Stuff I read and watched in July – Blue Towel Productions

I am in the middle of working on my monthly round-up of stuff that I watched, read and did in July, but the whole thing is beginning to stretch on a bit, so I decided to pull out three thematically bits of media that I consumed (or actually re-consumed) and give them their own post. What connects these three things?

It’s Supergirl, whose new movie I watched early in July, but already wrote about here. But afterwards, this led me to a bit of a binge of other Supergirl-related media, all of which I’ve watched or read in the past, but not for a long time.

What were they? Let’s start with my favorite…

Supergirl: The Silver Age volume one

This book reprints many of the earliest Supergirl tales, from the late 1950s and early 1960s, which I bought because I thought my then-young daughters might be interested in, but as they’d already read them in the DC Showcase Presents volume that I used to own (where they were reprinted in black & white), so it’s been sitting ignored on my shelf pretty much ever since. I even almost sold it at one point, but changed my mind at the last minute. I’m glad I did.

These stories are from deep in DC’s silver age, which in case you don’t know was a very silly place. But its also a loads of fun. It’s a breezy collection of mostly short adventures, all from Action Comics, dealing with Supergirl’s arrival on earth, her misadventures as a resident of the Midvale orphanage as Linda Lee, and occasionally being used as Superman’s secret weapon. All of this includes multiple examples of failed adoptions (sometimes because the prospective parents were actually criminals, sometimes because Linda would deliberately sabotage it in order to prevent her identity from being exposed). There are also Supergirl’s first romances with Jerro the merboy and Brainiac 5 of the Legion of Super-Heroes, and also the introduction of her super-cat Streaky.

If you don’t know, Streaky was an ordinary cat that swallowed some “X-Kryptonite” (a material Supergirl creates in a failed attempt to rid Superman of the threat from kryptonite). Doing this would give Streaky temporary super-powers, something the cat would do from time to time because the stuff was stuck in a ball of string it liked to play with. Neither Streaky nor Supergirl understand how this is happening, at least in the period the book covers. I really like the Streaky stories, partly just because I like cats but also because of how unhinged Streaky could be. You especially see this in a story that features Streaky competing with Krypto about which one is the best super-pet, which also features a surprise last minute appearance by Beppo the super-monkey.

There is also the occasional more dramatic stories, and even some multi-part adventures. The book goes up to Action Comics #284 and the last six or so issues tell a continuous story about an evil scientist from the bottled city of Kandor (who also happens to be a Supergirl lookalike) who manages to rob Supergirl of her powers and memory and to switch places with her. She concocts a scheme to use Luthor to kill Superman before killing him. Of course it all gets foiled but it’s pretty diabolical.

A major recurring bit that is teased out over an extended period of the time was the idea of Superman publicly announcing his cousin’s presence to the world. There are numerous false starts to this idea which usually get cut short when Superman decides she’s just not ready. Of course, any reasonable modern examination of this proves Superman to be a major jerk, locking away his newly arrived cousin in an orphanage as he does, and forcing herself to keep her identity a secret (leading to those sabotaged adoption attempts, mentioned above). There’s even a story where Superman pretends that Supergirl has to be exiled to another planet for a year just to see how she handles it (in reality, he lets her come home after just a week).

But if we can suspend our disbelief and put on our silver age-colored glasses as we read it, there is a lot to be enjoyed in this book.

Supergirl is created by writer Otto Binder and artist Al Plastino. Binder wrote a bunch more of the stories, although I think Jerry Siegel wrote even more. And after the first story, the rest of the book is drawn by Jim Mooney. The book goes up to the story just before Superman finally does reveal Supergirl to the world (in a tale in which Red Kryptonite causes Supergirl to temporarily grow a second head!). On the strength of how much I liked it, I’ve gone ahead and ordered the next volume, which as it happens has just arrived today as I write this.

Supergirl: Being Super

Being Super was a Supergirl-starring miniseries by writer Mariko Tamaki and penciller Joëlle Jones from 2016 which functions as a standalone origin story for the character. It’s basically a YA story about a version of Kara (as she’s known) who arrived on earth via rocket ship and was immediately adopted by a human family, in much the same way that Superman traditionally was. In this iteration, Kara has no idea of who she is or where she comes from, and instead attempts to live a normal life hanging out with her friends and keeping the world outside of her family from knowing that there is anything unusual about her. Of course things go wrong and become quite confusing for our heroine as her powers misfire just as a devastating and unexplainable earthquake hits her community. This all leads Kara to discovering a whole boat-load of secrets, including about herself.

I loved this story when I first read it, and still liked it now, although it doesn’t have quite the magic that I remember. I think part of that is just because if you remove Supergirl’s memory of Krypton, you actually take away one of the things that makes her distinct from her more famous cousin (especially in modern depictions) and thus makes her a bit more of a generic character.

But still it’s a good book, and Joëlle Jones’ art is crisp and beautiful. It’s well worth a read if the idea of “Supergirl” and “YA drama” are at all appealing.

Supergirl (1984)

Yeah, the streaming algorithm picked up on something and put this movie in my face, which I have not watched all the way through for a looong time. So I made my way through it, and confirmed my overall impression that it is not very good. Made as a spin-off of the Christopher Reeve-starring Superman films of the era (it came out the year after Superman III) the movie suffers from massive underdevelopment of its characters or ideas.

Supergirl in this version comes Argo City, a community which is just there, floating around in some sort of ill-defined “innerspace.” Kara accidentally lets a super-powerful power source fly out a window and then chases after it in an experimental rocket ship in order to retrieve it as Argo cannot survive without it. She lands on earth, emerges in a Supergirl-suit and immediately starts flying around before deciding to adopt a secret identity as a student at a girls’ boarding school.

Helen Slater has got a certain amount of delightful going for her as the lead character, but nobody around her is interesting. Faye Dunaway plays the villain, a witch named Selena, in a massively over-the-top performance that is completely devoid of either charm or menace, and the none of the rest of the supporting cast is memorable at all. Maybe the most personality is found in Peter O’Toole’s Zaltar, a Kryptonian scientist who is Kara’s friend, whom she meets ups with again during an extended sequence where she is stuck in the Phantom Zone.

There are also some very nice flying scenes which hold up quite well. But in general while the movie has got some fun ambitions, there is too little heart or thrills to make it anything more than an odd curiosity.

I’ve heard that at one point the idea was for the Supergirl story to be part of Superman III. I don’t know why this didn’t happen, but it certainly couldn’t have hurt Supergirl’s first big movie outing to have her alongside Christopher Reeve’s Superman. As it is, we had to wait for the ill-advised climax to the disastrously muddled Flash movie of 2023 before that became a thing we saw on screen.

The minor cast of Supergirl includes Matt Frewer (Max Headroom)as one of the truckers who harass Supergirl after she first arrives on earth (and gets beaten up for his trouble) and Sandra Dickinson (Trillian from the TV version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) as a pretty woman who gets kind of tortured by Selena and her magic powers when the woman makes her angry. Sandra Dickinson also has a small part as a different woman (presumably) in Superman III.

And that’s that! Now to settle down and read Supergirl: The Silver Age volume two.