamous aerial ballet sequence when Supergirl first emerges on Earth and learns that she can fly is often cited by most fans as their favorite moment in the film. “I think I came up with most of the idea of the ballet,” says Szwarc, “or at least I pitched it and everybody liked it. A lot of this was done live, with cranes and all that.” Szwarc studied the flying in Superman and noticed that while it worked for Christopher Reeve, he wanted something different. “I know

a lot of it was zooming in as he flies towards us and I wasn’t crazy about that. [The effects process] would not let her ‘exit in frame’ or ‘enter in frame,’ so we worked on that.

We changed the flying quite a bit from what it was in Superman, because our requirements were so much different.

All those people were extraordinary. Derek Meddings [in charge of special visual effects], I mean, was like a genius!” Bob Harman, who ran the flying rigs themselves, also garnered much praise from cast and crew.

Szwarc cites one scene as especially extraordinary. In the scene, Supergirl flies over an outdoor crowd in Midvale, and zooms up the side of a magical mountain created

by Selena. “You know, [Meddings] did that with a painted glass matte. It was absolutely unbelievable when I watched it. It was a technique that was used a lot in silent films, and in the ’30s. He painted the mountain and then we saw him put the mountain in front of the camera. The optical perspective—was absolutely perfect.” The scene was shot live, with no cuts, with Slater hanging from crane wires over the townspeople, but the glass matte appearing to be in the background instead of the extreme foreground.

While that sequence was one of most technically difficult, Szwarc remembers another one as a brilliant bit of engineering. “You’ll never guess how I did her coming out of the water,” he says, referring to Supergirl emerging from inner space and flying upwards out of the middle of a lake, her hair and costume perfectly dry. Not only was the dryness an issue, but, Szwarc asks, “How do you keep her underwater long enough to get set up and all that? You put her underwater and you pull her out, and the hair will not look Supergirl-like.”

Supergirl in the Bronze Age Issue

Strings Attached (left and bottom right) Behind-thescenes photos of the making of Supergirl’s celebrated flying scene, and (top right) the finished product. © 1984 DC Comics and Tri-Star Pictures.

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BACK ISSUE • 41

THE ORIGINS OF SUPERGIRL/WOMAN

TM & © DC Comics.

With the immense success of Superman in the comics of the 1940s, plans for a direct female counterpart were hatched almost immediately, if only to protect trademarks from anyone else launching a similar title. Detective Comics, Inc. (DC) trademarked a name and logo for Supergirl on November 9, 1944, claiming that the character had first been used on September 1, 1941. The company’s “proof of publication” was actually a February 1944 ashcan comic which featured a Supergirl logo atop the Joe Simon and Jack Kirby artwork for Boy Commandos #1 (Winter 1942), with interior pages from Action Comics #80 (Jan. 1945). A similar ashcan was made for Superwoman in January 1942, using a Superwoman logo above a cover featuring Dr. Fate from More Fun Comics #73 (Nov. 1941). The Superwoman trademark was filed on October 24, 1941 with “first use in commerce” listed as September 1, 1941.

Despite all this trademark skullduggery, the first appearance of the actual superheroine was still in the future. Due to a blood transfusion, Lois Lane became Superwoman in Action Comics #60 (May 1943), and she would reappear as a version of that character over the following decade, even wearing a blonde wig in Action Comics #156 (May 1951). And this issue’s Prince Street News looks back at the earliest Supergirls at DC Comics!

Initial talks were to film the sequence in reverse, with Slater wearing a solid plastic cape, but the movement of the hair would have not worked. Another idea was to put her in a bubble and somehow remove the bubble in post-production. Ilya says, “And then cinematographer Alan Hume asked, ‘Why don’t we try a photo?’ ” The effects team constructed a full-size photo of Helen in costume and the proper pose, and mounted it on a board, with wires to pull it up. “With the photo, I knew that I had to move very fast. So we did it, and I just edited fast enough so we won’t see the photo. It worked like a charm!”

One other element that Szwarc added throughout the film— mostly in Argo City—has been making a Hollywood comeback lately, mostly courtesy of J. J. Abrams: lens flares, where light would reflect against the camera glass. “I love lens flares! It’s true!” Szwarc says, laughing. “I think it adds a magical quality.” Szwarc also chose to use Oxford University documentary footage which showed closeups of the viscosity of liquids for the sequences in which Kara’s ship travels through inner space.

Despite technical challenges, filming went smoothly. Too smoothly, perhaps, for Ilya Salkind. Today, he muses that Szwarc might have been too agreeable to work with. “Jeannot is and was a lovely guy, but he was a bit of a ‘Yes man,’ and with a director, however unpleasant it is, sometimes it is good to have confrontation. I had many confrontations with guys like Donner or Lester or other directors, you know, where they say no, and we don’t agree. Then you discuss it and theoretically, you come to a solution.” Salkind wasn’t overly bothered by the toopleasant nature of Szwarc, however; the two would work together on his very next feature film: Santa Claus: The Movie (1985). [Editor’s note: We’ll look at Marvel’s adaptation of Santa Claus next issue!]

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BOX-OFFICE KRYPTONITE: THE RELEASE OF THE FILM The actual release of Supergirl was set for July 13, 1984, from Warner Bros., which owned the distribution rights to it, and had supervised every step of the film (although the Salkinds financed the film themselves).

A conflict arose between Warner and the Salkinds, however, regarding pushing the release date back to the holiday season in 1984; the Salkinds were worried about Supergirl being lost in all of the summer films and the Summer Olympics. Eventually, Warner backed out, returning the distribution rights to the Salkinds. They, in turn, took Supergirl to Tri-Star Pictures in early May 1984.

Supergirl was released in the United Kingdom on July 19, 1984, and shortly after, in Ireland and Japan. While the British press didn’t like the film, the Japanese audiences loved it, leading to a fast release of a laserdisc for the film in Japan—months before the film was to be opened in America (leading to black market videos showing up in American stores)! Other foreign markets rolled out in August and September, and even Canada got the film release in October. Although two test audience screenings of the complete Supergirl had happened early on in New York and Los Angeles, countrywide US audiences first saw the film on November 21, 1984, but by that time, half an hour of the film had been cut out!

Supergirl did open in the #1 slot for North American box office during its opening weekend with well over $5 million, but when it left theaters in early February 1985, it would “only” have earned about $14 million domestically. Given that its budget was around $30–35 million, it was seen as a failure. Critics were not kind, and Supergirl actors received two Razzie Awards nominations: Worst Actor for Peter O’Toole and Worst Actress for Faye Dunaway. On the flip side, Helen Slater was nominated for a Saturn Award as Best Actress.

“I wish the picture would have done better when it came out,” Szwarc says. “Except in Japan, by the way. They’re nuts about it. I remember when I went to Japan, they mobbed me. I couldn’t believe it. There are some territories where people are crazy about it. I think, again, like the release of Somewhere in Time, maybe it’s my karma, you know? Everything I do is fantastic ten years later.” He laughs, then adds, “I think part of it was that people were not ready for a girl hero. I don’t know why. Maybe we missed somewhere, you know?”

Szwarc isn’t wild about all the different cuts made to the film for American audiences, and thinks they might have affected what viewers thought of it. “I’m sure that didn’t help. I didn’t have final cut, unfortunately, and when I delivered my cut, it was long, but the aerial ballet had not been cut down. I liked that version the best because I thought it had kind of a lyrical quality that really fit the film. In France, every director has the final cut on whatever he does. In America, only the very big-name directors have final cut. I always try to hang out and give input and protest and scream or whatever, but there’s nothing I can do. I like my [Director’s Cut] version better.”

With the way Supergirl ended, it seemed like a sequel wasn’t planned for, even though Slater’s contract had signed her for a total of three films. “When I was there, I never heard anyone say anything about a sequel,” Szwarc says. “Also, I don’t think sequels were as automatic as they are now. I’m sure maybe the Salkinds would have liked to have had a Supergirl II and Supergirl III but I never heard of that.”

From his perspective, Ilya Salkind thinks there were multiple missteps. “Perhaps, from the campaign, you know, ‘From the producer of Superman—Supergirl.’ Perhaps people were disappointed. I’m sure there were mistakes in the script because … I repeat, the [original] Odell script was, in my opinion, much better. It had certainly much more of a cosmopolitan world, this bigger-than-life world! I think the [revised] story became a little too small, you know, with the witch and all that. I think what the film is missing perhaps is … it might miss guts!

The first script was better, bigger. And that was it. Sometimes you just try, you pray, you have a lot of influence in the outcome, coming from directors or writers… I mean, we had the rights, but Warner did intervene. However when the time came for Superman IV, I think they sent the whole brass to convince us about certain things, and not many things were right. So, it’s very difficult… Look, if it wasn’t difficult, everybody would be making hits!”

Today, Salkind is proud of his Superman and Supergirl creations.

“The very nice thing that goes around is that they are, frankly, the examples for all the comic books that have followed. We actually launched the superhero movie.”

Supergirl received a number of videotape releases, all of which did well, and has been released on DVD in both its full-length “Director’s Cut” version and in a shorter European/International version (see sidebar).

But the heroine’s Hollywood story didn’t end with the film…

two episodes of the tenth and final season, each time wearing outfits that brought her closer to her classic costume. The June 2013 film Man of Steel actually featured an Easter egg referencing Kara; Clark sees her open space pod in his Fortress of Solitude.

Although she had a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it non-speaking cameo at the end of the direct-to-DVD animated film Justice League: The New Frontier (Feb. 2008), Supergirl would next make a major animated appearance in the direct-to-DVD animated film Superman/Batman: Apocalypse (Sept. 2010), which was largely adapted from the alternate origin of the 2004 Superman/Batman comic series. This time, Kara Zor-El was voiced by Firefly actress Summer Glau. Supergirl got animated again in five of the DC Nation short films aired on Cartoon Network in 2012.

This Supergirl, voiced by Nicole Sullivan, was part of Super Best Friends Forever, alongside Wonder Girl and Batgirl. Supergirl’s last animated appearance to date was in the direct-to-video animated film Superman: Unbound (May 2013), where she was voiced by Molly Quinn.

Announced in September 2014 was a series commitment from CBS for a new live-action Supergirl show, executive-produced by Greg Berlanti, Allison Adler, and Sarah Schechter. Berlanti’s success on CW’s Arrow and The Flash (where Schechter also worked) established his comic-book bonafides, while Adler brought with her actress Melissa Benoist from Glee to take on the title role. This time, the story follows the original comic origins fairly closely, though the grown Kara Zor-El now lives on Earth under the name Kara Danvers. Costume designer Colleen Atwood created a costume that combined elements of the comic costume, the Slater movie costume, and the textures and darker colors of the Man of Steel costumes (see page 74 of this issue). The costume would not be the only nod to the 1984 feature film; cast in the potentially recurring roles of the Danvers parents, Fred and Sylvia, were Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman star Dean Cain and Supergirl’s own Helen Slater! Although the series pilot leaked online on May 22, 2015, the series itself is set to premiere on October 26, 2015.

THE SCREEN LEGACY OF SUPERGIRL Supergirl has appeared in other media since the feature film. Voiced by Nicholle Tom, she made her animated debut in Superman: The Animated Series from Warner Bros. Animation on May 2, 1988 in the two-part second-season story “Little Girl Lost.” She would reappear in the third Superman season, as well as in The New Batman Adventures (1998) and in Justice League Unlimited (2004–2006). Kara Zor-El became a series regular on the CW’s live-action Smallville series beginning with the seventh season in 2007, played by Laura Vandervoort. The producers cast Helen Slater as Clark Kent’s biological mother, Lara Zor-El, in two episodes, and produced animated webisodes of Smallville Legends: Kara and the Chronicles of Krypton that later appeared on the Smallville Season Seven DVD sets. Vandervoort’s character was written out after one season, though she did reappear in season eight, and in

Supergirl Around the World Courtesy of Heritage (www.ha.com), the Spanish Supergirl movie poster, with painted art by Francisco Fernandez Zarza-Pérez, a.k.a. JANO. © 1984 DC Comics.

Supergirl in the Bronze Age Issue

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BACK ISSUE • 43

WRAPPED IN A CAPE

ALTERNATE SUPERGIRLS Tracking the full story of the alternate versions of Supergirl would take far more pages than we have in this issue of BACK ISSUE, but here are a few fun facts about how you can learn more of the story: • DC Comics published the Supergirl Movie Special on November 22, 1984. The 48-pager featured an adaptation by Joey Cavalieri, with art and colors by Gray Morrow. The cover was by José Luis García-López, inked by Dick Giordano.

The story features a few minor moments that were not included in the US version of the film.

• Warner Books (US) and Sphere Books (UK) published a novelization of the longer cut of the film, adapted by Norma Fox Mazer. G.T. Putnam’s Sons of New York published a photo-filled The Supergirl Storybook for younger readers, with an adaptation by Wendy Andrews. Ironically, the kid’s book is a better, more coherent read.

• The US theatrical release of Supergirl was 114 minutes in a 2:35:1 widescreen format. Note that some reviews from the period list 117 minutes, and others list 105 minutes.

• The first home-video version was a Japanese laserdisc, prior to the US debut.

It featured the 124-minute “International Version” of the film in pan-and-scan, cropped, fullscreen format, with subtitles.

• There have been various US VHS releases of the film: • U.S.A. Home Video (May 30, 1985, also on CLV laserdisc) and Avid Home Entertainment (1990) released an edited 105-minute version in a pan-andscan cropped fullscreen format. This version features one brief shot of Supergirl flying that is not in any other release.

• In 1998, Anchor Bay Entertainment released the 114-minute US Theatrical Release version in fullscreen format.

• In 2000, Anchor Bay released the 124-minute “International Version” in both fullscreen and widescreen “Collector’s Edition” packaging, though the footage was reportedly transferred from a PAL-formatted time-compressed video print.

• HBO did not like the pan-and-scan transfer used on video, so they had TriStar Pictures create a new pan-and-scan print which they aired on HBO and Cinemax beginning in November 1985. It remained at the edited 105 minutes, but featured different cropping.

• ABC television re-edited the 114-minute version down to 92 minutes; this version would also be the one that aired in syndication. Despite its shorter running time, it included scenes not in the US theatrical airing, including the longer aerial ballet sequence, and brief scenes towards the end with Nigel and the Coffer of Shadows, as well as another in which Ethan says goodbye to Lucy and Jimmy.

• Anchor Bay released three DVD versions: • The 2-disc “Limited Edition” set (numbered at 50,000 copies, released August 8, 2000) included the 124-minute “International Version” (digitally remastered by THX), and the 138-minute full-length “Director’s Cut,” which was discovered in StudioCanal's archives, and is the only known print to exist.

Bonus features included a 16-page booklet, audio commentary, the television Supergirl: The Making of the Movie special, trailers, TV spots, storyboards, photo and poster galleries, and talent bios.

• The single-disc 124-minute “International Version” (also August 8, 2000) with special features as above.

• The 138-minute full-length “Director’s Cut,” was released as a solo disc on May 7, 2002.

• Warner Bros. reissued the “International Version,” version on DVD late in November 28, 2006—now called “European Theatrical Version”—at the same time as the DVD and Blu-Ray release of Superman Returns. It featured only the previously released Anchor Bay commentary track and a theatrical trailer.

• Several websites list deleted scenes from the 138-minute “Director’s Cut,” to the 124-minute “International Version” to the 105-minute “US Theatrical Version.” Those scenes include: a longer Argo City opening; more of the aerial ballet of Supergirl flying and learning her powers; more scenes with Selena, Bianca, and Nigel; more scenes of Linda Lee; a longer version of the Midvale bulldozer scene; longer Phantom Zone scenes; and others. Look for the best discussion of these scenes at movie-censorship.com and imdb.com.

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Still working on producing upcoming films in Hollywood, including The Abominable Snowman, Ilya Salkind finds it telling that Supergirl is not only coming to television, but is doing so in a costume that is almost a direct copy of Helen Slater’s. “Of course, it’s not unpleasant that they’re doing Supergirl on TV. It means that it’s definitely an example that it has become something that counts! It was ahead of its time. I’m sure it’ll work on television.”

Looking back at the Supergirl film, Ilya says, “I’m the kind of guy who has to really get excited. If I don’t get excited by the project, it’s very difficult. If I make it just for the money, it’s a disaster. A lot of directors and producers go there and will make it for the money, but in my case it’s a very big no-no.

It has to be something that turns me on! And Supergirl did turn me on because it was a different approach. Helen particularly was great, the casting was good, the flying was great. Frankly, you ask me tomorrow if I wanted to do another Supergirl, I think I would, but I think the only way to do it really well is enormous!” He reflects for a moment, then adds, “You know, Supergirl is a strange thing because apparently it has become a kind of cult film now. I guess a lot of women like it because obviously it’s a woman heroine! And if you think about it, there’s been very few successful women heroines.”

Post-Supergirl, Jeannot Szwarc has had an illustrious and continual career in film and television, including directing 14 episodes of Smallville. He doesn’t think his Supergirl past got him the job on that series, however. “Greg Beeman, I think, is the guy who brought me to Smallville. I did one, then it turned out very well. After that, they just kept asking me to do more and I loved doing more. I visited one day and I met the girl [Vandervoort] who was playing Supergirl.” Why didn’t he ever direct any of her episodes? “You know, when you do episodic television—which, by the way, I love because it’s fast, so it’s not as big an investment in time, and I can have time to go to Europe where my wife and sons are—it’s the luck of the draw. You never know what you’re gonna get in terms of the scripts, so it just happened that I never got any of the Supergirl scripts [on Smallville].” He does have one other trivia tie-in to share, however. “Glen Winter, the one who’s directing the new Supergirl pilot, was my Smallville director of photography.”

Szwarc appreciates the fans who hold a special place in their heart for his Supergirl film. “I like Supergirl! I always did.

I really invested myself. I did it with care and with love and with affection and then, of course, I was horrendously disappointed when it didn’t do well. But with that, there’s nothing you can do. Of course, if it had done well, I could have made more magical films, but that is the reality. You know, to me, the most important thing about film is time. The films I watch time and time again… a lot of them are films that didn’t do well when they came out. Time is the ultimate judge and the fact that people are still watching Supergirl and talking about it means that it has something. I’d like to tell all the fans thank you for watching it and thank you for liking it.”

The interviews with Jeannot Szwarc and Ilya Salkind were conducted in March–April 2015 by Andy Mangels, and transcribed by Steven Thompson.

Artwork and photos are courtesy the collection of Andy Mangels. Ashcan images are from the collection of Gary Colabuono. Special thanks to Paul Channing Keefe for scripts and other materials.

ANDY MANGELS is the USA Today bestselling author and co-author of 20 books, including the recent TwoMorrows book Lou Scheimer: Creating the Filmation Generation, as well as Iron Man: Beneath the Armor, and a lot of comic books. Additionally, he has scripted, directed, and produced Special Features for over 40 DVD releases. His moustache is infamous. www.AndyMangels.com and www.WonderWomanMuseum.com.

TM

by

Franck Martini

Maybe it’s because of its iconic cover, maybe it’s because of its emotional impact, but one cannot forget Crisis on Infinite Earths #7 (Oct. 1985)–a.k.a. the Death of Supergirl. Let’s flash back on this key moment of the Bronze Age with the involved writer and artists.

To use a quote allegedly pronounced by Joseph Stalin: “When one man dies, it’s a tragedy, but when a million people die, it’s a statistic.” This is exactly what’s at the heart of this story. During Crisis on Infinite Earths (COIE), millions of people pass away or vanish. But when we picture the crossover in our mind’s eye, what we are likely to see are some of these moments: red skies, planets interlocking, the Flash running himself into oblivion, and Superman crying as he lifts the body of his deceased cousin, Kara Zor-El, a.k.a. Supergirl.

As Marv Wolfman explained in the trade paperback introduction of COIE, the project was a long time in the making. Initiated in 1981, it was delayed until 1985 for DC Comics’ 50th anniversary. That means the involved creators, editor, and publisher had a long time to envision the pros and cons or what were the objectives and the expected outcome of the maxiseries. Worlds would live and worlds would die, just like the ads announced. Worlds, for sure—but heroes, too, and among the body count were two key characters of the Silver Age: Supergirl and the Flash.

CHRONICLE OF A DEATH FORETOLD Dick Giordano, DC Comics’ executive editor at the time, recalled how Supergirl was chosen in his 2003 TwoMorrows Publishing biography Dick Giordano: Changing Comics, One Day at a Time: “To give Crisis resonance, somebody had to die. The principal target, suggested by Wolfman, was Supergirl. I brought that in to Paul [Levitz] and Jenette [Kahn] […] they turned white.” To understand their concern, one has to remember that a Supergirl movie was about to be released at the time. Yet the character was far from being successful, as her title had been canceled a few months before the film’s opening.

The movie did not perform well at the box office, which fully opened the door to the character’s disappearance. And possibly this could have reduced, at least initially, the impact of the event as George Pérez said in George Pérez on His Work and Career (Rosen Publishing, 2007): “All the publicity went to Supergirl’s death […] because there was a movie coming out with Supergirl. So here we are killing a character who’s just had a movie come out. I think if the movie succeeded, she still might have been alive...” …a sentiment shared by Jerry Ordway, who inked COIE starting with #4 and was co-inker with Dick Giordano of issue #7: “I had read many of the 1970s Supergirl stories drawn by the great Bob Oksner. As a character, I liked her fine, but she was not a fan-favorite by any stretch. Also, we all knew that if the Supergirl movie had been a success, her death would have not been on the table for consideration. Personally, I am not a big proponent of killing off characters, because I think every character has potential. It’s all about the approach, really.”

Dick Giordano seemed to be pushing for her death as he explained to his biographer, Michael Eury, in a

The Death of Supergirl House ad for 1985’s Crisis on Infinite Earths #7.

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The Ultimate Sacrifice (this page and opposite) We dare you to remain dry-eyed after reading this powerful sequence.

TM & © DC Comics.

TM & © DC Comics.

why Supergirl had to die.” But as Wolfman tells BACK not-so-politically correct way: “Let’s be realistic. Supergirl is Superman with boobs. She has no reason for being ISSUE today, his point of view on the character was quite here.” He gave further explanation in BACK ISSUE #34 different from Giordano’s. There was much more to (May 2009): “Supergirl was created initially to take advantage her than a feminine Superman: “I had read Supergirl’s of the high Superman sales and not much thought was appearances since her very first one back in the ’50s. put into her creation. She was created essentially as a I also wrote several Supergirl stories back in the very female Superman. With time, writers and artists improved late ’60s or early ’70s in Adventure Comics. I saw her as Portrait by Michael Netzer. powerful as Superman, but more upon her execution, but she never did troubled, as Superman was sent really add anything to the Superman from Krypton as a baby and had mythos—at least for me.” no memories of his home In the COIE trade paperback world, while Supergirl was a introduction (1998), Marv teen and watched her family Wolfman provided a very die. That she stayed optimistic simple driver: make Superman despite that made her an even unique again. “Before Crisis, it more interesting hero to me.” seemed that half of Krypton survived Inker Jerry Ordway recalls being its explosion. We had Superman, “in the loop” early: “I had heard Supergirl, Krypto, the Phantom Zone about Supergirl dying beforehand, yes, criminals, the Bottle City of Kandor, and though I was not involved in the story many others. Our goal was to make at all beyond inking. I was aware that Superman unique, […] the unique dick giordano it was a big thing for DC to allow survivor of Krypton. That, sadly, was Marv and George to actually kill a part of the Superman mythos. A big thing for me was that it was meant to be a permanent thing, and she would not be brought back, to cheapen the death story. Same with the Flash—that it was to be permanent. That made that story more important.”

COIE was to be important—to matter—because Wolfman and Pérez’s goal was also to have a book with more long-lasting impact than [Marvel Super Heroes] Secret Wars—the maxiseries published the year before

by Marvel—as Pérez explained in TwoMorrows’ Modern Masters vol. 2: “Secret Wars, to us, seemed to have no real purpose other than getting all these characters together—it was basically a slugfest.”

Perhaps the most surprising element in this story is how the final decision was made by DC president Jenette Kahn. Dick Giordano gave her a handwritten note (below) with tick boxes to decide the character’s fate, a funny reminder of how things could be done back then. Today this would be the subject of editorial summits and countless emails…

From this image it seems that Kara Zor-El could have escaped her fate had Jenette Kahn seen things differently.

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the other heroes. You needed to see how powerful the villain was to show he was a real threat. That’s also why I had the Earth-Three supervillains Even though she died in issue #7, Supergirl did not appear much die so quickly in issue #1. Since they were actually doppelgängers for Superman, Wonder Woman, etc., we saw how quickly before that during previous issues of Crisis. She is part he defeated them. Secondly, it was to tell the readers of the story, occasionally throwing a punch here that even the most powerful heroes could be killed. and there, like in issue #6 when she is fighting It set up anticipation and concern for the characters.

Captain Marvel, but like most characters during It’s also why we followed her death immediately such a major event, she only had a limited with Flash’s. We were being serious.” George amount of screen time. That seems rather Pérez, who had also become co-plotter of obvious considering the number of characters the book, was fully in line with Wolfman in (and worlds) involved.

2007: “It was, ‘OK, we’ve killed Supergirl, now Yet before her final appearance, she had in issue we’ve killed the Flash. Anything can go now.’ ” #4 (July 1985) a quiet moment with Batgirl where she A double-sized issue means quite a workload for was able to provide words of wisdom to a self-doubting the creative teams. Inking each issue was getting more Barbara Gordon. In a few panels she shows her faith in and more time consuming for Jerry Ordway because a positive outcome and her sense of duty, even as the of Pérez’s trademarked details. So he had to share ink void seems ready to engulf them: “I’m scared too, but duties with Dick Giordano, who had already worked I can’t let that stop me from doing what I have to do.” george pErez on the first three issues: “I believe I only got to ink half of In these three pages, we can see a lot of the talent of the issue because DC was worried about the schedule, artist George Pérez. The faces of the two women but also because Dick Giordano and George had some agreement on display such different emotions; Batgirl is terrified, withdrawn, and full doing it. The entire issue’s worth of original art was presold to an art dealer/ of doubt, while Supergirl is filled with purpose and confidence. As she flies fan, with Dick attached, I believe. I traded my share of the inked pages to save a small plane, she explains: I did for an equal number of “We fight to live as long as we can.

George’s art share on another issue That’s the only way to live and to so the person got the whole issue.” be able to live with yourself.”

The issue is clearly split into Batgirl sums it all in one sentence: two main chapters: one which “A hero through and through.” sets things up by presenting the This Batgirl sentence is almost origins of the Monitor and the meta and can be seen as a preAnti-Monitor, and one which explanation of what will happen presents the fight against the in issue #7. But more importantly, villain and its deadly conclusion. the Supergirl line establishes her motivation and the role she AN ECHO OF THE intends to play in this crisis.

SILVER AGE This quiet and strong scene The Supergirl story-within-the also presents us a beautiful bond story starts on page 33. A group between Batgirl and Supergirl, a of heroes is gathered to attack the bond we never had really seen Anti-Monitor base in an antimatter before—they had shared a few dimension. There, Superman and team-up stories but nothing that Supergirl discover that their really established such a possible powers do not work as efficiently connection between the two as they do on Earth. Then, the characters. This newly established Anti-Monitor attacks Superman, and friendship gave logic in having Kara hears her cousin screaming Batgirl reading Kara’s eulogy at the in pain. She rushes to his rescue end of issue #7. For Marv Wolfman, with the goal of preventing his that friendship was a logical one: “I death. Not knowing if Kal-El is wanted the characters to be friends alive or dead, she makes a silent and didn’t think they couldn’t promise: “He’ll be alive […], but if be. Unlike Superman and Batman, he’s not, I’ll swear I’ll carry on for however, they would not be rivals. him.” This looks like a reminder of They could confide in each other. one of Supergirl’s early appearances, She therefore made the best choice.” back when she was still Superman’s emergency weapon: In “The SETTING THE STAGE Death of Superman” in Superman Crisis on Infinite Earths #7 is the #149 (Nov. 1961), a wonderful only double-sized issue of the Jerry Siegel/Curt Swan-produced maxiseries, which makes this imaginary story, Superman was issue completely pivotal in the (very sadistically) murdered by saga. Today, whenever we read a Lex Luthor. Supergirl hadn’t yet crossover, we expect to see character made her first public appearance deaths—it has become almost a and decided to follow her cousin’s cliché or a necessary element. And footsteps—similarly to Crisis #7, those deaths are more likely at the beginning of the story for shock value or toward the end during the final she declared, “You may have succeeded in treacherously killing Superman, but I’m going to carry on his great work.” Kara’s dedication brawl that leads to the conclusion of the event. So the choice of killing a was still as strong as it was when she first appeared and the importance major character in the middle of the maxiseries can be seen as unusual.

But we must remember that Crisis was one of the first of its kind, of Superman in her life may have lowered as she gained more so there were no real rules to follow. And it was a calculated decision independence, but in this issue, Marv Wolfman brought back a lot of

by Marv Wolfman: “I wanted her sacrifice to give even more urgency to what that character was.

THE BEGINNING (AND THE END) OF A BEAUTIFUL FRIENDSHIP

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Also, when Supergirl attacks the Anti-Monitor in the following pages, Marv Wolfman uses another character like he used Batgirl in issue #4. The new Dr. Light gives a meta reaction and provides Wolfman’s view of the character, stating all the extra elements he had to say about the character’s strengths and almost suicidal attack: “She keeps hitting him […] as if she doesn’t care about herself at all. […] She is a hero … totally selfless and concerned only with others.”

In a few lines, Marv Wolfman has established why and how she will die—protecting her cousin’s life and life in general against a mindless “blasphemy of life” that “doesn’t deserve to survive.”

AND IN THE END…

It Always Goes Back to Kirby… (below and opposite) The “Crisis #7 pose” is a comic-book classic, harkening back to Jack Kirby and Vince Colletta’s cover to (left) Thor #127 (Apr. 1966). Here’s a sextet of examples.

Thor and X-Men TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. Lois Lane, Superman: The Man of Steel, and Supergirl TM & © DC Comics.

Comic Book Guy TM & © Bongo.

first, this fight was Kara’s and Kara’s only, because none of the other assembled heroes has thrown even a single punch at the Anti-Monitor. The second thing is the humanity that Wolfman has put into this ending.

It’s very rare to take the time to have a funeral within a crossover story, something that even the Flash did not have, as Pérez recalled in 2007: “Flash died alone, unlike Supergirl who had this big, dramatic death and big funeral sequence almost immediately after her death; the Flash, for quite a while, no one knew that he was dead. It was a little eerie.”

Yet even if Supergirl did have a funeral, such was not the case of Linda Danvers—Kara’s secret identity—and that’s logical because there was no more Supergirl solo book to assemble possible supporting characters. Furthermore, Supergirl’s existence would be completely wiped out in the reboot, so there would not be much to honor and remember beyond Crisis #7. Yet…

Kara has attacked the Anti-Monitor and keeps on hitting him, while still trying to save her cousin. During a break she turns to Dr. Light and urges her to save her cousin and leave the antimatter universe with the rest of the assembled heroes. Supergirl can then go back to her battle, knowing that to save the other heroes she must pay the ultimate price.

And she will, as the Anti-Monitor, AN UNFORGETTABLE COVER even with his shattered armor, makes The cover of Crisis #7 spoils its marv wolfman the most of a moment when Kara conclusion without any possible doubt. disengages the fight to mortally wound With a design reminiscent of Marvel’s her. Almost beaten, the Anti-Monitor leaves the battlefield Uncanny X-Men #136 (Aug. 1980), it presents a crying while Superman has just enough time to share a brief Superman holding Supergirl’s deceased body, with and sad moment with Kara as she passes away. dozens of characters weeping and mourning in the If George Pérez’s artwork is generally spectacular, here background. George Pérez explained in Modern Masters in five panels it has a clear cinematographic vibe. We start vol. 2 that he did not use the X-Men cover as a reference: with a closeup of Kara and Kal-El, then we get closer to “The particular idea was inspired primarily from a Jack Kara’s face, then finally her eye closing as life departs Kirby Thor cover. I had seen the John Byrne death of her, then her eye closed, and finally her lifeless hand hitPhoenix, cover but it didn’t register at the time. […] But ting the ground. We may never had seen (and we may later I looked at […] an old Lois Lane comic—Superman never have until today) a character pass away in such a dra- holding Lois Lane with a ring of characters at ground level matic and heroic way, but beyond the hero, we see the in mourning, too. […] That one I didn’t even remember human being as life deserts her, and how her relative and having ever seen. But that seems to be the closest in comrades react to the brutality of the event. actual layout to what I did for the cover of Crisis #7.”

The story concludes with Kara’s funeral with a eulogy The Thor cover is very likely to be the iconic Jack

by Batgirl. Several things are striking in this sequence; Kirby/Vince Colletta one for Thor #127 (Apr. 1966), with

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Odin lifting Thor’s body, and the Lois Lane issue is Superman’s Girlfriend, Lois Lane #128 (Dec. 1972)—a cover drawn by John Rosenberger and Vince Colletta (again), but Lois Lane #102 (July 1970) could also have been a good contender for Pérez’s inspiration.

And since Pérez has created this cover to pay homage to previous creators, this special cover with its incredibly iconic look would be recreated several times after 1985, so much that websites have tried to aggregate all the pastiche versions published all through the years. The interest of these pastiches is that some of them are meant to be funny (Bongo’s Comic Book Guy #1, July 2010; Tiny Titans #29, Aug. 2010), while some are really self-referencing like Jon Bogdanove’s Superman, The Man of Steel #10 (Apr. 1992) or Ed Benes’ Supergirl vol. 4 #79 (Apr. 2003).

Not surprisingly, George Pérez has done a lot of recreations and commissions of the cover himself, including the collected edition cover with Alex Ross, and the novel adaptation.

CLOSING THE SILVER AGE? Kara was a child of the Silver Age, and so were the many worlds of the DC Universe. DC was editorially cleaning its house, and a lot of elements were forever eliminated from the publisher’s mythos. COIE was clearly an ending of a more innocent age of time travels, super-pets, multiple worlds, and super-sons and … cousins. We asked Marv Wolfman if the death of Supergirl was a closing chapter: “No. Not really. I didn’t think of her death as the end of the Silver Age. I did think that of Flash’s.

I just thought her death would give more power to Superman. I also assumed someone would create a new Supergirl at some point.”

On the Silver Age-ending topic, there were much more important casualties for Jerry Ordway, Crisis’ inker, but also previously artist on Infinity, Inc., the series showcasing Earth-Two’s JSA children: “[The death of Supergirl] made the story told in Crisis more important, but I never thought of it as a cap on the Silver Age. Crisis was more brutal to Earth-Two, my favorite playground. That said, I think the death of Barry Allen as Flash was a turning point which ushered in the Superman reboot and more cohesive DC Universe of the later 1980s and 1990s.”

As both Wolfman and Ordway point out, all involved creators were already thinking forward and focusing on what would come next: DC’s reboot in 1986. And the three men were involved in it: Wolfman and Ordway on the new Adventures of Superman book, tied to John Byrne’s Superman revamp, and Pérez on Wonder Woman and The History of the DC Universe (the latter once again in collaboration with Marv Wolfman).

But before the reboot, Supergirl would appear a few more times: first in Superman #414 (Dec. 1985), when Superman delivers Supergirl’s body to her parents Zor-El and Alura on New Krypton, much

to their understandable shock; then in Superman #415 (Jan. 1986), which presents a never-before-told tale of Kara’s past, where an amnesic Supergirl wandered to the planet Makkor, where she would meet, fall in love with, and eventually marry an alien called Salkor.

When her memory returned, she left the planet with no memories of her marriage to Salkor. At the end of the story, Salkor and Superman together emotionally listen to Kara’s last recorded message in which she tells her love for both of them with fitting last words: “I know I’ll remain alive in both of your hearts for the rest of your days.”

Finally, a time-traveling, younger Supergirl appears in the first part of Alan Moore’s last Superman story—“Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?” (Superman #423, Sept. 1986)—for a poignant and very Silver Age-y scene where Superman sees his cousin (along with other members of the Legion of Super-Heroes) again shortly after her passing in Crisis #7.

Both stories have a very classic vibe and propose a lovely aftermath to Kara’s passing. Also it is a nostalgic touch to see Supergirl’s final stories drawn by Curt Swan, who drew the cover of Action Comics #252, (May 1959)—her first appearance.

AND THE CROWD GOES WILD—THE FAN REACTION So, what was the fan reaction to the death of a character who no longer had a solo book and whose movie recently tanked at the box office? Lack of interest? Guess again, as Jerry Ordway explains: “I can tell you how fans reacted at summer comic shows in summer of 1985— they were mad! I had one fan who was a bit crazy, who told me he wanted to kill Marv and George! I kept encountering this fan, and kept trying to reason with him about it being a comic character, etc.

Not sure he accosted the others, but it was a little scary for me.”

Marv Wolfman does recall some negative feedback, but provides an extra interesting point: “Some people hated what we did, but I’d say 90% either approved or understood. Now, years later, as the passions of the surprise are gone, almost everyone feels it might have been Supergirl’s best appearance. People love that issue beyond what I had expected.”

Possibly, the fans reacted harshly because Kara was a member of Superman’s family, because it seemed to be the end of a more innocent era, but possibly also because they suddenly saw a dead character who got bigger and more interesting with her final appearance. Maybe what enraged the fans is the potential they saw in a different and maybe edgier Supergirl, one that would look a lot less like a sidekick but more like a caring, noble, and selfless person.

Some heroes appear bigger or more important when they pass away—that is exactly what happened here with Supergirl, and that’s why there was such a fierce fan reaction. The best evidence of this feeling

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A Crisis #7 Coda This two-parter in Superman #414 and 415 (Dec. 1985 and Jan. 1986) revealed, among other things, the secret marriage of Supergirl! Covers by Eduardo Barreto.

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meta-messages about Supergirl being wiped out of everyone’s memory.

It is a splendid and touching story that sure would be worth reprinting (along with all of Brennert’s wonderful DC stories). [Editor’s note: A transcription of Rob Kelly’s interview with Alan Brennert follows in this issue—and in our next issue we examine Christmas with the SuperHeroes and many other Yuletide comics from the Bronze Age.] Photo by Luigi Novi.

Funnily, the story was drawn by Dick Giordano— one of the persons who made the decision to kill Kara in the first place. As Brennert further explained: “Actually, Mark Waid brought it into him to have it okayed editorially, Dick read it, clutched it to his chest, and said ‘Mine!’ ” The story did not sit well with Superman’s then-creators—including Jerry Ordway, as he recently explained to the website Comic Book Resources: “Even after John [Byrne] left the books, [Superman editor Mike] Carlin fought many battles on our behalf, to keep what we were doing consistent A DEADMAN’S CHRISTMAS TALE across the other books in the DCU. I have always felt There was one person who was also not pleased with strongly that a company should keep their characters DC’s decision of killing Supergirl, but even less with jerry ordway consistent, as a service to readers. I think Julie the fact that she had been wiped out from continuity Schwartz tried to keep his era’s incarnation of the at the end of the maxiseries, and that’s writer Alan Man of Steel consistent in both tone and look, and Brennert, as he explained to Rob Kelly during a interview for the Fire we all tried to do the same.” & Water podcast: “When John Byrne decided he would completely If there was an internal debate regarding this story and continuity, reboot Superman, it was decided, ‘Well, okay, Supergirl never existed.’ it was Dick Giordano who ended it, as Brennert concludes: “Dick said— And to me that seems like a repudiation of a great character […] but God bless him: ‘Guys, this is just a nice little Christmas story.’ ” also to the work of writers and artists who did that. […] When Mark [Waid] asked me to do the Christmas with the Super-Heroes story, I conceived POST-CRISIS SUPERGIRL AND COIE CREATORS the somewhat seditious idea of doing a Deadman story and at the end Strangely enough, COIE’s main artists would work on Supergirl again. we would sneak in the ghost of Kara Zor-El.” We have seen Dick Giordano with Christmas with the Super-Heroes #2, Christmas with the Super-Heroes #2 (1989) is a Christmas-themed but George Pérez and Jerry Ordway were involved with Matrix—the second anthology of short stories. The last one presents a depressed Deadman Supergirl introduced in Superman vol. 2 #21 (Sept. 1988) by John Byrne. who feels lonely and joyless at Christmastime. He then meets a young For George Pérez, there was a real simple reason for a Supergirl comeblonde woman who can see him and talk to him. They have a short back, as he explained in 2007: “ ‘OK, we’ve gotten rid of Supergirl. But conversation during which she provides him words of support and how are we going to hold on to our copyright and trademark on Supergirl wisdom. At the end of the story, the young lady reveals to Deadman unless we actually print Supergirl?’ So you have to bring back Supergirl her name: Kara. And the conversation they have conveys a lot of […] in a different form; they found a way of doing it via the Matrix

appeared in the pages of the Fantagraphics Books fanzine Amazing Heroes #91 (Mar. 1986). After the end of COIE, Amazing Heroes (with editor Mark Waid) dedicated a full issue to the maxiseries, ran interviews, analyses, obituaries, and a global summary of each issue. The focus for Crisis #7 was obviously on Supergirl’s death—and what a huge wasted opportunity and possible mistake it was, a mistake on DC’s part that even predates Crisis: “Anyone with half a brain can see the nigh endless potential the character had—yet she was constantly left to the mercy of third-string writers and artists. It wasn’t the fans who cared too little […] the lady deserved better”— wrote R. A. Jones. How true: Supergirl could have been so much more, and that’s what Marv Wolfman offered us in Crisis #7.

French writer Frederic Dard had a classic quote that sums it up pretty clearly: “Had I known that I loved her so much, I would have loved her even more.”

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character.” In fact, all creators knew or had in mind the fact that a character such as Kara would surely return sooner or later. It was just a matter of time. But with Matrix the creators had a different approach than with Kara.

Jerry Ordway recalls how this Matrix creature was developed: “What I really loved about Matrix was that she was a blank slate after she was rescued by Superman from the Pocket Universe storyline [in Legion of SuperHeroes]. Having Ma and Pa Kent take her in and share their values with her allowed us to parallel Kal-El’s experience with the Kents. So she is more connected to Clark than the Silver Age version was. Fans had bombarded us with requests for the return of Supergirl after the Superman relaunch, but we specifically started fresh, rather than cheapen the death told in Crisis. Using Matrix was a perfect opportunity to do our Supergirl.

She’s the only survivor of her world.”

The shapeshifting Matrix would appear as Supergirl a few issues after her/its inception. Among those was an issue during Pérez’s short stint on Action Comics.

Matrix/Supergirl would also join the last team of the New Titans before the end of Marv Wolfman’s run and the cancellation of that title. Yet Wolfman had little or no input on the team’s lineup at the time and he recalls those last days on the book as bittersweet.

There would be more DC reboots and Crises, and reboots of Supergirl, as told elsewhere in this issue.

But the “real” Kara would return, thanks to Jeph Loeb and the late Michael Turner, in the pages of Superman/Batman #8–13 (May–Oct. 2004). For Loeb, it was time to go back to the source of the character in comparison with the evolution of the Matrix character, as he told playbackstl.com: “A good idea is a good idea and Supergirl is a great idea. As much as I admire Peter David’s work on Supergirl, the concept of a protoplasmic being from another Earth who bonded with an angel— OW—head hurt. By returning her to being Superman’s cousin from Krypton, it is simple, clean, and allows for new conflict and hopefully exciting stories. But this is not your grandfather’s Kara Zor-El. For her, the sun doesn’t rise and set because of her cousin—she is determined to make it on her own. And she’ll make mistakes and have calamities like any teenager who has something to prove. This one, however, can bring down a mountain, so it’s a little interesting!”

So Kara was back; there would be more editorial changes in the DC Universe with part of history (like the multiverse) being re-integrated. But there was a bit more to tell about Kara’s death and role in COIE. And thanks to DC’s Convergence, 2015’s global event that serves as an homage to major periods of the DCU, there was an extra tale of the original Kara Zor-El to tell, a story that takes place before Crisis #7. Could there be a better suited writer for this story than Marv Wolfman, coming back to the character he had “killed” 30 years before?

In this miniseries, Superman and Supergirl go on a rescue mission where they’ll learn Kara’s eventual fate. So, what was it like to go back to the character after such a long time? Marv Wolfman explains: “My goal with the story was to add even more power to Supergirl’s story and sacrifice without altering anything I had already done with Crisis. As I always love writing both Superman and Supergirl, this was a special treat.

Plus I got to write another character I loved in the story that I only had briefly written in the Crisis, so it was a total win-win.”

In the end—and you can trust this writer who has spent a lot of time reading and re-reading Crisis #7— there is no reboot nor return that can alter the impact of that issue. Some liked it, some hated it, and some have seen it quite ironically like the character’s defining

moment. It remains a truly powerful story. It is one of those Marv Wolfman moments when the emotion is really strong, like in his original New Teen Titans “Who is Donna Troy?” story. It can be read on its own and remains, with those of Gwen Stacy and Jean Grey, one of the best-written deaths in comic books. Too bad that 30 or so years of “temporary deaths” has somewhat tarnished the impact of such tales…

Familiar Scene George Pérez has frequently recreated the cover image of Crisis #7, including this 1999 sketch from the Heritage Comics Auctions. (inset) George has even done the “Kryptonian mourning wail” in real life at comiccons! Photo courtesy of Franck Martini.

Many thanks to Marv Wolfman and Jerry Ordway for their qualitative feedback! Complementary quotes for Marv Wolfman taken from the Crisis on Infinite Earths TPB intro. Complementary Jerry Ordway quote from Comic Book Resources.

George Pérez quotes taken from TwoMorrows’ Modern Masters vol. 2 and George Pérez on His Work and Career (Rosen Publishing, 2007).

FRANCK MARTINI discovered the Spider-Man daily strip in the French TV guide at the age of three.

After that, “Nothing would ever be the same again.” When no one is watching, he is also a mild-mannered intranet manager with a patient wife and two daughters.

Supergirl in the Bronze Age Issue

Superman and Supergirl TM & © DC Comics.

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BACK ISSUE • 51

It’s October 1981, and a young comics fan rides his bike to a nearby 7-11 to pick up some comics. On sale is the newest issue of one of his favorite series, DC’s The Brave and the Bold. Even with a limited amount to spend, B&B was almost always a blind buy, no matter the guest-star, especially when Jim Aparo was drawing.

This particular issue—Batman and the Earth-Two Robin, menaced by Prof. Hugo Strange—looked especially like a winner, so it was grabbed off the spinner rack with no further thought.

A short time later, this young comics fan is lying on the floor of his parents’ basement, ready to dive in to that afternoon’s purchase. The cover to The Brave and the Bold is opened, and for the next half hour or so, the kid is whisked away to the magical concept known as Earth-Two, following along breathlessly as the Darknight Detective is forced to form an uneasy bond with that world’s Robin, the No-Longer-Boy Wonder, to stop the aforementioned Hugo Strange from exacting a plot of murderous revenge. The story, brought vividly to life by Jim Aparo, is powerful, exciting, full of everything a superhero comics fan could want: compelling moments of characterization interpolated with brilliantly executed action scenes, ending on a note of mystery. No doubt, this issue of Brave and the Bold is a complete winner, worth every penny of the 60-cent cover price. The kid flips back to the credits page (something he usually only glanced at, if at all) to look at what writer is responsible for this masterpiece. “Alan Brennert,” he reads to himself.

“I wonder who that is? I’ve gotta find what other comics he writes.”

Of course, at that tender age, that young comics fan—me, of course—had no conception that people who wrote comics did anything else, so I spent the next few years on a fruitless search for the elusive series where I could read this Alan Brennert guy’s work on a regular basis. Every so often I would stumble over a comic-book story he wrote—“To Kill A Legend” from Detective Comics #500, or “The Autobiography of Bruce Wayne” from The Brave and the Bold #197—and each time I would be transported back to that basement, reliving that sense of excitement and wonder, completely confident I was about to be told one hell of a story. It wasn’t until I got a little older that I realized that Alan Brennert was writer and producer for television (winning an Emmy for his work on L.A. Law), and author (winning a Nebula for the short story “Ma Qui”), who only dabbled in comics, essentially only when he felt like it.

I eventually tracked down his complete comicography, consisting of only 13 comics over 13 years. I was stunned at how consistent it was—not a single bad story in the bunch. To put it in more concrete, mathematical terms, if Alan Brennert was a baseball player, he’d be a player who only got to bat 13 times, but in those 13 at bats, he hit five home runs, two triples, two doubles, and four singles, never getting out once. A player with an average like that would have a bronze statue at Cooperstown.

Thanks to the magic of the Internet, over the last decade I have gotten to know Alan and tell him how much his comic-book work meant to me. A little while ago, it occurred to me that Alan had never really been interviewed in depth about his comics work, and I wanted to change that—both he and the work deserved the look back. So in July 2014, I asked Alan to appear on my show, The Fire and Water Podcast, and he graciously agreed. As we discussed, Alan’s career as a comics writer seems to have a period at the end of it, but I prefer to think of it as an ellipsis…

– Rob Kelly

conducted by

Rob Kelly

Gone But Not Forgotten The concluding—and controversial (among Superman creative personnel)—page to the Alan Brennert/Dick Giordano Deadman tale from Christmas with the Super-Heroes #2.

TM & © DC Comics.a

52 • BACK ISSUE • Supergirl in the Bronze Age Issue

“Based on a story by…”

Brennert’s first comic credits: the Osira two-parter scripted by Martin Pasko in Wonder Woman #231 (top) and 232 (May and June 1977). Cover art by Michael Nasser (Netzer) and Vince Colletta.

TM & © DC Comics.

ROB KELLY: At the time that you first wrote your first comics, which were— you plotted those two issues of Wonder Woman, #231 and 232 (May and June 1977)—and then Martin Pasko wrote the script. What were you doing at the time and how did you get into comics that first time?

ALAN BRENNERT: Well, I have to go back and explain that I’ve actually been reading comic books since I was six years old. I talk about this in my novel, Palisades Park.

There was a stationary/candy store called Pitkoff’s in Cliffside Park, New Jersey, where I lived, and my friend Miriam Salten—she and I were the best readers in our first grade class—we used to go to Pitkoff’s, which was owned by her grandfather.

She was in charge of opening up the comic books for the week. We would buy the new comics, then go over to her house and read them together. I vividly remember the two of us reading “The Death of Superman,” the classic Jerry Siegel “imaginary” story, and we were just in absolute tears as we read it. Still my favorite comics story of all time. Later, I wound up getting into comics fandom through Marty Pasko; he and I were among the many “letterhacks” who wrote in to Julie Schwartz’s letters columns; I happened to mention his name in a letter to Justice League, and he contacted me. It turned out we were both living in New Jersey, in towns that were roughly adjacent to one another, Haledon and Clifton. He sent me this letter and asked, “Hey, how’d you like to get together with another enthusiastic fan and do a fanzine?” So we published a fanzine together, called Fantazine, which ran for four issues from 1970–1971, and soon I was off to college in California and Marty went to college at Northwestern outside Chicago. But by 1976, Marty had come back to New York and was working as a professional comic-book writer. I was a professional science-fiction writer; I had published a number of stories in SF magazines and anthologies and was nominated for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 1975. I was making a living—sort of—off my fiction, and also from working part-time at Richard Kyle’s comics/science-fiction bookstore in Long Beach. But even so, I was a starving student and I could always use money.

Marty knew that and offered me the opportunity to plot a comic book for him, for which I’d get paid a hell of a lot more than I was getting paid from the SF stories I was selling. [both laugh] So I plotted what was originally going to be a Superman story but wound up getting repurposed into a Wonder Woman story when Marty took over writing that book. It happened to fall in the period after the Wonder Woman TV show (set in World War II) debuted, and DC had switched the comic-book continuity to that of the Earth-Two Wonder Woman—allowing me to insert the Justice Society of America, [Rob laughs] a group I’d loved ever since they were reintroduced in the Silver Age (but more about that later).

Anyway, it was essentially a very kind gesture on Marty’s part to get me a little bit of extra money. Flash forward: A few years later I broke into television writing, and one of my earliest pitch meetings was at Star Trek Phase II, an abortive attempt to relaunch Star Trek as a weekly syndicated series.

KELLY: Right.

BRENNERT: I came close to selling them a story I called “Eclipse of Reason”—involving the Medusans from the original series episode “Is There in Truth No Beauty?”— when the whole project fell apart and morphed into Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

But I still had this story outline, and around 1980 or ’81, Marty was working on Marvel’s Star Trek comic and needed a plot for his next issue, so I was able to return the favor. I said, “Hey, I’ve got this. What do you think?” And he liked it and used it.

KELLY: Now it makes sense!

BRENNERT: And that’s how we wound up collaborating. (We also collaborated on a Fantasy Island episode a couple of years later, but that’s another story.)

KELLY: I always wondered how you ended up doing [Marvel’s] Star Trek #12 (Mar. 1981). It just seemed random… why that issue of Star Trek?

BRENNERT: And it’s been reprinted in a really shoddy trade paperback recently, too.

KELLY: Really? Oh, geez.

BRENNERT: Yes. IDW came out with a reprint of all the Marvel Star Treks, and none of us who wrote or drew those issues got any payment for it. And to add insult to injury, Marvel’s plates most have been, like, horribly deteriorated, because it was the worst reproduction that you’ve ever seen in a comic-book trade paperback.

KELLY: It’s a good story. I reread it not that long ago and it reads like a classic episode of Star Trek. I definitely feel like I could have watched that in 1968 with all the actors. It has that feel to it.

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BACK ISSUE • 53

BRENNERT: Thanks. I thought Marty’s script was very good. He did have to change the Medusans to “Phaetonians” because Paramount hadn’t licensed Marvel to use any of the alien races from the original series (a silly restriction, and one that DC did away with when they licensed the title).

KELLY: Well, that’s good. Okay, so your first solo book—your first solo story—is, of course, “To Kill a Legend” for Detective Comics #500 (Mar. 1981). At least chronologically, printed-wise, that’s your first one.

Is that the first one you wrote?

BRENNERT: That was the first script, yeah. And it came about because Paul Levitz was an old friend of mine. He was actually Marty’s roommate for a time in New York. He was in L.A. for a visit—I think it was early in 1979—and we got together for dinner. He had just become editor of the Batman titles. At some point when I was just daydreaming about things, I had come up with this idea that I thought would make a good Batman story. So I told it to Paul and said, “If you’d like to have one of your writers adapt this, feel free.” He looked at me and he said, “Well, you’re a writer. Why don’t you write it?” [Rob laughs] I said, “Well… okay.” I’d never written a full-length script for a comic book before but I was writing plenty of TV scripts, so I just followed the format of Marty’s scripts because I still had copies of those. (Although I think I used a bit less scene description than Marty does in his scripts.) I had just gotten off Buck Rogers, which was a fairly hideous TV staff experience, so to recover I took a vacation at the Club Med in Playa Blanca, Mexico. And I recall sitting out by the pool plotting this Batman story in between taking dips in the pool and drinking fruity tropical drinks. Rough, huh? So I wrote the outline for Paul, he liked it, approved it, and sent me into script. I wrote the script, he said he liked it, and I figured it was going to wind up as a fill-in issue somewhere.

The next thing I knew, Paul told me that he had scheduled it as the lead story in Detective #500, and I was totally stunned! This was honestly the last thing that I had expected. But I was very pleased, and I was thrilled to hear that Dick Giordano was drawing it; I had been a fan of Dick’s for a long while. I even talked to Dick while he was drawing the story and arranged to purchase some of his original pages.

KELLY: It’s a great story from beginning to end, but the kicker is the ending, where he is still going to be Batman but he’ll be a sort of a happy Batman. He won’t be a grim Batman.

BRENNERT: Mm-hm.

KELLY: On an episode of the Super Mates Podcast, hosted by my friends Chris and Cindy Franklin, we talked about that story and I said I wanted to keep seeing adventures of that Batman! [Alan laughs] Happy Batman! That would be interesting! Now, was that part of the story? Did you have that at the beginning or did you have that at the beginning and sort of write to that moment? Or was it just there the whole time?

BRENNERT: It’s hard to say. I can’t remember right now whether I conceived the ending before I began writing the story. I probably did because my usual process in writing novels is that when I conceive a story, I know the beginning, I know the ending, and I have at best a hazy idea of what’s in the middle.

KELLY: It was funny. You mentioned that Paul put it in the front of Detective Comics #500. Obviously, Paul knew what he had when he got it and DC knew what they had when they got it because they reprinted it a year later in their Best of the Year [digest] stories. I didn’t read it in the original Detective at the time, I read it in the digest when they reprinted it. But it felt like everyone knew right off the bat that—“Oh, boy. This is a killer, this one.” [laughs] It’s kind of good to know DC knew even at the time that this was a winner. They knew what to do with it.

BRENNERT: I was very flattered. There were some other very good stories in that issue of Detective. There was the closing story—the Deadman story—where Bruce meets his parents in the afterlife.

That was pretty touching, too, so I was in good company.

KELLY: Yeah, and [The Shadow’s] Walter Gibson has a piece in that book! That’s pretty amazing, you know?

BRENNERT: When I saw the cover for the first time—and the contributors were listed in alphabetical order, and there was my name, like the second or third one because it started with “B”—I remember thinking that all across the country, comic-book fans are going to be looking at this and going, “Who the hell is Alan Brennert?” [both laugh] KELLY: I’ve said this before. The first comic I ever read of yours was Brave and Bold #182. I remember reading it and really enjoying it at that time, [but] I thought, “Who wrote this?” At that age, you don’t think that people that write comics do anything else. You just think that’s their job. I was, like, “Who is this guy? What other comics does he write?” I didn’t realize that no, he doesn’t really write there. There’s no other series that you’re writing. But I was desperate to find whatever book you were currently writing because I was thinking, “Boy this story’s really good! I gotta read more of these!”

BRENNERT: I think I was probably the first television writer to make a hobby of writing comics. I can’t recall anyone else… I mean, certainly some comic-book writers had written for television, but I don’t know of any for whom it was the other way around.

KELLY: So… you’ve written 13 comics so far. Let’s say it’s 13. I’m not ready to say it’s totally 13. [Alan laughs] But four of them are The Brave and the Bold—#178 (Sept. 1981), which is the Creeper; #181 (Dec. 1981), which is Hawk and Dove; #182 (Jan. 1982), which is the Earth-Two Robin; and then #197 (Apr. 1983), which is Catwoman.

When you were approached to do the first one—say, the Batman and the Creeper—was the team-up already set? Did they come to you and say, “We want you to do Batman and Creeper. Do you have a story?”

BRENNERT: No… no. It came about because Dick Giordano took over the editing of Brave and Bold from Paul Levitz. He obviously knew my work from “To Kill a Legend” and he called up and said, “I’m doing

Boldly Going Alan and Martin collaborated again on this tale in Star Trek #12 (Mar. 1981), when the Enterprise was docked at Marvel Comics.

Star Trek TM & © Paramount Pictures.

54 • BACK ISSUE • Supergirl in the Bronze Age Issue

Brave and Bold. Would you like to write a script or two for me?” I immediately said yes. You have to understand that I was a huge Charlton fan. I discovered Charlton Comics in a little soda shop in the next town up from me in New Jersey; I’d never seen them anywhere else.

[Rob laughs] And I just fell in love with them! Steve Ditko, Jim Aparo, Pat Boyette, Pete Morisi—these really distinctive artists, the whole feel of that [Action Heroes] lineup [edited

by Giordano]. It was not as copy-heavy as Marvel but it was a little bit more adult in some respects than what DC was doing at the time, and I really became a huge fan of them. In retrospect, I look back and I realize that what I was doing on Brave and Bold was, I was working with Dick Giordano, my stories were being penciled by Jim Aparo, and my first two team-ups were Creeper and the Hawk and the Dove, which were Steve Ditko creations.

So in a way, I was trying to recreate that Charlton experience, or at least that late 1960s experience when Dick moved to DC and edited Ditko’s books. So yeah, it was my idea to do the Creeper. It was certainly my idea to do the Hawk and the Dove, because by that time they had been completely forgotten by everybody at DC, which is why I decided to age them out of sync with the rest of the DC Universe. I figured, “Who’s going to care?” These characters hadn’t been used in years, since an old issue of Teen Titans, and at that point, it seemed as though they never would be again because they were so… you know… of the ’60s! I thought, “Well… let’s run with that. If these are characters who are sort of stuck in the ’60s, let’s make them literally stuck in the ’60s in

that they have not matured the way they should have.

They’ve aged but not matured.”

KELLY: Right.

BRENNERT: As for the Creeper, I know people love that story but it’s probably my least favorite of all of my Brave and Bold stories. I was trying to create a Ditko-like villain and I think if Steve Ditko had drawn it, the “Origami Man” probably would have looked a lot more like what I had envisioned (it was visually inspired by the villain in the then-unpublished Blue Beetle #6, the “Specter”).

Jim Aparo did the best job that he could, but basically it was, you know, [laughs] a villain made out of paper.

My favorite part of that story was getting Jack Ryder back onto the air doing social commentary, which was my reaction to the right-wing politics in America at the time.

KELLY: Well, yeah. Thank God that’s over with! [both laugh] Now that you’ve brought it up, I want to ask you about this specifically. All your stories have some very real-world concern buried in them. All of your stories are about something other than the plot that’s going on.

The one with Hawk and the Dove is about aging and not growing up—to me, at least—and the one with Earth-Two Robin is about facing your own mortality, the one with Batman and Catwoman is about sort of a fear of death.

Again, in terms of your writing process, how do you approach it? Is it like a theme that you want to get into with a particular story and then you build the sort of comic-book plot around it, or does the theme sort of naturally occur as you’re writing out the story that you’ve come up with?

Supergirl in the Bronze Age Issue

A Bat-Classic “To Kill a Legend,” produced by Alan Brennert and Dick Giordano for Detective Comics #500 (Mar. 1981), put the writer on the radar of many DC fans. To learn more about this anniversary issue of Detective, check out our own anniversary issue, BACK ISSUE #69.

TM & © DC Comics.

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BACK ISSUE • 55

Ditko Double-Shot Brennert’s first two issues of The Brave and the Bold paired Batman with the Steve Ditko-created Creeper (left, in #178) and the Hawk and the Dove (right, in #181).

TM & © DC Comics.

BRENNERT: It generally starts with the characters. I think about the characters and what I like about the characters and what I would like to see done with them, and it goes from there. The emotional through-line definitely occurs to me before the action storyline does. That was one of the reasons that I never worked with Julie Schwartz. I came to love Julie as a friend in later years, but back in the day I was going to do a Superman story with him. It was going to be the return of Sally Selwyn (“The Sweetheart Superman Forgot,” Superman #165). I started pitching it to him in emotional terms, the “character arcs,” and he was getting impatient, saying, “Where’s the action?

Where’s the action?” This was never a question I heard from Dick Giordano. After that first story I did for Paul, all of my Brave and Bolds were basically just verbal pitches.

I’d say to Dick, “I want to do something with the Creeper,” and he’d say, “Fine. Go ahead.” He was great to work with. Occasionally it would be a little bit more than that, a little bit more worked out, but generally the emotional through-line or the social comment I had in advance, and then I worked out the action beats.

If you look, my stories are not really action-heavy.

They’re more character pieces, but I think I have enough action in them to keep the story moving along and prevent it from becoming just talking heads. So that was sort of my process, and I learned quickly it was not Julie’s, and I just let that assignment slide.

KELLY: I assume with the Hawk and Dove one where you said they’ve aged … sort of out of continuity-wise, they’ve aged. I assume you know about the nod that Marv Wolfman did to that in a later issue of Teen Titans?

56 • BACK ISSUE • Supergirl in the Bronze Age Issue

BRENNERT: I know, I know. [Rob laughs] It was funny, but I did think at the time, “Was that really necessary?”

I also know about the nod that Barbara and Karl Kesel did in an issue of the revived Hawk and Dove, where they used parts of that story as dream or fantasy sequences.

I finally met Barbara at a party at Len Wein’s just a few years ago. She told me that they really loved my story and tried to figure a way to get it into the modern canon in some way.

KELLY: [laughs] Great! Talking about Brave and the Bold #182, it features Batwoman, Kathy Kane, and a lot of your stories—in fact, half of them—either feature a parallel world or specifically characters from Earth-Two. Is that because you mentioned earlier how much you loved the Justice Society? Is that just from a childhood thing, you just love those characters so much?

BRENNERT: Yeah, pretty much. I’ve loved the characters since they were brought back in JLA. I remember around that time, Julie would run these one-page text features in his various magazines—little histories of the Golden Age characters. They’d all have a small repro of the comic the character first appeared in—for instance the Spectre in More Fun Comics—and then a short history of the character in the Golden Age. I actually collected those. I cut them out of the comic and collected them into a scrapbook; they just fascinated me. The thing that I loved, what really imprinted on me as a child, was the sense of history—that these characters had histories, that there was this world where all these heroes debuted in the 1930s and ’40s and they’ve since aged and grown in real time. It seemed to me, years later,

All This and Earth-Two Alan’s love for DC’s Golden Age characters is on view on these Jim Aparodrawn covers to (left) Brave and Bold #182, starring Batman and the Earth-Two Robin, and (right) #197, featuring the Earth-Two Batman and Catwoman’s romance.

TM & © DC Comics.

that DC didn’t make as much of some of those characters as they could have. I was a great admirer of what Gerry Conway, Paul Levitz, and Joe Staton did in the revival of All-Star Comics. There was this feeling in that book that these are characters who are middle-aged, they have wives, husbands, some of them have children … time has moved on for them. They were allowed to become more real, more human, than most of the Earth-One characters, who were locked in to being merchandisable, and thus unchanging.

KELLY: Right.

BRENNERT: You couldn’t have Clark and Lois actually get married back then. They had to stay exactly the way they were. So I loved the freedom of being able to use these Earth-Two characters, to show them aging and the decisions that they made in their lives. Sometimes they were good decisions, sometimes they were bad ones. That held a great appeal to me. I also just liked the idea of alternate worlds in general, mainly for the same reason.

I wrote an entire novel, Time and Chance, with chapters alternating between two parallel worlds—one man, two lives. So that concept was very powerful to me. And I did love the Justice Society. In fact, Brave and Bold #182 I had originally conceived as Batman teaming up with the JSA—but at that time, Roy Thomas was DC’s Earth-Two editor, he had approval over where those characters could appear, and he did not really want them to have many appearances outside his books.

He wanted to keep the continuity, which is understandable.

So then I had to figure out—I want to do an Earth-Two story, but how do I do an Earth-Two story without the JSA? I started thinking about the Batman family and I thought, well, I could do the Earth-Two Robin. I didn’t think Roy would object if I did that. Batwoman came as a secondary thought while I was writing it. “Wouldn’t it be cool if there was a Batwoman on Earth-Two?” That was partly in response to the fact that she was sort of unceremoniously bumped off on Earth-One. I thought, “You know, she deserves a grace note.” So I brought her in. I was taken to task for this in a fanzine by E. Nelson Bridwell because I had the story occur in 1955 and in the DC Universe, Batwoman didn’t appear until 1957. My attitude toward that was the same, as it turns out, as Denny O’Neil’s. When Denny and I had dinner about ten years ago, we talked about this and he said, “I always assumed that time flowed differently on Earth-Two,” which was exactly how I’d figured it. Because if you

actually try to apply real time to the Earth-One/Earth-Two continuity it just doesn’t work! Robin’s, what, eight years old in 1941, so by the time All-Star is revived in 1976 he would have been 43, 44—which was not how he was portrayed—so I just figured, nah! Time flows differently relative to each parallel world.

KELLY: You mentioned giving Batwoman a nice sendoff. I have to assume that was part of the impetus behind Brave and the Bold #197, which was really your last Brave and the Bold because the book was canceled three issues after that. I read that story again—beautiful art

by Joe Staton and George Freeman. The artwork is just gorgeous. It feels like … I mean, obviously you couldn’t have planned this because I don’t know if you necessarily knew it was happening, or maybe you did, but the Crisis was only two years away at this point and they were going to get rid of there ever being an Earth-Two Batman. This feels like a nice, Autumnal sendoff of this character. And when you look at it from that perspective, it feels like, “Let’s give him one last hurrah before we start to erase him from our publication history.”

BRENNERT: Believe me, that was not in anyone’s mind. The story came about at a pool party at Mark Evanier’s house after a San Diego Con. I don’t go to conventions but I would occasionally go to Mark’s postSan Diego parties. [Rob laughs] So I’m in the pool with Len Wein, I’m meeting him for the first time, and he says that he just took over Brave and Bold and do I want to write an episode? I said, “Sure.” Notice I keep saying “episode.” My TV roots. I said, “Sure, I’ll write one.” I’m not sure whether I suggested right then and there, “How about if I do the Golden Age Batman and the Golden Age Catwoman?” I don’t recall if I proposed it then or later, but I chose it because it was a backstory that hadn’t been told. Paul Levitz had created the Huntress and wrote a sort of condensed version where we find out that Bruce Wayne married Selina Kyle, but I wondered, “How did they get to that point?” That’s quite a leap, you know? Even allowing for a lot of sexual tension between them. So I proposed telling that backstory and Len said, “Sure. Go ahead.” I talked to Paul before I did it because I was trying to make sense of Catwoman’s chronology, in particular this whole business where she got amnesia. She was an airline stewardess and she got amnesia and became the Catwoman. Sure, happens all the time.

I remember saying to Paul, “Wow, this really is contrived. I wonder how I can get around that.” And Paul had the brilliant notion—what if she Supergirl in the Bronze Age Issue

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When Bruce Met Selina Old foes become new lovers on this remarkable page from Alan’s “The Autobiography of Bruce Wayne!” From The Brave and the Bold #197 (Apr. 1983). Art by Joe Staton and George Freeman.

TM & © DC Comics.

was lying? [Both laugh] I said, “Well, of course!” and it all fell into place from there.

The thing I’m most proud of in that story is the origin that I gave Selina Kyle, which sort of became canon for the Golden Age Catwoman for the brief time she had left. And also that scene where Batman gets burned on the back and takes his shirt off and Selina says, “My God, you’ve got all this scar tissue,” and he just sort of shrugs it off and says, “Oh, that. Yeah, 15 years of fighting will do that to a person.” That was the first time, I think, that anybody had remarked on any superhero at DC having anything like permanent wounds. Superman would lose his powers and he’d get a black eye, but he was always fine by the end of the story. I thought, “But in the real world this guy’s got no superpowers. He’s got to be pretty banged up.”

Years later, Alex Ross did a painting— KELLY: Right, right.

BRENNERT: —which he credited as, “This is based on a great Joe Staton story.” Well, yes. Joe did great artwork, but that was my idea, Alex. Thank you very much.

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And then the image later turned up in Batman Begins or The Dark Knight, so that was kind of cool, to see something that you wrote become so firmly established in the mythology.

KELLY: Yeah, it’s absolutely become part of the character’s backstory that he’s all scarred up. There’s a similar thing with Kingdom Come. I don’t know if you ever read that miniseries?

BRENNERT: Oh, yeah. Loved it.

KELLY: Where Aquaman talks about how he runs 70% of the world! Every writer has quoted that. Every single Aquaman writer. Mark Waid just threw in this little line and it’s now just part of the character. I remember reading Brave and the Bold #197 when it came out in 1983 and I literally remember reading that and going, “Yeah! Of course!” I’d never thought of it before, but of course! Bruce Wayne’s body is going to look horrible, and you have to wonder what the guys at the Gotham Country Club think when they see this guy. Like, what is this guy doing in his spare time?

BRENNERT: He keeps his polo shirt on.

KELLY: [laughs] Yeah. I mean … Good lord!

BRENNERT: That was what I was trying to do in all my stories. I tried to think: What would these characters be like if they really existed? It was the Marvel approach, obviously, but DC—even by the early 1980s—had not yet fully embraced that. They were trying; I admired Steve Englehart’s Batman and JLA stories, especially the way the heroes called each other by their real names, something I picked up on. But it wasn’t until Marv Wolfman’s New Teen Titans that we started to get, on a consistent basis, more flesh-and-blood human beings in DC stories. I just tried to take that one extra step toward reality. Then Alan Moore came along and took, like, 12 extra steps and showed us all just how far you could go!

KELLY: You mentioned Marvel and it’s the perfect time.

I wanted to ask you about Daredevil #192 (Mar. 1983), which is only your second Marvel comic and your only solo credit on a Marvel comic. And it is the first issue of Daredevil following Frank Miller’s big run. How did that come about that you’d end up writing an issue of Daredevil?

BRENNERT: Basically … nobody at Marvel wanted to follow Frank Miller. [Rob laughs] Honestly! Denny O’Neil, who’d read my Batman stories, called me and said, “Look, I like your Batman stories and Batman is kind of similar to Daredevil. I was wondering if you’d like to write an issue?” He had no idea that Daredevil was actually one of my favorite, if not my favorite, Marvel character, especially as drawn by Gene Colan. I love Daredevil, love the idea of a blind superhero, love the idea that he’s a lawyer by day and a vigilante by night.

So I immediately said yes. I’d been reading Frank Miller’s run on the book—which was really wonderful—so I knew what had gone before. But I also didn’t try to write it exactly the way that Frank did. I tried to keep a continuity and a style similar to what he did, but I also threw in a little bit of the bantering Daredevil that I loved as a kid, when his dialogue was written by Stan Lee. It was just a great lot of fun to do although the circumstances of writing it were a little odd. I came down with the flu and had simultaneous deadlines on both Daredevil and an episode of Fantasy Island. I swear, there were days I wasn’t sure if Mr. Roarke would be swinging around a flag pole [Rob laughs] or Daredevil would look down to find Tattoo calling, “Da plane, da plane!”

I was very, very flattered that Denny had offered this to me, especially because back in my days as a letterhack, I said some not very gracious things [Rob laughs] about Denny’s Justice League stories. I think Denny is one of the greatest Batman writers ever. To my mind he wrote

the definitive Batman. But I think even he would admit that Justice League was not quite his forte. But apparently he forgave me all of that. I handed the story in and he immediately said, “This is great! Want to do another?” And I said sure.

Unfortunately at that time I was going through some personal problems—a close friend of mine had passed away suddenly and it was causing me to suffer some depression and writer’s block. When it became apparent after a week that I was not going to be able to wrap my mind around this story, I called Denny up and said, “Denny, I’m sorry.” I explained the situation to him and he said, “Don’t worry. This is very professional of you to call me with this much notice. I’ve gotten this call sometimes a day before the deadline!” [both laugh] He knew the idea that I’d come up with and he wound up writing the story himself and put a little thank-you to me in it. At the time, Marvel didn’t want writers to edit their own stories, but he just had no choice but to write it himself. Yeah, I would not have minded doing more Daredevils but my schedule then was getting pretty busy. I started writing for Simon & Simon, and after that I went on Twilight Zone and I just didn’t have time to do any more comic books until around the end of the ’80s.

KELLY: There you go. Perfect segue here. Your next story was your—I don’t want to say it’s your crowning achievement, because there’s a bunch of crowning achievements here—but the Christmas with the Super-Heroes #2 (1989) story with Deadman, drawn again by Dick Giordano. Warning to anyone who hasn’t read it, I’m gonna spoil the ending but you should have read it by now anyway! Even if you remove the kicker ending, the story itself, of Deadman, is wonderful, about all you put Deadman through with an angle I don’t think I’d seen in a Deadman story. How did it come about that, at the end of this story, Deadman talks to Supergirl who had been—at that point—completely erased from DC continuity?

BRENNERT: Well, yes, and I was pretty pissed off about that, actually. [Rob laughs] Really, the way that Crisis was originally supposed to have ended was that everybody—at least the heroes that went back to the beginning of time—they, at least, remembered the Earth-Two heroes and Supergirl. Then when John Byrne decided that he was going to completely reboot Superman, it was decided, well, Supergirl never existed. To me that seemed like not only kind of a repudiation of a great character that meant a lot to many of us growing up, but also a repudiation of the work of the writers and artists who created her stories. Sort of a kick in the teeth to Jim Mooney and Otto Binder. So when [editor] Mark Waid asked me to do this Christmas story—which, incidentally, was done after my Secret Origins story but was actually the first one that saw print— KELLY: Oh, wow. Okay.

BRENNERT: —I conceived the somewhat seditious idea of doing a Deadman story and at the end I would sneak in the ghost of Kara Zor-El. There have been rumors circulating out there among the fans that this was done without the knowledge of anybody at DC; that it was Mark Waid and me sort of slipping it in past management. But it was drawn by the editor-in-chief and vice president of the company! [Rob laughs] In fact, Mark said when he brought it in to Dick to okay it editorially, Dick read it, clutched it to his chest and said, “Mine!” Which was very flattering.

Dick did a great job; he drew Kara in a way that in retrospect is recognizable as her, but would not tip readers off the way it would have if, say, Jim Mooney had drawn her.

So, yeah. It was approved. It was sent to all the group editors. Mike Carlin signed off on this. Where the trouble came in was when the freelancers working for the Superman books saw this and said, “Well, wait a minute. We’ve been saying all along that she never existed and now you say you have this!” They were really quite distressed about this, and I can understand it; they felt sandbagged, which was not our intent. Some even went—I was told—to see Dick and said, “Okay, we have a way to make this part of continuity. Over in Justice League Europe, Power Girl is in a coma right now, so how about if we say that this was her astral self [Rob laughs]

“Nobody at Marvel wanted to follow Frank Miller!” …but Alan Brennert did it anyway!

Cover and title page to Alan’s issue, which took place immediately after Miller’s celebrated Daredevil run: issue #192 (Mar. 1983), drawn by Klaus Janson.

TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc.

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that was projecting itself to Deadman and that’s who he meets.” And Dick—God bless him—said, “Guys! It’s just a nice little Christmas story. End of story.” Again, it was just intended to be a nice grace note for the character. Her death in Crisis was fine, but what was done to her later, just unmaking her? I thought she deserved better than that, and happily, that eventually became part of DC continuity: The story is cited by John Wells in his “Post-Crisis Events” done for the Absolute Crisis hardcover edition. And years later, Peter David did the same thing—he brought back the spirit of Kara Zor-El in one of his Supergirl-Matrix stories.

KELLY: Is it too far to reach to assume that your dog Kara is named after Supergirl?

BRENNERT: You know, I don’t know how many people will believe this, but—yes and no. She had that name when we got her! We adopted her from her trainer; her original name was Montana, but her trainer gave her the name Kara, with a “K,” because she said it was Hebrew for “second chance.”

KELLY: Awww…

BRENNERT: I’ve never been able to confirm that, but Marty Pasko tells me he recalls hearing the same thing from his days at DC: that someone, maybe Jerry Siegel, named her Kara because Argo City was her second chance. That gives me chills. In any event, my wife wanted to call her Molly but I protested, “No, no, we have to keep the name! Kara is a noble name, she sacrificed herself to save the universe!” And as Paulette so often does, she just sighed patiently and said, “Yes, dear.

I understand.” [laughs] KELLY: Wow, yeah!

BRENNERT: But we did add “Zor-El” as her middle name.

KELLY: That’s great! So … .you mentioned the Secret Origins story, which is “Unfinished Business,” which ran in the final issue of Secret

Origins (#50, Aug. 1990). Again you’ve got Joe Staton and Dick Giordano, so you’ve got a twofer there…

BRENNERT: By the way, I forgot to mention that I actually requested Joe for the Batman/Catwoman story because I loved his work and I knew him through Marty. He happened to be in L.A. right after I had requested him, so he and I had dinner at Hamburger Hamlet and went over the story together. It was one of the only times—just Joe and Norm Breyfogle—that I worked directly with the artists.

KELLY: Yeah, Joe Staton, one of the best guys ever to do it! Not only are the stories great, but you really had—Aparo, Staton, Klaus Janson— you had a really good string of artists doing your stories.

BRENNERT: Yeah, I was lucky.

KELLY: So how did the Black Canary origin come about for Secret Origins #50?

BRENNERT: Mark Waid again. Mark had just become an editor at DC. He called me up, left word on my answering machine in Los Angeles.

I was on vacation in Hawai’i. I got his message, called him back, he said he was editing Secret Origins and would I be interested in doing a Black Canary origin? At first I turned it down. I thought, “Aw, I don’t know.

That character’s never really done much for me—aside from the fishnets.”

So my then-girlfriend and I went down to breakfast and sometime during breakfast, as she put it, I “went away.” My eyes became glassy as I stared into the distance, realizing, “Well wait a minute. In this new DC Universe, there are two Black Canaries, mother and daughter.

And the Golden Age Black Canary didn’t go off to Ragnarok with the rest of the Justice Society. Why was that, I wonder?” I suddenly realized this could be an interesting story so I called Mark Waid back and asked, “Is it still available?” I pitched him my take on it and it became the origin of two Black Canaries and the way that the mantle was passed from one to the other. And to make it more dramatic—and because it just seemed like the right thing to do—I had the estranged mother dying and Dinah reconciling with her at her bedside, thanks to the kind intervention of the Spectre.

The two high points for me were when Wildcat is talking about his girlfriend, Irina, back in the ’40s, and how she got pregnant and had his baby, Jake. And one of his foes, the Yellow Wasp—who I mistakenly referred to as the Golden Wasp; so sue me—had kidnapped him and basically tormented Wildcat with the knowledge that he would never see his son again. And Wildcat admits, “You ever wonder why so many

Deadman’s Best Friend (left) Title page from the Deadman tale in Christmas with the Super-Heroes #2, by Brennert and Giordano. (right) Alan and his dog, Kara Zor-El. Photo courtesy of Alan Brennert.

Deadman TM & © DC Comics.

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The Story Behind Black Canary Title page to Brennert’s contribution to Secret Origins #50 (Aug. 1990). Editorial mea culpa: Ye ed was the mop-up editor on this tale, and regrets that the creative role of its conceptual editor, Mark Waid, was diminished in the credits. This story would not have been possible without Mark.

TM & © DC Comics.

JSAers did not have children? This is the reason. It’s a dangerous life.” I was also setting up something that I thought surely someone would pick up on: the son!

Geoff Johns knew about that story. Way back when he was working for [film director] Dick Donner, he told me he and David Goyer had read it and were using it as a “bible” of sorts for their JSA run. But Geoff never had Wildcat meet his son, just someone who’d known his son. I don’t know, seemed an obvious thing to do, but maybe he didn’t want to do the obvious thing. And then at the end I got to put in a little more seditious stuff implying that the souls of everybody from Earth-Two still existed somewhere. Some of this got edited out after Mark Waid left his editorial position at DC, but I think there’s enough of it still there that you get the idea.

KELLY: Oh, absolutely! And again, another nice sendoff for this character that—as you said—I think most people forgot. She was never really part of the JSA stories at a certain point and then you had the other version that was going around, so … yeah.

Now, the next thing you did was arguably the splashiest thing you’ve ever done for a comic book. It was an Elseworlds book! A solo Elseworlds book, which was Batman: Holy Terror (1991). I’m hard-pressed, when I first read it, to sort of connect it up with what I knew about your stories. I find that even though your stories have all the dramatic stuff, they seem generally upbeat, and this is … heavy! This is a very heavy story and for anyone who hasn’t read it, it’s basically an Elseworlds story where Batman lives in this universe that is a theocracy. Where did this come from?

BRENNERT: Well, I was approached again by Mark Waid, who started out as editor; it was taken over by Denny O’Neil. It actually was the first to bear the Elseworlds logo, after Gotham by Gaslight. I did it partly for the opportunity to work at the graphic novel length, which I had not done before, and also for the freedom of the format, because this would not be a Code-approved comic book. And that was something that I was interested in tackling. The story was darker than any of my other ones, but it had a more serious lynchpin: an alternate America that was a theocracy. The subject was something I felt pretty strongly about—you can trace it all the way back to my Jack Ryder commentary in the B&B Creeper story. I believe passionately in the separation of church and state, and I think that when there’s confusion between them, it’s bad for the country and bad for its citizens. But without going into politics too deeply, this was just my way of finding an interesting background that would have some meat to it—and it just turned into a darker story. I thought, well, of necessity, Batman has to be the only hero. He has to be the first superhero in this world. So what happened to all of those other heroes of the Justice Society and the Justice League?

So I set about finding, you know, horrible ways to dispose of them! [laughs]

KELLY: Yes, you did! [both laugh] BRENNERT: My favorite being the misdirection of the Green Man, who I was trying to get everybody to think was either the Martian Manhunter—because Dr. Erdel was involved—or Green Lantern. It turned out, of course, to be Superman, dead from kryptonite poisoning (as in that classic Jerry Siegel story I read when I was seven).

KELLY: Right.

BRENNERT: So, yeah, it was darker. Also, it was a more difficult story for me to write because I was used to writing these 20-, 22-page stories and I didn’t really have to work the plot out that much in advance. I was able to write the script pretty much as I went along.

But this was 48 pages, and I found myself having to sit down and lay it out. I’d take out a sheet of 81⁄2 by 11 paper and lay down a grid and actually start to sketch in some of the action so that I had an idea of what the pacing for the first ten or 15 pages was going to be. It was something that I’d never done before and at times it really didn’t work—there’s a two-page sequence in the beginning where there’s so Supergirl in the Bronze Age Issue

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Alan’s Elseworlds Tale Courtesy of Heritage Comics Auctions (www.ha.com), Norm Breyfogle’s original cover painting for Brennert’s 1991 Elseworlds graphic novel, Batman: Holy Terror.

TM & © DC Comics.

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much exposition that the word balloons are practically crowding characters out of the panels. I should have just let Norm lay out those pages by himself. He could have paced it a lot better. It was not as pleasant a writing experience, partly because of the format and partly because I had committed myself to writing a very dark story. But it was a theme that I cared about and it did sell pretty well, something like 75- or 80,000 copies.

KELLY: There was never any trouble at DC for writing this type of story?

Because this could be perceived as pretty offensive to some people. I mean, just touching religion in comics at all is a live wire. So there was never any issue at DC with it?

BRENNERT: I never heard a word. I was fully expecting to get some flak about Thomas and Martha Wayne being arrested for “counterreproductive activities” because I really was kind of pushin’ the envelope with that. You have to understand, by this time Alan Moore had come along and the landscape, the parameters of what was doable in comics, had changed completely. I wanted to try to push that envelope a little bit in my own way. But, no, I heard no complaints from DC about it.

Denny O’Neil liked the story very much. Norm Breyfogle liked the story very much. I think I got maybe two letters about it. One was from a very serious Catholic who objected to my libeling his Church, and I had to point out to him, “No, this is not the Catholic Church. This is a Protestant theocracy.” He didn’t know quite as much about history as he did about religion.

The other was a fan letter that Denny said they got at the office which was from a nun in New York City who said, according to Denny, that it was “one of the most faith-affirming stories that she had ever read.”

KELLY: Wow! BRENNERT: Denny told me, “I’m not sure I’d be willing to go that far.”

Neither would I, Denny! But that was how I was writing it: that Bruce genuinely had faith, but that faith had been co-opted and corrupted by the Church. To me, that was the only way to write the story. The fact that I was an agnostic didn’t interfere with that any more than when I wrote from the viewpoint of a nun in my novel Moloka’i. If you’re writing about people of faith, you have to respect that faith. Anyway, those were the only two letters I know of that we received. Go figure.

KELLY: One of the things that’s surprising about it is if you just read it in a one sentence summary, “In this Elseworlds story, Batman lives in a theocracy,” your brain immediately goes, “Well, he won’t be a believer! He’s fighting against it!” And yet one of the nice things about the story is, no, he is! He is a man of faith. He just conflicts against the corruption of it. It’s a strange thing to read Bruce Wayne talking about belief in God. You never see that in any Batman comic, so that was a nice switch-up. It really is not what you’re thinking you’re gonna get.

BRENNERT: Bruce was not aware that the Church killed his parents; he thought it was just a random street crime. So to me, his growing up to become a priest was a logical extension because he’s lost his parents.

Who does he have to turn to? He turns to God. And his, ironically, is the purer form of faith than that of this corrupt theocracy.

KELLY: Before we move off this, I have to tell you this. It breaks my heart that the one time in your comics career that you wrote Aquaman, you wrote him as a vegetable floating in a giant water tank and he has no dialogue! You’re breaking my heart, Alan! [laughs] BRENNERT: Sorry. I liked Aquaman. He wasn’t one of my favorite characters, but I knew he had to be included. There’s even a mention of a forced mating with Lori Lemaris, so let me just offer my deepest apologies to you and all Silver Age fans.

KELLY: Yeah, yeah. There’s a bunch of your letters in the old ’60s Aquaman comics…

BRENNERT: That’s true! I really loved Steve Skeates’ run on that book.

I thought it was great. Plus it was Jim Aparo!

KELLY: And [editor] Dick Giordano! So there you go! All the Charlton guys together. That’s my single favorite run of Aquaman still, those Skeates stories from the ’60s.

Well, let’s move on to your very last … SO FAR! Let’s hold out hope!

Your so far last credit in comics is in Batman: Gotham Knights #10 (Dec. 2000). You did the black-and-white story called “Guardian” and it was drawn by—I’ll explain this in a second—José Luis García-López, Praised Be His Name, which is something we always say every time we mention his name on the show because we just all love his work so much! Talk about your string of great artists! I mean … Good Lord!

And this is another Earth-Two sort of story because you’ve got the Earth-Two Green Lantern in here.

Now, how did all this come about?

BRENNERT: Mark Chiarello, the editor of Batman: Gotham Knights, called me and asked if I’d do an eight-page Batman: Black & White story.

And as it happened, I had this idea. I’d been following the new DC Universe as it had been reconceived and I thought, “You know, they haven’t done a story about how Alan Scott met Batman.” I mean, they’re both in Gotham City; when did they meet? What happened when they did? So I decided to tell that backstory—again, a story I wanted to see myself. And it was fun to write because I played Green Lantern as the nearly omnipotent figure that he was in James Robinson’s Golden Age miniseries. I even borrowed James’ idea that Alan retires because it was getting too easy for him—he could do anything with that ring and he needed to struggle and strive like a human being again, be a human being again. It was fun playing the two characters, who are so different, off each other. And the closing scene in Little Paris, when Bruce’s talking about taking a rollercoaster ride with his father … well, that was really me

A Cross to Bear Kal-El fares poorly in Brennert and Breyfogle’s Batman: Holy Terror.

TM & © DC Comics.

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The Future Mrs. Gordon Brennert and Giordano introduced Barbara Kean in their Detective #500 story, as shown here. In this interview, Alan discusses his reaction to the addition of Barbara Kean to the cast to TV’s Gotham.

TM & © DC Comics.

talking about taking a rollercoaster ride with my dad at Palisades Park when I was a kid.

I handed in the script, and the first artist that I was told was going to be drawing it was Dave Gibbons.

I thought, “Wow, Dave Gibbons! Cool!” Months then go by and Mark Chiarello calls me and says, “Well, Dave sent it back. He can’t do it after all. He’s got too much else to do. But … I just gave the script to Gil Kane.”

KELLY: Oooooo!

BRENNERT: I fairly swooned at the thought of having one of my stories—much less a story with Alan Scott!— drawn by Gil Kane. I thought, “Can’t do better than that”—and then Gil Kane promptly died. I swear it wasn’t my script that did it. Finally the story, which I was beginning to think of as some kind of cursed chain letter, wound up going to García-López, who’s a terrific artist. I love what he did with it, I thought it was an excellent job, but … you know, part of me still feels like, “Oh, God, I came this close to having Gil Kane drawing Alan Scott and Batman!”

KELLY: How could you not? It’s a great story and another great angle.

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I guess now’s the perfect time to mention [this…]

You’ve come up on the Internet. This thing went viral about your issue with DC Comics currently involving the Gotham TV series. Now, most people have probably seen the article. It went all around, which is great. A lot of places picked it up. But for anybody who hasn’t been following it, why don’t you give a brief explanation as to what the issue is in terms of creators’ rights, and specifically with you and the Gotham TV show?

BRENNERT: In “To Kill a Legend”—which was set in an alternate world that was about 20 years behind Earth-One—I created a character named Barbara Kean, who was the fiancée of Lt. James Gordon. I had Dick Giordano draw her to resemble her daughter-to-be, Barbara, and even gave her the same first name because I thought it was kind of cool to show that Babs got her beauty, brains, and even her name from her mother.

There had been a nameless “Mrs. Gordon” that appeared twice in 1951 back on Earth-Two, but in the 30 years after that there had been no appearance of the Earth-One Mrs. Gordon until my story. Then, after that, DC retroactively named the Golden Age Mrs. Gordon “Barbara,” so somebody there liked the idea.

The character was picked up later by Frank Miller, who named James Gordon’s wife “Barbara” in “Batman: Year One” (and I know Frank had read my Batman stories because he told me so in a conversation we had when I was writing Daredevil). Then Barbara Kesel—or Barbara Randall as she was then known—wrote a Secret Origins about Batgirl and further expanded her mother’s character, who has since been referred to as Barbara Kean Gordon.

She even appeared in a couple of the Batman movies— Batman Begins and The Dark Knight—although her appearances were pretty brief.

I didn’t really think too much about all this until I saw that Gotham was going to be on this fall and one of the recurring characters was “Barbara Kean, fiancée of Lt. James Gordon.” I thought, well this is just too close.

So I emailed the executive at DC who was in charge of approving “equity.” (If creators receive “equity” in a character, they are entitled to payment when it’s used in other media, determined on a percentage basis.) But the exec turned me down, saying, “Well, the character’s too derivative of her own daughter, Barbara Gordon, because you made her look like her and she even has the same name and profession. We don’t give equity in derivative characters.” I responded, “Mark Waid’s character, Bart Allen, is derivative of Barry Allen and yet Mark tells me he’s received equity in Bart and been paid for the character when it appeared on Smallville. And what’s more, I know for a fact that you do make payments for derivative characters, just at a reduced percentage than for ‘original’ ones.” I said, “Look, just give me a reduced percentage on the character. I’ve had a long and largely positive relationship with DC. I’d hate to see it end over a matter of a few hundred dollars.” (I later learned that the actual fees were usually far less, more like $45 per TV appearance for original characters and maybe half that for derivatives ones.) How did this exec respond?

He stopped answering my emails.

Let me be clear: I was not in this for the money. I am hardly in desperate need of 25 bucks an episode. But as a Writers Guild member, had I created this character for a TV show, I would have automatically received payment for recurring appearances. And here’s Warners, they’re putting Barbara Kean’s name and face on bus stop advertisements, for God’s sake, and they’re saying she’s not an original enough character to warrant payment?

Bullsh*t. That’s when I decided to go public on Facebook.

I figured if this is happening to me, it was probably happening to a lot of other creators, some of whom who

might really need that $25 an episode. And I’ve since spoken with a number of comics creators who’ve said, “Oh, yeah. I’ve been screwed over in the same way by DC.” Most of these writers are dependent on DC for their living and they’re not going to make waves. I’m not dependent on DC for anything, so I thought someone should make some waves. I maintain that Dick Giordano and I do deserve compensation for the character. Since our story, there have been 52 instances of Barbara Kean Gordon being used in comics, twice in movies, and now as a supporting character on a TV series. So clearly, this character is of value to DC even though they’re trying to disparage it as derivative (and dissemble about the fact that they do make exceptions and pay for such characters).

I think it’s pretty petty and sleazy when a company is willing to screw a creator over 25 bucks. And it’s particularly disheartening to me because, under Jenette Kahn and Paul Levitz, DC was a standup company when it came to creator payment, and used to be one I was proud to be associated with.

KELLY: The thing that bothers me when these things come up, all of a sudden comics fans become experts in contract law. Everybody knows, “No, no, no! That’s not right.” You don’t know. You don’t know what was signed. Second of all, there’s a kind of blind “I don’t wanna see how the sausage is made” mentality. “Just gimme the comics I want and give me the show I want and I don’t wanna hear about how it gets made.”

Well, these are people! These are people that did this for their livelihood. Not so much in your case, but certainly others. It’s troublesome.

BRENNERT: It’s troublesome to me, just as a viewer.

The only Marvel movie I’ve actually paid money to see was the first Captain America movie because I knew that Joe Simon had made some sort of settlement with Marvel. But I didn’t go to see any of the Thor or Iron Man movies because I could just not bear the thought of watching characters that were co-created by Jack Kirby and knowing that the Jack Kirby estate is not receiving a dime for that. That just interferes with my enjoyment of the film. [Interviewer’s note: Since Marvel’s settlement with the Kirby estate, Alan says he is once again able to watch and enjoy Marvel films.]

KELLY: Yeah, yeah.

BRENNERT: My little dustup with DC is just trivial compared to the Kirby estate not getting money and Bill Finger not getting credit for having co-created Batman.

KELLY: I would imagine that—at least for the time being— you’re never going to do anything for DC. I guess some big change would have to occur. Do you feel like you’re done with doing comics? You’ve never done anything for an independent company. Would you ever be interested in that or is it just that DC and Marvel have these characters that you grew up on and that’s what attracts you?

BRENNERT: I have been offered projects at independents.

Scott Dunbier, when he was at Wildstorm, offered me the opportunity to continue Alan Moore’s Top 10, which I immediately said yes to because I loved that book.

I thought it was one of the most imaginative, innovative, and wildly whimsical comic books that I’d read in years.

I suggested doing a miniseries which would have been the Silver Age Top 10, the characters who were working at the Top 10 precinct in the 1960s. [Rob laughs] This was at the point that Alan Moore was just finishing the script for The Forty-Niners graphic novel, which featured the Golden Age Top 10. I had ideas of what I wanted to do—I wrote, on spec at Wildstorm’s request, a whole proposal—but I didn’t know how many of the characters from The Forty-Niners would survive into the 1960s, meaning would they be alive or not at the end of the graphic novel? So I just asked, will you please have Alan

tell me who survives so I know who I can use? Four months and many emails went by without my ever getting this information. Without even getting my contract. Finally, I got an offer from Paramount to go on staff at Star Trek: Enterprise and I could hardly turn that down when I still didn’t even have a contract from Wildstorm and wasn’t getting the information I needed out of Alan Moore.

So I had to call up Scott and say, “Sorry, I just can’t do this.” I do regret that, not only because it would have been a lot of fun to do, but Jerry Ordway was assigned to draw it I and I love his work. But I just couldn’t get what I needed to start writing.

KELLY: That’s a real shame. I would have liked to have read that. But you’re not ruling out that something could come up down the line in between novels that might interest you?

BRENNERT: No, I don’t rule it out completely. I don’t really read many comic books these days. I stopped reading DC with the reboot because I decided my brain was filled with enough useless DC continuity as Supergirl in the Bronze Age Issue

Batman: Black & White Gotham’s guardians meet on this page from the Alan Brennert/José Luis García-López tale from Batman: Gotham Knights #10 (Dec. 2000).

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Recommended Reading Book covers for two of Alan’s novels: Moloka’i (2003) and Palisades Park (2013). © Alan Brennert.

it was. [Rob laughs] And yeah, I don’t expect to do anything for DC again unless they surprise me and do the right thing by me and Dick.

Marvel pretty much has the same work-for-hire terms, so… you know, if there’s an independent out there and it’s the right project, who knows? I might say yes.

KELLY: Oh, that’s good!

So, during all this time that we’ve been covering with your comics, you were writing TV shows, you did the reboot of the Twilight Zone in the ’80s which was such a great show, and then you talked about Buck Rogers, you wrote a couple episodes of China Beach, which was one of my favorite TV shows at the time, and you were writing novels as well!

You had Time and Chance. What were other ones from that time?

BRENNERT: I did a novel called Kindred Spirits, which was published in 1984, then Time and Chance in 1990. (My first novel, which shall remain nameless, was published when I was 24. It was a paperback original and it was not me at my best. I hadn’t started writing television at that point, and I really became a better novelist after becoming a TV writer because television taught me about structure.) After China Beach I worked on L.A. Law in the early ’90s, just after Time and Chance came out.

The book did okay in hardcover but flopped in paperback. After that I decided that I was not going to go back and write another fantasy novel.

So I concentrated on Hollywood development work—screenplays, TV movies, miniseries, pilots. When I finally started thinking about writing another novel, I came across the story of the people of Kalaupapa, the leprosy settlement on the island of Moloka’i; it was a story that I had heard of, as a frequent visitor to Hawai’i, but the more I researched its history the more I realized that the full story had never really been told, and I became obsessed with telling it.

KELLY: All right! It’s a great book. I’ve read all the historical novels that you wrote, but that’s a great book.

BRENNERT: It was really a labor of love. I wrote it entirely on spec.

It took me three years to write and my wife and I endured a fair amount of financial hardship, because I stopped writing scripts to write this humongous book. After I finished it I did pick up a couple of TV staff jobs, but by 2007 Moloka’i had sold enough copies (today, over half a million!) that my publisher was offering me real money to write another book, which became Honolulu. I’ve been a full-time novelist ever since. I do have a movie version of Time and Chance 66 • BACK ISSUE • Supergirl in the Bronze Age Issue

which is theoretically alive; there’s a studio that wants to do it, there’s an actor that they want to star in it, and if he says yes, they’ll greenlight the picture.

KELLY: Wow. BRENNERT: But this has been going on for a very long time. My friend Michael Reaves used to say that glaciers melted faster than things moved in Hollywood. Well, now glaciers are literally melting faster than things move in Hollywood!

KELLY: [laughs] I don’t know why I’m laughing. It’s not funny at all!

BRENNERT: It’s funny because it’s true. So I’m waiting to hear on that and I’m also working on a proposal for a new historical novel.

KELLY: Wonderful! Like I said, your last book—for anybody who doesn’t know—was Palisades Park, which was a great read.

BRENNERT: You can get it as a paperback, an e-book, an audiobook, large print—everything but action figures. And I should mention that there are a lot of comic-book references in the book.

KELLY: There sure are! It would make a great comic book. They’re doing more and more of these sort of novelistic, long-form graphic novels.

I can see Palisades Park as a comic book! I think that would be interesting.

BRENNERT: Hm. I never thought of that. That might be an intriguing idea.

KELLY: Yeah, all the stuff with people diving. That’s got a lot of visual to it that I can see being done in that format. I don’t know. Something to think about.

What are you working on now?

BRENNERT: Just this proposal for a new book.

I’ll get it out to my agent and from there to my editor, and if she likes it, I hope to be starting work on a new novel pretty soon.

KELLY: Thank you, Alan. Looking forward to it.

ROB KELLY is a writer, illustrator, and comics historian.

He is the creator/EIC of The Aquaman Shrine, the co-creator/writer of the award-winning webcomic Ace Kilroy, and the creator/editor of the book Hey Kids, Comics!: True-Life Tales from the Spinner Rack, which features the story “Mahalo, Keniki” by Alan Brennert.

TM

Crisis on Infinite Earths may have been the end of Kara Zor-El as readers and fans originally knew her, but Supergirl’s adventures were just beginning as a new DC Universe was emerging from the ashes of Marv Wolfman and George Pérez’s classic. This article will examine the life and times of Supergirl in post-Crisis DC Comics in and out of the four-color panels.

DC Comics’ characters went through some major shake-ups after Crisis on Infinite Earths. The main three heroes—Wonder Woman, Batman, and Superman—and their “families” seemed to be the most affected by the creation of the new post-Crisis universe. This is especially true of Supergirl, who had gone through some significant transformations throughout the mid-1980s and beyond.

NEW GIRL IN TOWN

by

James Heath

The 1986 reboot of Superman brought about great changes in the character, supporting cast, and titles. One of the biggest rules set up by DC was that Superman must be the sole survivor from Krypton in the post-Crisis DC Universe. However, John Byrne, who was working on the Man of Steel’s titles alongside Marv Wolfman, Jerry Ordway, and Dick Giordano, felt something needed to be done with Supergirl. According to his website FAQs, Byrne didn’t think DC should let the copyright on the Supergirl name slip away. Thus, he went to work on a new storyline for the Maid of Might. However, this Supergirl would not be Kal-El’s cousin from Krypton.

Beginning with a cameo in Superman #16 (Apr. 1988) and continuing in scenes in #19 and 20 and Adventures of Superman #441 and 442, an unknown woman in a costume similar to that of the Last Son of Lantz Krypton appears in Antarctica. She has no memory of who she is Photo by Corey Bond. beyond the fact that she is Supergirl. She needs to escape a laboratory to complete her mission.

After using her superhuman strength on the doctors studying her, the mysterious Maid of Might flies to Smallville, a place familiar to her, yet different. Supergirl knows only one thing for sure: She must find Superman.

It should be noted that there had been some confusion about this new Supergirl. Some panels showed her as a blonde, while others had her with red hair. John Byrne stated that it was a coloring error.

However, Byrne would eventually use that mistake to his advantage when he revealed the new Supergirl could change shape. She had taken the form of redjohn byrne head Lana Lang. In fact, she was Lana Lang.

“But Lana Lang was never Supergirl,” you say, and in a sense, you’re right.

To understand this new Supergirl’s origins, one must go back a bit in John Byrne’s stories. Clark Kent never became Superboy before growing into Superman in post-Crisis continuity. This would cause problems in the Legion of Super-Heroes book, as the team often shared adventures with the Boy of Steel. Enter the Time Trapper. He had created a “Pocket Universe” where the Legion could travel to the past.

This dimension was much like the pre-Crisis comics, except the other DC superheroes did not exist. Superboy was this world’s only protector until he died defending it from the Time Trapper’s nefarious schemes.

[Editor’s note: See BACK ISSUE #68 for the Time Trapper’s history.]

Superboy’s demise left the Pocket Universe without a Superman.

That dimension’s Lex Luthor is desperate to help somehow. He finds the Boy of Steel’s secret laboratory and is duped into freeing three villains—General Zod, Zaora, and Quex-Ul—from the Kryptonian prison called the Phantom Zone. The result of the trio’s trickery is the near-

She’s Back…! …sorta. Matrix/Supergirl punches her way into post-Crisis continuity in John Byrne’s Superman vol. 2 #21 (Sept. 1988).

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Lana, is that you?

The Man of Steel meets the Maid of Might in this panel from John Byrne’s Superman #21.

TM & © DC Comics.

genocide of all life on the Pocket Earth. Only a handful of rebels led by Lex Luthor remain. His fellow soldiers need an edge. Lex creates a new Supergirl from shape-changing protomatter using Lana Lang, a familiar face to Superman, as a genetic pattern. She is sent to the post-Crisis DC Universe to enlist the aid of its Last Son of Krypton, who arrives to find the Pocket Earth decimated. Zod eventually exterminates many of Luthor’s rebels, leaving only Luthor (who later dies), a severely injured Supergirl (who has reverted to a protomatter state), and Superman. The Man of Steel is forced to carry out Lex’s last desperate plan to save both the Pocket and post-Crisis Universes. Taking debris from Superboy’s demolished lab and using Gold Kryptonite, Superman creates a prison to hold the powerless Phantom Zone villains. He traps the three villains and commits an act that goes against his very beliefs: He uses Green Kryptonite to kill Zod, Zaora, and Quex-Ul. They had threatened to slaughter everyone on Superman’s Earth, leaving the Caped Wonder no other choice. However, Kal-El is haunted by his taking three lives as he brings the recuperating Supergirl back with him to his dimension.

THE MATRIX HAS YOU After “The Supergirl Saga,” John Byrne left the Superman titles and Roger Stern took over writing chores on Superman and Action Comics, the latter of which became a weekly anthology book. Jerry Ordway was doing double duty writing and penciling Adventures of Superman.

Stern, according to Byrne, had come up with the “Matrix” angle and progressed Supergirl’s story from where Byrne had left off. Stern, however, tells BACK ISSUE that Byrne had already established the origin of this new Supergirl. “Jerry Ordway and I just built upon the foundations that John set up. I don’t remember which of us first had the Kents refer to her as ‘Mae’ [for Matrix]; it was probably Jerry.”

Matrix is in scenes throughout Superman and Adventures of Superman, Martha and Jonathan Kent teaching her the ways of this new world. Yet it’s a bit of a challenge because her child-like enthusiasm often caused more chaos for her new family. One such case occurred while Superman had exiled himself in space.

Clark Kent had written some incriminating articles on Intergang and had the Kents mail two pieces a week to the Daily Planet. Most people think Clark was murdered in his Metropolis apartment by the criminal organization. As Matrix becomes obsessed with becoming like Clark to the point of taking his likeness, Jonathan tells a phoning reporter that his son is actually staying at the Kent Farm. Metropolis Police Special Crimes Unit Captain Maggie Sawyer offers to escort Clark back to Metropolis. However, Mae has beaten the law to the punch. She’s already there “as” Clark with all his belongings. He/she is mugged, is in a barroom brawl, and eats a lot of Big Belly Burgers while making friends with Jimmy Olsen, who finds “Clark” wandering the streets alive and well. Olsen and Kent’s colleagues believe that Clark’s strange behavior is caused by amnesia.

Booster Gold creator Dan Jurgens became part of the Superman family’s creative teams as Matrix learns of Clark Kent’s life while the Man of Steel faced his personal demons and various aliens in space. He began his run with a guest stint in a Superman #29 and Adventures of Superman #452 tale called “Word Bringer.”

Jurgens would become the writer and artist for the books’ most important 1989–1999 Superman stories, including the highly publicized and hugely popular “The Death of Superman.”

Upon Superman’s return to Earth, there were some dan jurgens changes going on both in the comics and behind the scenes. Action Comics returned to monthly status with issue #643. George Peréz, who wrote and inked portions of Action Comics Annual #2, was on board Action for scripts and breakdowns (Roger Stern became Action’s co-writer with #644).

Action Comics #643 (July 1989), named “Superman on Earth” after an episode of the 1952–1958 television series The Adventures of Superman starring George Reeves, saw Kal-El return to his adopted planet. However, Superman’s homecoming was not an easy or quiet one as Adventures of Superman #457 and this and the next issue of Action would reveal.

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Superman prevents Turmoil, a giant robot sent by Darkseid, Morgan Edge, and Intergang, from killing “Clark.” Having survived Turmoil’s attack and an explosion in Clark Kent’s apartment, Matrix is brought back to Smallville by Superman. Later, the shapeshifter is cleverly disguised as Clark Kent. The protomatter being even believes that he/she is Superman as his/her and Kent’s minds and bodies are in sync. The simultaneous thought and action continue until Lana Lang stops Matrix from killing a night watchman. This also keeps the Man of Steel from destroying a weapon in Metropolis as he believed he heard Lana’s voice.

The mental link between Superman and Matrix was created by the Eradicator, the device attached to the ship that brought Kal-El to Earth. It also made Clark’s home in Metropolis blow up.

The baffled Matrix looks like Superman in a brown-and-gray costume as homage to George Reeves’ costume in the black-andwhite years of TV’s The Adventures of Superman. A clash with the real Big Blue does nothing to sway the being’s belief that he/she is the true Metropolis Marvel until Lana is injured in the crossfire.

Superman is finally able to calm down Matrix. Yet the shock of his/her actions forces Matrix to leave Earth. As one exile returns home to his friends and family, another goes away. Matrix journeys into the same starry spaceways in which Superman had traveled not so long ago to deal with his/her psychological state.

Supergirl in Action (top) The Girl of Steel takes over Action Comics with issue #674 (Feb. 1992). Cover by Dan Jurgens and Bob McLeod. (bottom) Courtesy of Heritage Comics Auctions (www.ha.com), signed Jackson Guice original cover art to his Action #1/Superman debut homage, Action #685 (Jan. 1993).

PANIC ATTACKS The post-Crisis Superman comics were interconnected since John Byrne and Marv Wolfman rebooted the franchise. Yet this was more evident during the “Superman in Exile” serial and beyond. Starting with the January 1991 cover-dated issues of Superman, Adventures of Superman, and Action Comics, a new triangle numbering system was used to aid with reading order.

Matrix/Supergirl was not seen again until Action Comics #674 (Feb. 1992). It served as a prologue to a story that was delayed for nearly a year due to the launch of a fourth monthly comic titled Superman: The Man of Steel. The serial’s title paid tribute to yet another of the George Reeves TV episodes, “Panic in the Sky.” While “Panic in the Sky” was originally to be a DC Universe crossover marking the return of Draaga, Maxima, and Brainiac, creative teams responsible really wanted to do something with Matrix. Roger Stern tells BACK ISSUE, “Since Matrix had exiled him/herself to space, it made a good bit of sense for her to get involved with Draaga, Maxima, and Brainiac during the ‘Panic in the Sky’ story arc.”

“Panic in the Sky” showed Brainiac ruling Warworld and allied with the scorned ex-monarch of the planet Almerac, Maxima, the former Warworld gladiator Draaga, and Matrix in her Supergirl form. The latter two are under his mental control while Maxima agrees to aid Brainiac in saving Almerac. The telepathic villain wants to conquer the Earth. Knowing the threat Brainiac poses, Superman rallies many superheroes to take the offensive against Brainiac’s armies and his gigantic skull ship. Supergirl and Draaga fight Brainiac’s hold over them to aid the Man of Steel’s cause, while many attacking Warworld’s forces turn bad thanks to spider-like devices placed on their heads.

Seeing that Superman and his allies could be triumphant, Brainiac activates an anti-matter robot. Draaga uses his body as a shield, thus sacrificing himself to rescue his new comrades.

Green Lanterns Killowog and Guy Gardner use their power rings to jettison the lethal automaton into space, away from Warworld, while Matrix, in honor of Draaga’s heroism, assumes the warrior’s form. Maxima switches sides when she realizes Brainiac could destroy Almerac whether she aided him or not. Her assistance helps Superman’s soldiers by allowing the Green Lanterns and the Metal Men to create a jammer for the mind-control machines on the heads of some of Superman’s allies. Maxima confronts Brainiac telepathically with the intent to kill him. However, Superman’s intervention allows his alien foe to merely be lobotomized after Brainiac launches a mysterious sphere.

With Superman and the other heroes victorious over Brainiac, Matrix pays her respects to Draaga in space and returns to her Supergirl form. She voyages to Earth, where she meets Lex

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Luthor II, who is actually a cloned body housing the original Luthor’s brain. While recovering from her past traumas, Supergirl falls for Lex in spite of Superman’s warnings. Roger Stern tells BI that it made sense for Mae to return to Earth and get involved with Luthor, who was the spitting image of her creator and made Supergirl go back to her Pygmalion-type roots (with a more sinister version of her Pygmalion).

“Panic in the Sky” was a big story in the Superman titles. It allowed the post-Crisis Supergirl to become a valued member of the Man of Steel’s family. Yet it was just the beginning for her as she got to be part of one of the biggest events both for Superman and comics history in general.

DEATH OF A LEGEND “Let’s just kill him.”

Throughout many a Super Summit—the meetings of creative and editorial personnel that occurred once or twice a year to prepare the stories for a year to a year and half’s worth of Superman comic books— Jerry Ordway would often say the above phrase as a joke. Yet things were different while planning the 1992–1993 serials for the Man of Steel.

The landmark Superman #50 (Dec. 1990) featured Clark Kent proposing to Lois Lane. The next logical step for the characters was to be married in #75. However, a new project forced the comic writers and artists to change their plans. The television series Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman was being developed, and the show’s producers wanted the title characters to get hitched in comic books at the same time they did so on the small screen. Creative teams on the four Superman monthlies were forced to start over from scratch with no idea where to begin.

“Let’s just kill him,” said Jerry Ordway once again.

This time, those at the Super Summit considered this idea. Dan Jurgens had come up with the creature who would be responsible for the Last Son of Krypton’s demise, while other writers and artists worked plots around it. Doomsday was coming for Superman, and the world would never forget it.

Supergirl’s role in “The Death of Superman” saga starts off on the sidelines until Doomsday reaches Metropolis. A punch from the rampaging monster’s protruding pointy-boned knuckles knocks the Maid of Might back into her protomatter form. With both Superman and Doomsday dead, Matrix is found in the rubble of Metropolis. Lex Luthor II wraps her in his jacket and takes her to LexCorp, where she painfully returns to her familiar Supergirl form.

With Superman gone, other heroes try their best to defend Metropolis.

Yet it’s Supergirl who shines as the city’s protector, particularly in the Action Comics chapters of “Funeral for a Friend” and after Superman’s burial.

Superman’s body has gone missing. Supergirl’s and Lois Lane’s investigations of the disappearance lead to the secret genetic research facility Project Cadmus. Its scientists were attempting to clone Superman.

Lois breaks the story of the body theft in the Daily Planet, and she enlists the aid of Lex Luthor II and Supergirl to retrieve the cadaver of the late hero. The Girl of Steel places her fallen “brother” back in his crypt. Yet Superman will not rest in peace for very long.

While Supergirl was fighting crime alongside Lex II and Team Luthor, stopping an assassination attempt on Luthor and mediating a dispute between the homeless of Metropolis and the Underworlders in Supergirl and Team Luthor #1, Superman’s casket is once again found to be empty in Adventures of Superman #500 (early June 1993). Four beings—the visorwearing Last Son of Krypton with no qualms about killing (the Eradicator), the armored Man of Steel (Steel), the cyborg Man of Tomorrow (Cyborg Superman), and the teenaged Metropolis Kid (Superboy)—surface, each wearing the symbol of Superman. Each one of this quartet displays various traits of the Caped Wonder as the “Reign of the Supermen” begins.

During discussions on how to bring the Kryptonian icon back, each creative team on their respective monthly comic had a different idea for a character to be Superman. Superman: The Man of Steel scribe Louise Simonson suggested that all four could be used, and thus the ball was rolling on “Reign of the Supermen.”

As Supergirl fails to recruit the young Superman later called Superboy for Lex Luthor II, the world wonders who the one, true Metropolis Marvel is while another mystery man heads for Metropolis in gigantic Kryptonian battle armor. Like the other four, this one has given proof that he is the genuine Superman. However, he reveals more intimate details that convince Lois Lane that he was the real steel deal.

The Last Son of Krypton, in reality the Eradicator in humanoid form, had placed Superman’s body in a regeneration matrix within the Fortress of Solitude and used some its life energies to power himself. The chamber had opened, and Clark used the Kryptonian battle suit to return to Metropolis, where he learns of the events that occurred after his death.

Coast City, home of Green Lantern Hal Jordan, has been obliterated. The culprit is the Cyborg Superman, who in reality is former astronaut Henry “Hank” Henshaw. He blames Superman for the death of his wife. After Superman’s passing, Henshaw had planned to discredit the fallen hero by destroying Coast City in the Man of Tomorrow’s visage. He allied himself with former Warworld dictator Mongul, and they turned Coast City into Engine City.

Even the Eradicator and Superboy could not stop the Cyborg. The Kryptonian was brutally hurt, but Superboy manages to escape Engine City to warn Lex Luthor II, Steel, and Superman, who is not at full power, that Henhaw’s next target is Metropolis.

Bad Company (inset) The Kerry Gammill/Bob Wiacek cover to Supergirl and Team Luthor #1, and (left) an autographed June Brigman interior art page (courtesy of Heritage).

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And what of Supergirl? As Superman put on some A STERN GIRL LexCorp jet boots, she turned invisible and gave him While “Reign of the Supermen” characters Steel and and extra boost to save fuel. Mae briefed Clark along Superboy got their own monthly titles, Supergirl got her the way and provided surveillance and cover for own four-issue miniseries, written by Roger Stern and Team Superman. Superboy, meanwhile, stopped Cyborg drawn by June Brigman.

Superman’s missile from striking Metropolis as the “I think that it was my idea that we give Supergirl a Eradicator nearly destroyed the Fortress of Solitude to tryout in a miniseries,” Stern tells BACK ISSUE. “The pre-Crisis recover from his injuries before returning to Engine City. version of Supergirl had never been that strong a seller, Supergirl and the Supermen soldier on to stop so it made sense to test the waters, in much the same way Mongul and the Cyborg. Mongul intends to ignite Chuck Dixon and Tom Lyle had spun the Robin miniseries Engine City’s core, which is powered by kryptonite. This off from the Batman titles. Plus, at the time, I was already will cause Earth to spin out of its orbit and rip apart. building toward the ‘Fall of Metropolis’ story in Action Superboy’s earlier intervention had prevented Mongul Comics #700, which would seriously change Lex’s status quo and Henshaw’s missile from completing their objective (at least, for a while). And the miniseries of turning Earth into a new Warworld. was a great opportunity to underscore Hal Jordan has entered Engine those events, while giving Supergirl City to fight Mongul. Shocked herself more visibility. It seemed by his hometown’s destruction, to work. Supergirl #1 sold Green Lantern furiously even better than Supergirl/ battles his foe and beats him.

Team Luthor.”

Meanwhile, Supergirl, Steel, and Matrix has discovered Lex Superboy are separated from Luthor’s true intention in a laboratory Superman and the Eradicator. in Singapore. An army of Supergirl Hank Henshaw attacks the true clones have been created. Feeling Man of Tomorrow with kryptonite. used, an angry Maid of Might goes on a The Eradicator shields Kal-El from the rampaging search for Lex. She finds radiation, but it passes through his him hidden at LexCorp, confronts body, hitting the newly revived hero.

Lex, and hurls the ailing mogul out a roger stern The energy, however, was changed by window. Superman catches him, while this act as Superman regains all his Mae is too hurt by Lex’s lies to see powers. The Eradicator had been reason. She returns to Smallville, battered and weakened by saving Superman. The rest helps Superman with the clone wars in “The Fall of of his comrades arrive to find the Man of Steel victorious Metropolis,” and travels the world to learn about herself. over the shattered and broken Cyborg. Supergirl uses Lex Luthor’s ex-wife Elizabeth Perske, who warned her telekinetic powers to change Kal-El’s tattered black Supergirl about Luthor, even becomes her mentor. suit into the classic red, blue, and yellow one.

Roger Stern had wanted to continue Mae’s journey It’s now official. Superman has returned. But what into becoming a more prominant part of the DC Universe about Clark Kent? Matrix uses her shape-changing ability to with at least one, or perhaps even two, more miniseries impersonate him as the Man of Steel digs him out of some to lead into a monthly. He never got the chance. By the debris from the fight with Doomsday. Once both Clark and time he finished this Supergirl comic, he needed a break.

Superman are settled back into Metropolis, Supergirl returns In addition to Action Comics, he had been writing such to LexCorp, where her life and adventures will later allow ancillary Superman material as text for The Death of her to make new discoveries she may not wish to learn.

Supergirl in the Bronze Age Issue

Buzzing Around (left) Cover to the first issue of the Roger Stern-scripted Supergirl miniseries of 1994. Cover by Gammill and Wiacek. (center) Supergirl headlines Showcase ’95 #1.

Cover by Tom Grummett and Doug Hazlewood. (right) Things get weird in The New Titans #120 (Apr. 1995). Cover by William Rosado and Keith Champagne.

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The truth behind Buzz’s interest in Linda became clear too late for her.

His group needed to corrupt someone who was pure. Buzz had sacrificed First issue cover of the Peter David-written Supergirl monthly.

Linda in order to use her blood to bring the cat-like demon Chakat into our world. Seeing Ms. Danvers dying, Matrix merged with Linda to heal Cover (and interior) art by Gary Frank and Cam Smith. her. After becoming one with Linda, the new Supergirl cut Chakat, allowing TM & © DC Comics. the bloodhound type of creatures that held him prisoner to take him once again. She then began her journey to learn of herself and Linda Danvers, Superman trading-card series for Skybox while encountering the likes of Gorilla and The Death and Life of Superman Grodd, Rampage, and Silver Banshee. novelization for Bantam. “Death and Life Buzz, in the meantime, was still had some truly crazy deadlines,” Stern making life miserable for Linda. Her continues. “Spring of ’93 is still a complete mother Sylvia even invited him to dinner blur. At the end of that, I got a couple after he saved her from riots caused months’ respite, when Karl Kesel filled

by Gorilla Grodd, whom Buzz secretly in for me on two issues of Action Comics aided. That evening’s meal at the Danvers (#694–695, for those keeping track), home is eventful, to say the least. but I spent some of that ‘time off’ getting After some cryptic dinner conversation, started on the Supergirl miniseries. So Buzz arranges a fight between Supergirl after I finished writing Action #700, I and Tempus Fugit, who had possessed took a few months off to rest and work Linda’s new friend Dick Malverne. The up a new set of proposals.”

Chaos Gods want Supergirl to kill Stern’s time off led to other plans Tempus, something she nearly does for Supergirl. She was featured in the when she believes Linda’s parents were anthologies Showcase ’95 and Showcase killed. Yet she stops herself once Buzz ’96, and she was briefly a member of asks what type of person she wants to the New Titans in New Titans #120–126. be. Angered by Buzz’s failure, the Chaos However, Titans writer Marv Wolfman Gods take him away in whirlwind while previously told BACK ISSUE that he didn’t the whole incident is being witnessed plot the stories—the editor had done

by Wallace “Wally” Johnson, a boy who that. This led to Wolfman’s dissatisfaction may or may not be God. Both Linda with the title, which soon ended with and the Maid of Might get a bit of a issue #130. reprieve from Buzz, but they may not “The Trial of Superman” serial that have seen the last of him. ran through the Superman titles saw Peter David’s spiritual take on Superman on trial before an alien this DC Comics series continues with tribunal who accuse him of being Supergirl gaining flame vision and responsible for the death of all life on wings made of fire in Supergirl #14–18 Krypton. Roman hero Alpha Centurion (Oct. 1997–Feb. 1998). The Girl of recruits Supergirl, Steel, the Eradicator, Tomorrow could also create portals and Superboy to rescue Kal-El. When to transport her from one place to the Tribunal Prime goes mad with another. These fiery gateways closed power, the Superman Rescue Squad with an “S” shape. and the Man of Steel himself must stop While the Danvers family is in shock over his murderous form of justice while they fight the Linda recently revealing that she has merged with Cyborg Superman. Hank Henshaw is sent into a Supergirl, the Girl of Steel must battle villains alongside black hole, while Superman is pardoned for the crimes Power Girl and tussle with Despero. Wally explains that he did not commit.

Supergirl is now an Earthborn angel. Three such beings exist—one of light, one of love, and one of fire.

LIFE WITH LINDA Supergirl is the Fire Angel. When Matrix saved Linda Supergirl #1 (Sept. 1996) marked the beginning of peter david and both beings became one, a person deemed a new monthly series for the Girl of Steel. According to worthy (Matrix) sacrificed herself for someone beyond Incredible Hulk and Aquaman writer Peter David, hope (Linda). This is believed to be what creates Earth Angels.

DC Comics originally wanted John Byrne to work on the title.

In the meantime, a new hero called Comet comes to Leesburg.

However, when Byrne turned it down, they asked David to write it, Comet was a former racing jockey with an affinity for horses. After an reuniting him with his one-time Hulk collaborator, artist Gary Frank. accident cost him his mobility, the Atlas Corporation’s scientists David, according to what he tells BACK ISSUE, had trouble relating merged equine DNA with that of the rider to make him a member to a character who became Supergirl because of arbitrary choice. of a superhuman group named the Stable. The remaining members Thus, Linda Danvers literally became a part of Supergirl’s life. want money that Comet must pay to leave the team. Supergirl aids Linda grew up in the small town of Leesburg. Her mother attended him. However, the stable gets their enhanced hands on the relic box church regularly, and her father was a police officer. Linda was they found. The end result is literally explosive for the Stable. essentially a good girl who was affected greatly by something traumatic There was an unusual twist with the Comet character. His secret identity she had witnessed. was the Leesburg Tribune reporter Wendell “Cutter” Sharpe’s ex-wife Andrea Reverend Meeke was a well-respected member of the community.

Martinez, who used the name Andy Jones in her standup comedy act.

Linda idolized him and his wife. However, she passed the Meeke home Andy was saved by a dying Zed One when the components of his and saw the couple arguing one day. The reverend had beaten his genetically engineered body joined with hers when they were both trapped spouse to the point of killing her. There was even blood on his fist and on Mount Everest. Readers later discover that Andy/Comet is the Earthbound later on rolled-up carpet that also had a torn piece from Mrs. Meeke’s Angel of Love. Andy is infatuated with Linda Danvers, and Comet has dress. This incident made Linda Danvers doubt her faith in God and feelings for Supergirl. Both ladies seem conflicted with their emotions for people. Enter a demon in human form: Buzz.

Comet/Andy. While Supergirl does feel romantic toward Zed One, she and Buzz had introduced Linda Danvers to the dark pleasures of life.

Linda are torn because of the latter’s relationship with Dick Malverne.

This led her to a path of satanic rituals as she became a part of Buzz’s cult.

A Wild Ride

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ONE IN A MILLION November 1998 cover-dated DC comics saw how life was in the 853rd century in the crossover event DC One Million. Each issue was numbered #1,000,000, and many had present-day versions of heroes like Superman and Batman meeting their counterparts from the future. Peter David’s contribution to DC One Million for Supergirl gave readers a look at the life of a different Girl of Steel.

In the Andromeda Galaxy, the Blffghs race is at war with the Xyanter.

Both alien factions encounter an extremely powerful six-year-old girl named R’E’L who also calls herself Supergirl. This Girl of Tomorrow has a tendency to accidentally destroy everything in her path. In fact, only one being, an extraterrestrial named Dura, survived R’E’L’s mischief because she believed he was her father. Dura takes this Supergirl under his wing, but she has to promise to not obliterate any more worlds or lifeforms.

MATRIX RELOADED Returning to 1998–1999, a subplot that began with Supergirl #26 would change the lives of Linda Danvers and Supergirl. It becomes the main story in issues #30–31 (Mar.–Apr. 1999). A series of strange deaths leaves behind nothing but skeletal remains. Recently promoted Detective Lieutenant Fred Danvers learns that a pink protoplasmic residue was found at every crime scene. At the same time, a trenchcoat-wearing blonde with pink skin that seems burned has been watching the places Linda and her family are known to frequent. During his investigation, Fred discovers the pattern of the murders’ locations looks like a backwards “S.” Matrix has committed these crimes. The protomatter that was left behind after she merged with Linda Danvers has become humanoid, with muddled memories of both Matrix’s and Linda’s lives.

This new Matrix has killed, and she’s searching to meld with Supergirl.

Wearing a costume with a backwards “S” written in blood, Matrix comes face to face with Supergirl. Their conflict results in Mae and the Girl of Steel becoming a new Supergirl who wreaks havoc on Leesburg, while Linda Danvers appears to be buried in her subconscious. Fred Danvers and Superman work together to free the Girl of Steel from Matrix. The Last Son of Krypton also learns the truth about Supergirl and Linda Danvers. As Matrix’s protoplasm covers Superman, Linda’s father shoots her, thinking she’ll be weaker. This, combined with Sylvia Danvers’ prayers, allows angelic fire to free Linda and Supergirl from Matrix. Mae regurgitates Supergirl, and all seems well as Fred and Superman welcome Supergirl and Linda back into the world.

The protomatter, however, is now in the hands of Atlas Corporation.

What happens to it will greatly affect both Linda Danvers and Supergirl.

con man Smith, who dies of a heart attack possibly caused by the shock of the Earth Angel of Fire’s rage. As all this occurs, Comet, Blithe, and the Carnivore attack the Maid of Tomorrow. Carnivean uses projections of foes Supergirl fought in various issues of Peter David’s run.

Supergirl #49 and 50 (Oct. and Nov. 2000) show the world literally going to Hell as the Carnivore takes over Heaven. With the aid of the spirit guide called Kara, who could also be Wally, the fallen angel Supergirl escapes Carnivean’s prison. Meanwhile, a paralyzed Blithe has become one with the Matrix protomatter taken by Atlas Corp. This allows her to walk again.

Blithe feels used by the Carnivore, and reluctantly sides with the flamewinged heroine. Comet is also recruited as the trio of Earth Angels take the fight with the Carnivore to the city he built—the Between Place. The conflict is rough, but the combined might of the three Earth Angels and Supergirl’s forgiving the Carnivore win the day. However, the victory is not without its losses. The angel part of Supergirl is ripped away from Linda Danvers.

The world mourns the loss of the Maid of Might while a letter from Wally gives Linda and a mortal Buzz a new quest: search for Supergirl.

SEPARATION ANXIETY Linda and Buzz begin their voyage to search for the part of Supergirl that is lost. Buzz can sense the Chaos Streams like the one under Leesburg.

Those underground waterways not only flow into the River Styx, but they also lead to Matrix. Linda herself has some superhuman abilities, yet she isn’t as powerful as she was when Matrix was connected with her. In the comic, Linda makes her debut as this new Maid of Might in Metropolis wearing a costume like Supergirl’s in Superman: The Animated Series.

The world believes Supergirl is dead, but Superman and other DC heroes know otherwise. Linda and Buzz go from Metropolis to the Amazon rain forest on their journey for her other half. Mary Marvel also comes along for their last leg of the voyage. The demon mother of the Carnivore, Lilith, has imprisoned the Earth Angel. She seeks to free her son and get revenge on Supergirl. Linda, Mary, and Twilight—an angel working with Lilith to save her sister—are injured. Linda asks her other Heavenly half to merge with Twilight. Fire Angel Twilight heals Mary Marvel and Linda, and Linda gets her Supergirl powers back afterwards. However, she has no time to test them as her next adventure will take her to another reality.

ONE FOR THE ANGELS While Linda Danvers’ sculpting career is beginning to take off thanks to Supergirl’s former mentor Elizabeth Perske, her superpowered alter ego is the subject of study by the head of Atlas Corp., Carl Carnivean, also known as the Carnivore, the first vampire child of Lilith and Beelzebub. Carnivean looks like an adult version of Wally Johnson, and he has Blithe, the Earth Angel of Light, working with him. Blithe tortures Andy Jones with her memories, thus recruiting Comet. With two Earthbound angels under his thumb, the Carnivore can begin his plot to take over Heaven. The only thing that stands in his way is Supergirl.

The Girl of Steel, meanwhile, has her hands full. A Church of Supergirl kept worshipping her while Buzz was possessing Dick Malverne. Buzz makes a deal with Supergirl. If she frees his body from a comet in deep space, Buzz’s spirit will leave Dick’s body. Both parties honor the bargain.

Yet Supergirl realizes that it comes with a price. The cancer that was killing Dick has returned. This causes Malverne to seek treatment from the Church of Supergirl. Its founder, Dr. Bob Smith, seems to be a faith healer who cures folks in his congregation. Linda and Fred Danvers learn otherwise when they find Dick dead in his home. An angry Supergirl confronts the

Fire Angel Writer Peter David took the Maid of Might in startling new directions. From Supergirl #17 (Jan. 1998), featuring Supergirl’s battle with Despero. Art by Leonard Kirk and Cam Smith.

TM & © DC Comics.

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Supergirl of Two Worlds (left) Joshua Middleton’s cover to Supergirl #36 (Feb. 2009). (right) Does TV’s Supergirl (actress Melissa Benoist) make you jump with glee?

TM & © DC Comics.

FAMILY MATTERS While Peter David’s last Supergirl story arc is going on, writer Steven T. Seagle and artist Scott McDaniel begin their run on Superman with Superman 10-Cent Adventure #1 (Mar. 2003). The character of Cir-El debuts in that issue. Her story is continued in Superman #190–200. The mysterious Futuresmiths introduce a dark-haired, black-clad female as Supergirl.

She believes that she is Superman’s daughter from the future. She is actually called Mia, and she was created as a vessel for Brainiac 12. She sacrifices herself by jumping into the time stream to prevent her timeline from ever occurring. Yet she is eventually rescued and joins Linda Danvers, Power Girl, and Kara Zor-El to rescue Superman in Superman/Batman #24.

Linda Danvers has her hands full with another member of Kal-El’s family as Pre-Crisis Kara Zor-El comes to post-Crisis Earth in “Many Happy Returns,” in Supergirl #75–80 (Dec. 2002–May 2003). This is not the first time Kara’s return was proposed. A character named Kara appeared in Dan Jurgens’ Superman/Aliens series. Jurgens originally wanted her to learn that she was Superman’s cousin as her Kryptonian abilities emerged. Yet that never came to be.

In “Many Happy Returns,” Kara must adapt to the ways of this new world while Linda takes her place in the other dimension to prevent her demise. Linda eventually falls in love with that version of Superman. They marry and have a daughter named Ariella Kent. However, Linda’s happiness doesn’t last. Kara Zor-El’s presence in Linda’s universe makes the timeline unstable. The Spectre, who is now former Green Lantern Hal Jordan, tells her that Kara Zor-El is destined to die, and Linda must return to her old life.

She agrees to go back if Ariella is saved. The Spectre keeps his word as we see Ariella skateboarding through space in DC One Million’s Supergirl’s costume. Linda, upon her homecoming, meets her newborn brother Wally and goes off to be on her own. She is seen in Gotham City fighting Shadowpact before being sent to Hell by Lilith in 2008–2009’s Reign in Hell miniseries, while Matrix appears in 2015’s “Convergence” event.

Peter David’s Supergirl series ended with issue #80. He had intended for Linda, Kara Zor-El, and Power Girl to team up for a series of stories with Kara being named the one true Supergirl. He never got to do this, but many plot elements David wanted to use in Supergirl were reworked into his creator-owned series Fallen Angel, which began at DC before moving to IDW Publishing.

Kara Zor-El made her official post-Crisis debut in “The Supergirl from Krypton.” This serial, published in Superman/Batman #8–13, was written

by Jeph Loeb and drawn by the late Michael Turner. It saw Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and even Darkseid fighting to mentor the Girl of Steel. This story leads to another volume of Supergirl that ran from 74 • BACK ISSUE • Supergirl in the Bronze Age Issue

2005–2011. There, Kara Zor-El tries to find her place among the heroes on Earth while becoming a girl of two worlds in “New Krypton.” She has to discover the identity of the enigmatic Superwoman and track down Reactron, the villain with a heart of Gold Kryptonite who killed her father Zor-El. Lana Lang also becomes Kara’s “aunt” as Supergirl adopts the civilian identity of Linda Lang. Kara even finds time to be a part of the Justice League and the Legion of Super-Heroes.

After the “Flashpoint” crossover had ended, DC Comics once again rebooted its universe with the first issues of the New 52 line of comic books. Supergirl #1 was among the established titles that started over from the beginning. While much of this series deals with the theme of Kara Zor-El trying to fit in as the previous volume did, some things are different in the New 52 pages. Silver Banshee is Supergirl’s friend, her mother Alura killed her father Zor-El, and a new Cyborg Superman has been revealed to readers as Zor-El revived by Brainiac. As of this writing, Kara Zor-El has been training at an intergalactic school called Crucible, whose students and faculty seem to have plans for Superboy. Supergirl can also be spotted in Justice League United. What happens next in DC’s various New 52 series is certain to make great changes in the life of Kara Zor-El. Perhaps the most well-known version of Supergirl outside of the comic pages is the 1984 film starring Helen Slater in the title role. (See Andy Mangels’ article elsewhere in this issue for a look at that movie, as well as Supergirl’s other screen appearances.)

Of course, the biggest news of 2015 for Supergirl fans is her new live-action television series, which debuts on CBS shortly after this edition of BACK ISSUE hits the stands. This television series, combined with her DC Comics adventures, will make Kara Zor-El a force to be reckoned with for many years to come.

Dedicated to my beautiful wife Laura—who will always be my Supergirl; Pupino the Cat and all our Legion of Super-Pets; my nephew Kento—who aided Pupino in launching Argo City into space; and the many writers and artists who made and continue to make the Supergirl legend live on for generations to come. May Rao guide you and watch over you forever.

JAMES HEATH LANTZ is a freelance writer who was heavily influenced by television, film, old-time radio shows, and books—especially comic books—growing up in Ohio.

He’s co-authored Roy Thomas Presents Captain Video with Roy Thomas. He also wrote the introductions for Pre-Code Classics: Weird Mysteries Volumes One and Two and Roy Thomas Presents Sheena, Queen of the Jungle vol. 3 (all published

by PS Artbooks) and reviews the New 52 Supergirl series for Superman Homepage. James currently lives in Italy with his wife Laura and their family of cats, dogs, a turtle, and humans from Italy, Japan, and the United States.

conducted December 28, 2013 by

Shaun Clancy

transcribed by Steven Thompson

SHAUN CLANCY: I write for a comic-book magazine called BACK ISSUE, and what we do is specialize in stories about the comic books from the 1970s and ’80s. You’re listed in one of the comics as the grand-prize winner of the Wonder Woman contest of 1979, which was supposed to have been an all-expenses-paid Wonder Woman weekend in New York for two including an afternoon at DC’s offices.

Are you that same person?

ORLANDO WATKINS: I am that same person.

CLANCY: Cool! So do you remember anything about that trip, how the contest happened, what you did to win, anything like that?

WATKINS: I think the original prize was to appear in an episode of the Wonder Woman television show.

CLANCY: Oh, that’s right. That’s the reason you first wrote in?

WATKINS: You had to write a story—a storyline, really—about what you wanted Wonder Woman to do, how you envisioned an episode of Wonder Woman. But, of course, by the time they announced the winners—the silly thing’s canceled! [both laugh] CLANCY: Did they inform you ahead of time that you were in the running, or did they just announce out of the clear blue that you had won?

WATKINS: They just announced out of the clear blue that I had won.

CLANCY: How did they notify you?

WATKINS: By phone, actually. I remember very clearly, I was at home.

I’d come home from school—I was a freshman in high school and they just called my house.

CLANCY: And do you remember at DC who made the call?

WATKINS: No. CLANCY: What did they tell you on that phone call?

WATKINS: They just told me that I’d won the Wonder Woman contest and that I’d won an all-expenses-paid trip to New York and a tour of DC Comics.

CLANCY: How many people were able to accompany you?

WATKINS: It was originally only supposed to be two, but they made arrangements for my entire family to go—my mother, my father, my little sister, and myself.

CLANCY: Did you take a lot of pictures or any pictures of the event?

WATKINS: You know, I’d have to check with my mom, but I do have the original letter. They followed up with a letter.

CLANCY: So, was Wonder Woman was one of the comics you were following at the time, or you were following the TV series? Which was it? How did you hear about the contest?

WATKINS: It was the comic book. There was an actual ad for it in the Wonder Woman comic book. I had a buddy of mine who used to work at a little store in the neighborhood and he used to have a ton of comic books. He’s the one that kind of actually got me into ’em. I was not really into Wonder Woman, but he had ’em so I read some of his. I was more into Superman, Batman, like that.

CLANCY: Was this the only contest you participated in?

WATKINS: Yeah, it was, and it actually sort of convinced me to write more. And I did. Journalism was my major, but I never followed that career path. It helped to convince me that journalism was gonna be my major. I could write.

When I had got to New York, they sat me down and told me that my entire story frame was about stealing oil from the Alaskan pipeline and introduced the Wonder Woman snowmobile that I put into the story, but that their writers were pretty much working on the same thing, writing the same thing. We went to the artists’ area and spent some time there listening to the Wonder Woman artist explain to me that I had won because the story I sent in was almost identical to something they were also working on.

CLANCY: [laughs] Did you ever see that storyline in print?

You’re a Wonder, Orlando Watkins!

The announcement of the Wonder Woman contest winners, from a DC house ad.

TM & © DC Comics.

Supergirl in the Bronze Age Issue

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From Start to Finish (top) The original contest house ad. (bottom) A letter from DC! Wonder Woman TM & © DC Comics.

WATKINS: Never saw it in print.

CLANCY: Now, the script you wrote—did you have any help with it? Did you do it completely by yourself? Did you have something to reference?

WATKINS: No, I just did it completely myself. I know at that time the Alaskan Pipeline was big on the news channels. I thought it was topical and thought it was time to give a shot.

CLANCY: Was the snowmobile also invisible?

WATKINS: [both laugh] I don’t think it was.

CLANCY: So, did you ask ’em why the TV series had been canceled and why you weren’t going to be on the television show? Did that get brought up at all?

WATKINS: No. I really don’t think I was old enough to understand ratings and viewership. I was just in awe of being able to take a tour of DC Comics, meet a lot of illustrators, get a bunch of comic books.

CLANCY: There was a man there all the time by the name of Jack Adler and he did a lot of coloring for the comics.

WATKINS: I did meet him.

CLANCY: Does any one person stand out in your mind?

WATKINS: No, not really. It’s kinda vague. The one thing I do remember is, I guess, the president of DC Comics … and I can’t remember his name…

CLANCY: Sol Harrison was the president, but Julie Schwartz would have been an elderly man with glasses, balding.

WATKINS: I believe it was Sol Harrison who I talked to. That’s who greeted us.

CLANCY: Were there any artifacts that they’d given you besides comics—a certificate telling you that you won? I know that you mentioned a letter.

WATKINS: I have the letter. The only thing I can think of that I have, that I actually have in my personal possession—I actually have it in a frame—is a letter on DC Comics letterhead.

CLANCY: Was there a photo that they took of you with everybody in the office and published someplace? If so, I couldn’t find it.

WATKINS: No. Just the tour and a chance to see how things were done.

CLANCY: What was your reaction?

WATKINS: It was impressive.

CLANCY: Did anybody do any artwork for you? Sketches? Autograph? Anything like that?

WATKINS: No, nothing like that. [They just gave me] a lot of the large, oversized Collectors’ Edition comics.

CLANCY: Were there any newspaper people there with you?

WATKINS: It was just my family and the DC Comics people. I can’t recall any newspaper people. I do distinctively remember—which is totally irrelevant—that I got a chance to meet Johnny Carson and Mike Douglas. My family and I went to Sardi’s for dinner [while we were in New York City] and they were at the next table. When they were leaving they had some drinks with, like, oyster shells and they stopped at our table, said hello, and gave me the shells. [Shaun laughs] CLANCY: Is there any other memory that you might want to share or that you think might be of interest about that trip?

WATKINS: Not particularly. It wasn’t the first time that I’d been in New York.

It was just really nice that they’d put us up in a suite at the Sheraton. This was a really first-class trip.

I think we got there on a Friday, early on a Friday [for the DC office tour]. And I always pictured something much, much larger in my mind, but it was a relatively small office. I was impressed with the really laid-back sort of atmosphere.

CLANCY: And the kids at your school? They thought this was pretty cool?

WATKINS: A few of my buddies that were into comic books did—and those are the only ones I shared it with. [Shaun laughs] The rest of the guys never knew.

It’s funny, I had a few friends who were all into comic books. My friend Layron DeJarnette, who actually became a well-known illustrator, he worked with Disney and [also] did the Garbage Pail Kids.

CLANCY: And probably like me, soon after this, you met women, and comics probably took a sidestep?

WATKINS: Not really. Not for too long. At this point I had really gotten into Justice League and then went into the X-Men. I continued to follow those.

CLANCY: Do you have kids now?

WATKINS: Yes. CLANCY: And do they know about this part of your little history, of being a contest winner?

WATKINS: Yeah.

CLANCY: Well, it’s on your wall, right?

WATKINS: In my living room. [Shaun laughs] CLANCY: Did you see your name in the comic books?

WATKINS: Yeah, my name as the winner of the Wonder Woman contest.

CLANCY: Fantastic! Thank you for talking to me today!

76 • BACK ISSUE • Supergirl in the Bronze Age Issue

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BLUE BEETLE COMPANION Before BLUE BEETLE made it to live action TV and movies, toys and video games, he had a strange career. Find out about his humble origins at Fox Comics in the 1940s, and his evolution through Charlton Comics and now DC Comics. Meet infamous Golden Age publisher VICTOR FOX, learn about the radio show, see a young JACK KIRBY’s Blue Beetle comic strip, and read his 1939 debut from MYSTERY MEN COMICS #1! Featuring interviews with WILL EISNER, JOE SIMON, JOE GILL, ROY THOMAS, GEOFF JOHNS, CULLY HAMNER, KEITH GIFFEN, LEN WEIN, and others, plus never-before-seen Blue Beetle designs by ALEX ROSS and ALAN WEISS, as well as artwork by WILL EISNER, CHARLES NICHOLAS, STEVE DITKO, KEVIN MAGUIRE, and more!

(128-page Digital Edition) $5.95 • SPECIAL PRICE: $4.95 in October only!

Remastered color digital edition now available at www.twomorrows.com

MEET ARTIST RUDY NEBRES

Email: euryman@gmail.com (subject: BACK ISSUE) Postal mail: Michael Eury, Editor-in-Chief • BACK ISSUE 118 Edgewood Ave. NE • Concord, NC 28025

Find BACK ISSUE on

PRINCE STREET NEWS ADDENDUM Mere days after Karl Heitmueller, Jr. completed this issue’s “Prince Street News” strip, CBS-TV released its first image of Supergirl star Melissa Benoist as the Girl of Steel.

So Karl added this coda to this issue’s PSN spotlighting his take on the TV Maid of Might and her costume (left).

TM & © DC Comics.

BI #81’s COVER CRISIS! Readers who don’t follow us on social media were puzzled by the “Giant-Size Marvel” blurb on the cover of BI #81, hyping content that didn’t appear in our “DC Bronze Age Giants and Reprints” issue. Here’s our fearless leader, TwoMorrows publisher John Morrow, with an explanation: “It was originally planned to cover both DC and Marvel giants, but Michael soon realized that, even with its 100-page expanded size, he needed much more space to do them both justice. So he opted to give Marvel giants their own issue, #86, shipping in January. But in the frenzy to get this oversize issue to press, I accidentally used the original version of the cover that mentioned Marvel giants, instead of Michael’s revised cover that was all-DC. So please ignore the Marvel blurb on the printed copies, and look for the all-Marvel giants issue early next year!”

Mistakes do happen, and we apologize to anyone who was confused by the cover error. If you were disappointed in the absence of the Giant-Size Marvel article, rest assured that the Giant-Size books will get the same treatment in BI #86 that the Super Specs got in #81.

The corrected cover appeared on digital editions of BI #81, but in case you’re a print reader only, here it is (center).

78 • BACK ISSUE • Supergirl in the Bronze Age Issue

Superman and related characters TM & © DC Comics.

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Allow me to plug a great one-day show that will be of interest to many of BI’s readers: the Fayetteville Comic-Con on Saturday, October 17, 2015 from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. at 1960 Coliseum Drive in Fayetteville, North Carolina. Filipino artist RUDY NEBRES (right), who illustrated a bevy of Bronze Age faves from DC mystery stories to Marvel’s John Carter of Mars, is the Guest of Honor. Also among the guests: rudy nebres The ‘Nam’s WAYNE VANSANT, author NANCY A. COLLINS, and © Luigi Novi / Wikimedia Commons. your friendly neighborhood Euryman, crawling out of the BI Bunker for a rare con appearance— and a comics flashback presentation you’ll enjoy. Join us! Info: www.facebook.com/pages/Fayetteville-Comic-Con/1617923875094221

WATERSKI SHOW A NO-GO, WONDER WOMAN CONTEST A GO-GO Michael, once again, thanks for putting out such a great magazine. There are too many highlights for me to single out right now, but all your feature writers do an incredible job, and I’m excited to jump into the latest issue in my hands, with the Charlton heroes (BI #79). I do have a question about BI #80: A number of issues ago, the coming attractions on the back page said that BI #80 would feature an interview with the winner of the 1979 Wonder Woman contest. Wow, what a great idea for an article! But I’m a little concerned because in the last few issues, the description for BI #80 no longer mentions the interview.

Can you tell me, has it been shelved or rescheduled? Or will it still be included in the issue? I definitely would love to hear more about that. In fact, I remember there was a contest for the Superman I and II movies, and a follow-up with those winners would be interesting, too. Thanks again for all the hours of enjoyment!

– Dan Brozak Dan, BI #80’s oral history of DC Comics’ New York offices took on a life of its own and squeezed the Wonder Woman Contest interview out of that issue. It went onto the backburner until I could find a home for it … and a delay with Andy Mangels’ DC Waterski Show article intended for this issue opened a space for the saga of Orlando Watkins, contest winner. (We apologize to readers expecting the Waterski article this issue; it will appear in a future, as-yet-determined issue.) And Shaun Clancy, the interviewer behind this issue’s WW bonus feature, would like to interview other comics contest winners, such as the Superman movie ones you mention. Is there interest in this from other readers?

VILLAINS NEED FRIENDS, TOO Just wanted to say I love the magazine and can’t get enough of it since I discovered it with issue #50. I usually look forward to it more than the new comics I still purchase! I’ve also been buying the available back issues of BACK ISSUE whenever I can. Rarely, when I receive an issue that I think won’t interest me much, I still always find myself reading the magazine from front to back. From there, I always find things I want to seek out and read. Thank you for helping me discover hidden treasure I didn’t know about!

Issue #78’s “Weird” theme fits that bill for me. I’ve never

Thanks for the kind words about BI. As you’ve noticed, we try to present articles about a variety of subjects in a mainstream way.

I’m like most of our readers—a superhero fan—but I appreciate material from other genres and believe it’s part of our mission to cover as many types of comics as possible.

Supervillain teams? That’s a great idea for an issue’s theme!

You’re right, the obvious two Bronze Age series (SVTU and SSOSV) have already been featured, but you bring up some good possibilities. There’s a lot of material in the thematic pipeline now, but consider this on the “to-do list.”

In the meantime, we flirt with the “Batman enemy team-ups” idea in March’s BACK ISSUE #87, themed “Batman AND Superman” (a cheery counterpoint to that month’s boxoffice release of Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice). For that issue I’ve written an article called “The Batman/Superman Swap,” surveying Bronze Age stories where Batman and Superman either teamed up with each other’s supporting cast or fought each other’s foes (Superman/Batgirl, Batman/Lois Lane vs. Metallo, etc.).

BOLDLY GO WHERE—WELL, YOU KNOW… A few suggestions for later issues: How about covering all the Star Trek books?

This, of course, would include Gold Key, Marvel, DC, Image etc. I’m really enjoying the new movie versions and of course the IDW series.

On the subject of Star Trek, how about an All-Sci-Fi issue devoted to all

the wonderfully strange and cool sci-fi books, DC’s Time Warp, Marvel’s Weird Wonder Tales, and the list goes on and on.

Anyway, thanks for the wonderful work you are all doing, and making BACK ISSUE one of the most enjoyable reads every month for me.

– Jeff Rosm Jeff, thanks for your positive feedback about BACK ISSUE! I’m glad you’re a reader of our magazine.

We’ve twice covered Star Trek, in issues #5 and 23. I’m not opposed to eventually revisiting the subject, though, but not for a while.

We’ve also covered sci-fi series in the cosmic- or future-themed issues #9 and 14. BI #9 featured and article on DC’s Time Warp and #14 featured one on Marvel’s mag Unknown Worlds of Science Fiction.

Next year’s BACK ISSUE #89 will be themed “Bronze Age Adaptations” and will include Marvel’s Worlds Unknown and 2001, and some other stuff you might like.

WHO SEZ WE COMICS CAN’T LEARN YA SOMETHIN’?

I wanted to let you know that I sincerely appreciated receiving BACK ISSUE #79 on the Charlton heroes in the nick of time. I’m teaching a college course on the History of American Comic Books and this issue helped provide excellent background on these characters—both on their initial lives with Charlton and their second lives with DC. Without this issue, there would have a gap in my talks on both the Silver Age and Modern Age. Your publication is one of the best in the business. For a comic-book historian, the articles in BACK ISSUE are an outstanding resource. Keep up the good work. I look forward to receiving this publication long into the future.

– Jerry Harrington

THE ROOK RETURNS! Remember The Rook, which debuted in Warren Publications’ Eerie in 1978 then graduated to its own title? The brainchild of the late BILL DuBAY, The Rook is returning in September 2015 via Dark Horse Comics, with a creative team that will be a BI-reader crowdpleaser: STEVEN GRANT and PAUL GULACY! DuBay’s nephew, Ben, is directing The Rook’s return—and BACK ISSUE will explore both the original series and its new incarnation in next spring’s BI #88, which spotlights “Comic Magazines of the 1970s and 1980s.”

Next issue: Christmas in the Bronze Age! From Batman to X-Men, Luke Cage to Lobo, the Wild West to the far-flung future, comics’ best holiday tales of the 1970s through the early 1990s! Plus: Superhero Merchandise Catalogs, Christmas treasury editions, Power Records, and Archie, Harvey, and Comico Christmas stories! Featuring CHRIS CLAREMONT, DAN DeCARLO, JOSÉ LUIS GARCÍA-LÓPEZ, KEITH GIFFEN, the KUBERT STUDIO, DENNY O’NEIL, STEVE PURCELL, BOB SCHRECK, RICK VEITCH, and many more—and the return of your letters!

Spider-Man vs. Santa Kingpin cover by MARIE SEVERIN and MIKE ESPOSITO! Don’t ask—just BI it! See you in sixty!

Your friendly neighborhood Euryman, Michael Eury, editor-in-chief

Spider-Man and Kingpin TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. BACK ISSUE TM & © TwoMorrows.

Supergirl in the Bronze Age Issue

•

BACK ISSUE • 79

TM & © Time Castle.

thought of myself as a fan of the anthology or adventure comics (even less so of the undergrounds), but I also enjoyed this issue more than I thought I would. Being a big Batman fan, I enjoyed more on the Earth-B team-ups. I know this is a subject that’s been covered extensively but still interesting nonetheless. I also loved to read more on the Spectre, Shade, and the Creature Commandos.

Speaking of teams and team-ups themes/articles, any chance you might look into doing a villain groups/villain team-up issue? You’ve covered the hero end of this numerous times and you’ve already covered Secret Society of Super-Villains and Super Villain Team-Up, but what about: Acts of Vengeance (underappreciated, in my opinion), Injustice League (both the serious and JLI versions), Masters of Evil through the years, Batman enemy team-ups (including “Where Were You the Night Batman Was Killed?”; Detective #526—someone ask Gerry Conway what happened to Gentleman Ghost at the end of this one please; Batman #400; and maybe Knightfall), Flash’s Rogues’ team-ups (Death of the Top, at least), Sinister Six, Monster Society of Evil (the World’s Finest run by Don Newton would be great), Zodiac (could answer Todd Novak’s question about Scorpio from this issue), and the Serpent Society, just to name a few. Or maybe even another all-villains issue? I believe it’s been since issue #35 since you had one.

I’m happy to see an upcoming issue on Events and Crossovers. Any chance someone might analyze how this type of storyline is now the norm in comics, similar to how Jaws and Star Wars changed the movie industry? It seems every eight months or so “something BIG changes … EVERYTHING!” Well, at least for three months until the next event, anyway. I’m also looking forward to your holiday-themed issue.

Keep up the great work and thanks for listening. Now please excuse me while I search eBay and back issue bins for those hidden treasures I’ve discovered.

– Scott Andrews

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KIRBY COLLECTOR #66

ALTER EGO #135

ALTER EGO #136

ALTER EGO #137

ALTER EGO #138

LEN WEIN (writer/co-creator of Swamp Thing, Human Target, and Wolverine) talks about his early days in comics at DC and Marvel! Art by WRIGHTSON, INFANTINO, TRIMPE, DILLON, CARDY, APARO, THORNE, MOONEY, and others! Plus FCA (Fawcett Collectors of America), MR. MONSTER’s Comic Crypt, the Comics Code, and DAN BARRY! Cover by DICK GIORDANO with BERNIE WRIGHTSON!

BONUS 100-PAGE issue as ROY THOMAS talks to JIM AMASH about celebrating his 50th year in comics—and especially about the ‘90s at Marvel! Art by TRIMPE, GUICE, RYAN, ROSS, BUCKLER, HOOVER, KAYANAN, BUSCEMA, CHAN, VALENTINO, and others! Plus FCA, MR. MONSTER’s Comic Crypt, AMY KISTE NYBERG on the Comics Code, and a cover caricature of Roy by MARIE SEVERIN!

Incredible interview with JIM SHOOTER, which chronicles the first decade of his career (Legion of Super-Heroes, Superman, Supergirl, Captain Action) with art by CURT SWAN, WALLY WOOD, GIL KANE, GEORGE PAPP, JIM MOONEY, PETE COSTANZA, WIN MORTIMER, WAYNE BORING, AL PLASTINO, et al.! Plus FCA, MR. MONSTER, BILL SCHELLY, and more!

Cover art by CURT SWAN!

Science-fiction great (and erstwhile comics writer) HARLAN ELLISON talks about Captain Marvel and The Monster Society of Evil! Also, Captain Marvel artist/ co-creator C.C. BECK writes about the infamous Superman-Captain Marvel lawsuit of the 1940s and ‘50s in a double-size FCA section! Plus two titanic tributes to Golden Age artist FRED KIDA, MR. MONSTER, BILL SCHELLY, and more!

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KIRBY COLLECTOR #67

BACK ISSUE #85

BACK ISSUE #86

BACK ISSUE #87

DOUBLE-TAKES ISSUE! Features oddities, coincidences, and reworkings by both Jack and Stan Lee: the Galactus Origin you didn’t see, Ditko’s vs. Kirby’s Spider-Man, how Lee and Kirby viewed “writing” differently, plus a rare KIRBY radio interview with Stan, MARK EVANIER and our other regular columnists, unseen and unused pencil art from FANTASTIC FOUR, 2001, CAPTAIN VICTORY, BRUCE LEE, & more!

UP-CLOSE & PERSONAL! Kirby interviews you weren’t aware of, photos and recollections from fans who saw him in person, personal anecdotes from Jack’s fellow pros, LEE and KIRBY cameos in comics, MARK EVANIER and other regular columnists, and more! Don’t let the photo cover fool you; this issue is chockfull of rare Kirby pencil art, from Roz Kirby’s private sketchbook, and Jack’s most personal comics stories!

“Christmas in the Bronze Age!” Go behind the scenes of comics’ best holiday tales of the 1970s through the early 1990s! And we revisit Superhero Merchandise Catalogs of the late ‘70s! Featuring work by SIMON BISLEY, CHRIS CLAREMONT, JOSÉ LUIS GARCÍALÓPEZ, KEITH GIFFEN, the KUBERT STUDIO, DENNY O’NEIL, STEVE PURCELL, JOHN ROMITA, JR., and more. Cover by MARIE SEVERIN and MIKE ESPOSITO!

“Marvel Bronze Age Giants and Reprints!”

In-depth exploration of Marvel’s GIANT-SIZE series, plus indexes galore of Marvel reprint titles, Marvel digests and Fireside Books editions, and the last days of the “Old” X-Men! Featuring work by DAN ADKINS, ROSS ANDRU, RICH BUCKLER, DAVE COCKRUM, GERRY CONWAY, STEVE GERBER, STAN LEE, WERNER ROTH, ROY THOMAS, and more. Cover by JOHN ROMITA, SR.!

“Batman AND Superman!” Bronze Age World’s Finest, Super Sons, Batman/Superman Villain/Partner Swap, Jimmy Olsen and Lois Lane go solo, Superman/Radio Shack giveaways, and JLA #200’s “A League Divided” (as a nod to Batman v. Superman)! Featuring work by BRIAN BOLLAND, RICH BUCKLER, GERRY CONWAY, JACK KIRBY, GEORGE PÉREZ, JIM STARLIN, and more. Cover by DICK GIORDANO!

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DRAW! #32

FREE 2015 TWOMORROWS CATALOG

COMIC BOOK CREATOR #10 COMIC BOOK CREATOR #11

BRICKJOURNAL #37

The Broadway sci-fi epic WARP examined!

Interviews with art director NEAL ADAMS, director STUART (Reanimator) GORDON, playwright LENNY KLEINFELD, stage manager DAVID GORDON, and a look at Warp’s 1980s FIRST COMICS series! Plus: an interview with PETER (Hate!) BAGGE, our RICH BUCKLER interview Part One, GIANT WHAM-O COMICS, and the conclusion of our STAN GOLDBERG interview!

Retrospective on GIL KANE, co-creator of the modern Green Lantern and Atom, and early progenitor of the graphic novel. Kane cover newly-inked by KLAUS JANSON, plus remembrances from friends, fans, and collaborators, and a Kane art gallery. Also, our RICH BUCKLER interview conclusion, a look at the “greatest zine in the history of mankind,” MINESHAFT, and Part One of our ARNOLD DRAKE interview!

STAR WARS! Amazing custom ships by ERIC DRUON, incredible galactic layouts by builder AC PIN, a look at the many droid creations built by LEGO fans—truly, the LEGO Force has awakened! Plus JARED K. BURKS on minifigure customizing, step-bystep “You Can Build It” instructions by CHRISTOPHER DECK, BrickNerd DIY Fan Art, MINDSTORMS robotics lessons by DAMIEN KEE, and more!

Super-star DC penciler HOWARD PORTER demos his creative process, and JAMAL IGLE discusses everything from storyboarding to penciling as he gives a breakdown of his working methods. Plus there’s Crusty Critic JAMAR NICHOLAS reviewing art supplies, JERRY ORDWAY showing the Ord-Way of doing comics, and Comic Art Bootcamp lessons with BRET BLEVINS and Draw! editor MIKE MANLEY! Mature readers only.

Features all available back issues and books! Download the INTERACTIVE PDF DIGITAL EDITION (click on any item, and you’ll automatically be taken to its page on our website to order), or for a FREE PRINTED COPY, just call, e-mail, write us, or go online to request one, and we’ll mail it to you at no cost (customers outside the US pay a nominal shipping fee)!

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