Action Comics #502. Your heroine speaks.

Hello, it’s me, Kara from Krypton. You might know me from such smash-hit movies as Supergirl and, erm, er, Supergirl.

Movies aside, you want to know what’s eating me?

Superman.

That’s what’s eating me.

This pod thing lands on Earth, and some aliens say it’s got a baby in it that’s going to be their saviour, and can Superman and me look after it for ’em. So, before I can say no, he says yes.

Well that’s odd, Mr Super Duper Man, because I seem to remember that when you were asked to look after me, you stuck me in an orphanage, kept threatening to exile me into space and told me I could risk my life saving the world for you just as long as I didn’t tell anyone I existed. But, this brat, oh that’s right, you don’t hesitate to take that on even though it has hair that looks like a steel toupee.

So we raise this brat, which only takes a few hours ’coz he’s an alien.

And then what happens?

O-o-o-o-o-h, Superman gets himself killed fighting the Galactic Golem.

At this point, bearing in mind the way he’s treated me over the years, you might think I’d be breaking out the party hats and getting ready to dance on his grave.

But no. I can’t do that. Despite my ample displays of bosom, I’m the world’s nicest girl and am therefore devastated.

Then it looks like The Parasite’s come to the Fortress of Superman-Has-No-Friends - I mean Solitude - to kill me with the unstoppable power he’s just absorbed from the late Superman and the now equally late Galactic Golem.

So, that’s it, with no way of beating that kind of power, I’m a goner.

Except Superman’s not dead and the Parasite’s not real. It was all a trick by my cousin to make me devastated with grief so the alien brat - that has a mouth like a vent act’s dummy, you know, those really creepy ones you wouldn’t want to be left alone with - that he left me alone with, will find out what emotion is and pass it onto the alien race that spawned it.

That’s right. My cousin the jerk deliberately set out to make me devastated with grief and then make me think I was about to cork it.

At this point, I take a Kryptonite chainsaw to the big blue sheesh and gleefully hack him to pieces as he begs me to spare him.

Well, no. I don’t. Because I’m the nicest girl in the universe, I just tell him how great and clever he is.

You know what I think it is?

Stockholm Syndrome.

Look it up.

Krypto, Beppo (or Zeppo, or Heppo, or whatever the hell it’s called), Streaky, Comet, we’ve all got it. That’s what he does to people.

But just you wait, Mr Super Duper Man. Just you wait. Coz one of these days, I’m going to turn bad. I mean real bad. I’m gonna get a tattoo and leather pants and play pool and everything. And then, Mr Super Duper Man, I’m gonna give you the pasting you’ve been asking for.

And when I do, everyone’ll want to know just what it was that tipped me over the edge.

Yeah?

I think we both know what that was.

Don’t we?