I am rapidly approaching my 15th anniversary here on the site. That is a loooooong time and that means that I have reviewed a lot of books! It also means that I sometimes forget what I have reviewed and what I haven't reviewed.
So I have to admit that I was shocked when I discovered that I have never reviewed Superman Family #165, the first original Supergirl story in the Superman Family anthology book.
This is a crazy time for the Superman books. Back in February of 1974, Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen was 'canceled' with Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen #163. The numbering for the book was assumed by Superman Family, an anthology book with a rotating original story (noted by the larger image on the cover and the top spot of the character role on the left). Jimmy Olsen, Lois Lane, and Supergirl would rotate that original story spot during this bimonthly 'reprint' era of the book.
Superman's Girlfriend Lois Lane was still being published when Superman Family came about but it only had a few more issues before it was canceled and rolled into anthology. Superman's Girlfriend Lois Lane #137 was the final issue, in the September/October 1974 schedule.
The first solo Supergirl book was still on-going, but nearing the end of its 10 issue run. Supergirl #10, the last issue of that volume, was also on the racks in that fateful September/October 1974 shipping window.
Here we have Superman Family #165, on the rack in the June/July 1974 shipping window, meaning for a couple of months folks were getting an extra original Supergirl story to read and enjoy!
Put in the historical context, Supergirl had been part of a mobile news team in her Adventure Comics run, which ended with Adventure Comics #424. That story, cover dated October 1972, had her quit the journalism racket. The next month in Supergirl #1, cover dated November 1972, Linda enrolled in Vandyre University as an acting student.
Now semi-headlining Superman Family, it was time for another change. Talk about a character being a bit in the blender. And things get even crazier. So let's dive in!
Superman arrives to help her move with some super-feats. But Linda stops him.
'Princess of the Golden Sun' was written by Elliot S! Maggin with art by Supergirl stalwart Art Saaf. Saaf's is inked by Vince Colletta who brings an unfortunate minimalism to the work.
But what a great splash. First off, I love the banner at the top with Supergirl introducing the new direction for the character. I wonder if this was initially going to be Supergirl #11 with the splash the size it is to accomodate the indicia that would be at the bottom of the page. Needing to fill it, the introduction was added.
But Supergirl being tossed off an aztec temple by a superior girl is a nice hook.
We start with Linda in her apartment excited to be leaving Vandyre to start her new job in Florida.
Superman arrives to help her move with some super-feats. But Linda stops him.
She no longer wants to be a super-hero. She wants to be a 'genuine flesh-and-blood woman' instead of a a super-hero. She plans to retire from heroics and let Superman be the world saver. Clark doesn't agree with the decision but honors it, taking Linda to the airport to head to Florida.
From the top I don't know if I like where Maggin was going with this run. Thankfully this didn't last too long. But Supergirl should want to use her powers AND her civilian identity to help people.
Meanwhile, in Central Mexico, an odd ritual is happening. Tlaca is an Aztec princess. Her people wer vanquished by Cortez. But this offshoot has remained hidden. Over the generations, they have bred superior women warriors until the culmination of this in Tlaca.
Moreso, Tlaca has been using a special meditation to gain super-powers. When defeated by an opponent, Tlaca meditates for a week and when she awakens, she had evolved to now have a power to defeat her last foe. We see that Tlaca can fly and hurl fireballs.
She needs but one more evolutionary stage to be powerful enough to take over the world. And so she is sent to face Supergirl. By facing the strongest woman on Earth, she will evolve to be near omnipotent.
Saaf's art here is quite beautiful, showing Tlaca's battle against her tribe's most powerful warrior to prove her worth.
Supergirl being touted as the world's strongest female is a nice flourish.
In Florida, Linda takes up her new role as guidance counselor for the New Athens Experimental School, a job she will keep for nearly ten years until the Daring New Adventures of Supergirl comes out. [EDIT: She keeps this job until Superman Family #208, from July 1981, so keeps it for just over 7 years.]
I like how we already get the sense that some office politics and supporting cast will be part of these tales. Here, one of the Trustees thinks she is too young for the job.
She even has a male secretary named Martin Hamilton. Pretty progressive for the times!
Linda barely has time to situate herself in her office when two crises land in her lap.
The first is a student named Eileen Falco. She is adopted and loves her adoptive mother. But now her 'natural mother' Kerry Berkman has arrived and is trying to take her away. When the adoptive mother tried to run with Eileen to keep them together, Eileen was made a ward of the state.
Perhaps Linda can get to the bottom of this conundrum and help Eileen.
But before too much time can be spent on that, Tlaca arrives having sensed Supergirl's presence.
A brawl breaks out right on campus.
Tlaca fires her solar flares and flies around. Supergirl tries to batter Tlaca into submission, finally knocking her out with a left hook.
One thing Saaf knows how to do is amp up the cheesecake even in fights like this.
And despite her protests of wanting to be a 'normal girl' at least Linda knows she has to be Supergirl here to protect people.
Immediately after that fight, Tlaca assumes a lotus position and remains like that for the seven days it takes too evolve into her final form!
Nice vertical layout by Saaf here, pulling in closer and closer until we see the golden sun eyes of Tlaca.
Her final form is pretty formidable.
Tlaca can fly, shoot fireballs, has super-strength, and has what seems to be limited teleportation. She also can use her will to pull a submerged Aztec temple from the Florida waters. And she has brainwashing powers, plucking Eileen Falco off the beach to enslave as her first follower.
That's a lot of powers. It almost has a little Dragon Ball Z feel to it. She can kaio ken, fire the kamehameha, and use instant transmission! (Sorry for the non-DBZ fans.)
It looks like, as anticipated, she might have evolved to a place where she can defeat Supergirl.
But Supergirl isn't just strong. She is smart.
She notices that all the teleportation that happens occurs in a north/south pattern as if Tlaca's powers are somehow tied to the magnetic poles of the Earth.
Using her super-intelligence and powers, Supergirl fashions a quick electro-magnet which short-circuits Tlaca's powers.
The fight is over.
I do like Tlaca's last lines as they opened up what could have been a rematch. After all, couldn't she simply meditate again to evolve more? Or is she only allowed to evolve once per opponent? If Wonder Woman defeated her, could she evolve yet again?? Why has no one done a second story with Tlaca, the Princess of the Golden Sun??
Still, always good to see Kara use her brains and brawn to win a battle.
Remember though ... there were two crises.
Through some investigation, Linda learns that Kerry Berkman was the money-grubbing aunt of Eileen, pretending to be Eileen's mother to obtain access to an unknown trust Eileen has coming her way when she turns 18. Kerry would have gotten away with it too, if it weren't for this meddling guidance counselor.
All ends well!
As a bonus, we get an epilogue! Linda visits Clark to catch him up on her new life and how she loves helping the kids. He reminds her that she is a kid herself and tells her she needs to visit her own parents more.
A Zor-El and Alura sigthing! And the cousins acting very much like family, being close and supportive! Hurray!
So another new chapter of Supergirl starts with her moving to Florida, hoping to curtail her super-deeds, and ready to start helping kids. At least this job will stick a bit longer than the last ones did. The 'flesh-and-blood' plotline doesn't last long thankfully. This story reads like a classic Bronze Age one with a lot happening quickly. I don't mind it.
I like Saaf's art a lot so it was good to revisit this story.
And from a Supergirl history sense, it is of moderate importance as this is the next big step in her character.
Overall grade: B+
10 comments:
Ugh. I hated this era treating adoptive parents as disposable when the birth parents showed. The people who raise you are the real parents. Now, Kara's Kryptonian parents did rear her for years but the Danvers were a big part of her life too.
Saaf is good. At a glance I thought it was Oksner!
I forgot that the New Athens School era was so long! Though she was definitely on that soap opera before Daring New Adventures, so it couldn't have been that as long as that. They really couldn't figure out what to do with her civilian identity once she stopped being a teenager, could they?
Thanks for comments.
Complete brain cramp by me because she becomes the soap opera actress in SMF #208 in 1981. So the guidance counselor role lasted 7 years, not 9.
Edited main article!
Good call on noticing that bit with the indicia and the banner at the top of page one. I don't remember where, but I know I read somewhere that Julius Schwartz was to replace Robert Kanigher as editor of the Supergirl comic had it continued past issue #10. It was a needed change that should have happened months earlier. Kara and Kanigher were NOT a good fit.
Linda's desire to be "normal" seemed to come out of left field. Maggin's attempt to add some Marvel style drama, I guess. Surely, Linda knew that with great power comes...well, you know. And I think Clark knew that, in the end, Linda could not stop being Supergirl for long. A little bit of this came back in the early pages of Daring New Adventures, when Linda traveled to Chicago by train, rather than flying there. But by then, there was no notion of giving up her Supergirl identity.
I see that the trustee that Linda met at New Athens on her first day was Benjamin Pierce. Hawkeye had come a long way from South Korea.
Happy days! I’m amazed to learn that job lasted more than a couple of years, I suppose it’s cos the initial rotation meant there weren’t that many stories set there.
I liked Kara having two sets of parents, I don’t recall her Kandor set being favoured over Fredna… heck, who got to design her next costume?
It hadn’t crossed my mind that this could have been in Supergirl Love Stories, I’d assumed it was a new direction for a new book.
It’s always a treat to have a Bronze Age look-back.
I liked Eliot Maggin's Supergirl stories, not least because with he regularly came up with plots that weren't Supergirl has a disastrous romance because of her bad taste in men. His version of her as a caring person who tries her best to help ordinary people in both her identities is very appealing. I would love to see a review of his next Supergirl story from Superman Family #168. "The Girl With the See Thru Mind" is a classic to rank with the best of Leo Dorfman, Otto Binder, Jerry Siegel, and Sterling Gates and beautifully expresses everything the character is supposed to stand for.
Have to agree, Tlaca seems like too interesting a character to waste as a one-and-done. Surely at some point her electromagnetic prison cell would have failed and allowed her to escape, or whatever her sentence was would have been served in full. Or some of her people would have come looking for her?
Her constant power evolution could have been reined in a bit to keep her interesting. What if her powers were always enough to give her an edge against her last opponent, but she might lose earlier powers or power sets that had failed against that foe? That way she doesn't just keep getting more powerful and her abilities could change radically based on who she lost to last.
Pity she'll probably never get used again - although she probably needs a bit of a rewrite on her background, which doesn't sound like the most culturally respectful thing ever.
I see "Linda Danvers School Guidance Counselor/Ambivalent About Her Powers" as the very last gasp of "Relevance" in DC Comics. It would seem to be Maggin's Version of Wonder Woman's depowered "Mod Period", and as such it feels mad random and very much forced as an attitude change for Supergirl.
BUT IT IS STILL a vast improvement in tone over her solo book (however well drawn that comic was..) with it's revolving door of disposable boyfriends and Supergirl's passive needy depiction. Otherwise "New Athens" did foreshadow a troubling trend of big turnover in Supergirl's setting and supporting cast, from guidance counselor to actress and then back to being a college coed. Writer's clearly were frustrated with her and could not mine any of her settings for consistent good stories, which is why not only do her two sets of parents fade into the background, but so does Linda Danvers! Supergirl would, going forward spend a lot of time in costume and not interacting with her increasingly marginal supporting casts.
Agreed with the Above, Princess Tlaca while a worthwhile powerhouse, is a little culturally problematic by today's standards. But hey, if "SatanGirl" can make a comeback anyone can :)
JF
It seems to me that some of the blame for Supergirl's lack of a consistent supporting cast goes all the way back to Mort Weisinger. He and his writers made no real attempts to establish one in the strips earliest days. Aside from Miss Hart, there were no recurring characters among Linda's fellow orphans. Even Dick Wilson/Malverne appeared just once during that period, only returning after he and Linda had been adopted.
I imagine that more wasn't done with the Danvers because Weisinger didn't want to repeat the Superboy formula of living in a small town with adoptive parents, going to High School, etc. So Fred and Edna Danvers never became as important to the Supergirl strip as Jonathan and Martha Kent were to Superboy's.
JF,
Supergirl actually did have a brief 'depowered' phase in Adventure Comics around the same time as Superman's. I remember it had something to do with a lady with an eyepatch and a handsome guy seducing her and implanting something that would sometimes short out her powers. It all got dropped very suddenly.
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