Favorite Covers of the Golden Age--Batman #23

Chess as a metaphor.

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Who's Liz Allen's Dad?

This error comes to us from Amazing Spiderman #17:



It's sure as heck not Mr Brant. Liz Allen (the blonde shown) is engaged in a romantic tug-of-war over Peter Parker with Betty Brant, which is why the writer thought of that name.

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Dan Hastings

This is a little off-topic, as it's Golden or even Platinum Age. A few years ago I noticed some very old coverless comics on ebay. Star Comics #5 and #7 predated Superman, being published in 1937. One of the features in those issues was Dan Hastings. It was a science-fiction strip with a very evil villain named Eutopas:



Remember this is before Hitler's evil was widely known.

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Some More Recycling

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Supergirl--Action # 268

This is a pretty typical DC mystery story. Linda Lee accepts a week-long internship on the Daily Planet, when electrifying news breaks. There is a Supergirl on Earth, who came from the planet Krypton. At first Linda worries that perhaps her robot has performed the super-stunts. Then she fears that maybe she was affected by Red Kryptonite and is revealing herself during events that she later forgets. Eventually the new "Supergirl" shows up at the Daily Planet, but Linda is ready. She exposes the fake Supergirl to phony Green K, causing her to pretend to be affected. But when the Green K is exposed as bogus, so is the new Supergirl. She turns out to be an actress hired to hype a new movie.

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Supergirl--Action # 267

This is one of those oddball cases where DC actually thought about the continuity problems raised by a story idea, came up with a solution, and then promptly forgot about it, causing continuity problems for years to come.

Linda Lee runs into several super-powered youths like herself who clearly know her secret identity. It turns out that they are members of the Legion of Super Heroes, who had by this point made a pair of guest appearances in Superboy stories. Apparently realizing that there might be continuity issues, the Legion introduced in this story was purported to be a new Legion, comprised of the children of the original Legion. However, in all future stories Supergirl is a member of the same Legion that Superboy belongs to. The continuity problem comes in that if Superboy has met Kara, then he will not be surprised when she pops out of the rocket when he is a man. It was later explained that Saturn Girl leaves a post-hypnotic suggestion erasing his memory of Supergirl whenever he returns to the Smallville era.

The story borrows quite often from the original Legion story in Adventure #247, as I have discussed in the past. In an amusing twist, Red Kryptonite affects Supergirl by turning her into a woman; according to the Legion by-laws this makes her ineligible for Legion membership.

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Supergirl--Action # 266

Silly story here. A boy fantasizes about Streaky having superpowers, and it comes true when Streaky is exposed to the X-Kryptonite that Supergirl created again. Most of the humor in this piece revolves around the fact that the boy can't get his friends to believe that Streaky is pulling super stunts. Fortunately, in the end Supergirl convinces everybody that it was Krypto doing the stunts in a way that made it look like Streaky was super.

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Supergirl--Action # 265

After a long build-up, Supergirl loses her memory due to exposure to red Kryptonite and accidentally finds herself in Smallville as its newest super-heroine. For awhile Smallville relives its former glory as the home of a mighty being, but when Superman discovers that Supergirl's been revealed to Smallville, he unleashes an amnesia gas on the town that even affects Supergirl. Quickly, he prints up revised copies of the town paper without mention of the girl of steel and puts Linda Lee back in the orphanage. His secret weapon remains unknown. Of course, today, the story of a Supergirl would be on Drudge and there would be no possibility of the story disappearing.

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Supergirl--Action # 264

Something of a sad story here. Supergirl is adopted by a Mr and Mrs Wilkins quite unexpectedly. At first she thinks only of how to get out of the adoption. But as time goes by she finds the couple who adopted her loving and heroic, as the father is a policeman. So it becomes tougher for her. "Fortunately" some crooks try to kill her to get back at Dad, and he realizes that it's not fair to her to be his daughter. Ironically, of course, we know that his daughter is safe from assailants.

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Supergirl--Action # 263

Supergirl saves a young man who is an orphan from drowning. He ends up at the Midvale Orphanage with her, and eventually figures out her secret identity, even helping her conceal it when an accident happens. Eventually she realizes that he is not from Earth at all, but from another planet, where he's a prince, wanted for the murder of his aunt and uncle. Supergirl defends him and proves the killer was the evil Prime Minister Zoxxo. Once again in this issue Supergirl wears a red skirt instead of the blue.

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Supergirl--Action # 262

In this story, Supergirl continues her efforts to find a solution for the problem of Kryptonite. She places a green K meteor in a cave and tries to approach it and marks where she first feels pain. The second day she goes a little closer, and then closer still, till it seems that she must have become immune to the stuff. However, when she attempts to save Superman from Kryptonite she also falls victim to the poisonous radiation. They save themselves by focusing their x-ray vision on some gold above the green K. The gold is transmuted into lead by the effect of their vision, covering the meteor. Later they discover the reason why the other Kryptonite meteor was becoming less painful to Supergirl was that a metal-eating beast was eating the meteor from the inside.

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Supergirl--Action # 261

This is a significant issue for the introduction of Streaky, the Supercat. Supergirl attempts to find a substance that will neutralize Kryptonite, but is unsuccessful. She throws the Kryptonite away, but Streaky, a stray cat that Supergirl (as Linda Lee) adopted, finds and plays with it. For some unexplained (in this story) reason, the Kryptonite gives the cat super-powers and he decides to use those powers for the good of downtrodden cats everywhere. But at the end of the story, Streaky loses his powers. Note: In this story the colorist screwed up and Supergirl is shown with a red skirt on her uniform, instead of blue.

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Supergirl--Action # 260

The Superman story qualifies as a fairly idiotic story in the Action Comics catalogue. Superman meets a super-powered woman and they apparently fall in love, much to the dismay of Lois Lane. But in the end it was all a trick to fool the invading aliens (like that never happened ten million times in the Silver Age).

Of course, in the end, the super-powered woman turns out to be Supergirl, which is rather embarrassing since the cover and one panel show Superman kissing her rather passionately:



The Supergirl feature itself is a rather pedestrian "turn into a baby" story that DC was fond of back in the 1960s. There are numerous ridiculous examples of this plot device. In this one, Supergirl (still operating secretly) saves an old man from drowning in an pool by pushing him out of the water and onto land. Of course, it turns out that the pool contains the legendary Fountain of Youth, and the old man becomes a young man, while Supergirl becomes a baby, in which guise she manages to get some crooks arrested.

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