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| Front cover of Supergirl: the Silver Age volume 2 |
Score (out of 5 Capes)
Silver Age sensibilities sensibilities and assumptions are very different from current ones, more than 60 years later. Nothing here is too consequential or, really, very interesting. 2 out of 5 capes.
My Review
With the new Supergirl movie opening in a few weeks, let's take a look at past comic book representations of the hero.
Supergirl's early years included a run of backup stories in Action Comics. Her more famous cousin got the lead, of course, but she had a solid run of her own tales tucked into the end. This book collects nearly two years' worth of these tales, ones that originally ran between February 1962 and December 1963.
The collection starts off with a splash - a full-length feature telling of the great unveiling. In Supergirl's earlier adventures, she had been limited in action and hidden to the world. She would, when requested, swoop in and assist Superman, but they otherwise took pains to hide her existence from the world. But with Action Comics #285, her existence is revealed and she is introduced to the world, to international and even inter-planetary fame and acclaim.
But she still must protect her secret identity. So she builds a tunnel from the home of her adopted family that would allow her to come and go unobserved. Mom and Pop Danvers take in stride the shocking revelation that this sweet teenaged high schooler they have been raising is none other than Supergirl!
Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel handled the writing duties for the first seven stories included here, before Leo Dorfman took over the scripting role. While Dorfman kept his changes to the character and mythology to a minimum, with Super-horse being perhaps the biggest new twist, there is a noticeable difference in the writing styles of the two men.
Siegel's stories unfolded at a breakneck pace. Supergirl would go from Atlantis to Metropolis to Space to miraculously resurrecting Lex Luthor over the course of just a few pages. Siegel's dramatic plot twists were frequent, dramatic and extreme.
Dorfman still packed in no shortage of drama, space travel and time barrier crossing. But he slowed the pace, resisted throwing in dozens of swings, and instead went deeper into the back-story, relationships and emotions of the characters.
Several of the stories in the collection feature Super-Horse, a former half-man, half-horse centaur whose lover was duped into giving him the wrong potion - rather than making him fully human, he became 100% horse. Immortal and super-powered, sure, but also and always a horse.
These tales of the Super-Horse are some of the oddest in this collection. His courage and powers enable him to save a damaged submarine and rescue Supergirl on more than one occasion. But the extended bout of amnesia and the story of being turned human for 24 hours, during which time he sparks a romance with Linda Danvers, are ripe for psychological analysis.
In these stories we are reminded repeatedly that our hero is a high school aged girl in her mid-teens. Stereotypes of a girl's interests and emotional state are regularly on display.
Most out of step, though, with our 2026 sensibilities is surely the speed with which she and her parents agree on her marrying Tor-An. In the collection's final tale, a Kryptonian villain and escapee of the Phantom Zone seduces Supergirl and moves to marry her within days - with the blessing of her parents, Superman and key people of the bottle-city of Kandor (which makes regular appearances in these pages).
The pictures throughout the collection are provided by artist Jim Mooney. While largely following the Silver Age's standard 6-panels-a-page layout structure, he packs in loads of close-ups on our heroine. She is often front-and-center in these images, allowing him to convey her emotional reactions. Whether she responds with courage, shock, dismay or humour, Mooney manages to embody and portray her emotions with clarity. With just a few lines, he communicated so much emotional detail.
The body postures in Mooney's images are somewhat static and simplistic, which works against him in the action sequences in particular, leaving them stiff and awkward. His renditions of Supergirl in flight are the clearest and most frequent examples of this stiffness - she looks like a soaring star-fish, limbs splayed in all directions like she is about to fall off a wire.
With its wild swings through time and space, era-based stereotypes and so much focus on other characters like Super-Horse to the detriment of our heroine herself, these stories would not have the success today that they did in the early 1960s. But they serve as a great touchstone of the history and starting point as we explore the evolution of Supergirl.
2 out of 5 capes.
What I loved
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| Supergirl flies away from a super-conundrum posed by Black Flame |
Supergirl is the star of these pages, obviously. Artist Jim Mooney reminds us of that fact by placing her in the foreground on panel after panel and page after page.
One of his most-used techniques is to place her face in profile in one corner of the image, reacting to the words or actions of others depicted in the rest of the image, an approach he leans on especially when she is in her Linda Danvers secret identity.
In the image above, the villain's boastful, gloating words dominate the top half, and Supergirl fills most of the bottom half of the frame. It focuses our attention on her emotional response more than the cruel words of Black Flame who, in turn, shrinks in the distance.
With these visual choices, here and elsewhere, Mooney very effectively keeps his readers focused on our young hero.
What I didn't love
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| Time travel sure is easy! Supergirl pops over to the year 4,000 AD |
Hardly a story goes by, in this collection, without Supergirl flying off to another past or future time or, less frequently, another planet, meteor or galaxy.
These stories were created in the early 1960s, as the jet age and space age ramped up. So our writers might be drawing on the contemporary interests in space travel and science fiction. But their frequency grows wearisome. Can we think of so few stories where both the challenge and the solution are entirely in our own time and on our own planet?
Writers Jerry Siegel and Leo Dorfman both seem convinced that Supergirl would only face a villain, natural disaster or other challenge if Superman were away. Not off battling challenges elsewhere, but entirely unable to intervene. So nearly every story has an almost throwaway line that Superman is off-planet or traveling in the past or future.
Even Supergirl, though, cannot stay on little old 1960s planet Earth. Need to know more about the origins of one of the characters? No problem, just pop through the time barrier to go see their history for yourself.
I grew weary of the conceit long before the end of this collection.
Related Reviews
A flirty teenaged Supergirl teams with Green Lantern in the Brave and the Bold - Lords of Luck
Linda Danvers goes to college and Supergirl moves to the big city in the 1980s Supergirl books one and two
Quick Reference Details
Writers: Jerry Siegel, Leo Dorfman
Artists: Jim Mooney
Published By: DC Comics
Published When: Aug 7, 2018
Parental Rating: General
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| Back cover of Supergirl: the Silver Age volume 2 |
