Supergirl #8. A Head Full of Snakes - Part Two.

Here it is, the concluding instalment of my look at a comic that's so epic, so awesome, so multi-layered in its themes and plot twists that it's taken two posts to review it.

Here's what happens.

Having been cast in a play, our heroine is busy leching after her co-star Mitch when she spots one of her college professors being mugged.

No sooner has she dealt with the muggers than she spots something else.

That her head's sprouted a load of snakes and she's turning people to stone.

Needless to say, the Justice League of America can't tolerate such a thing and turn up to give her a good kick in the asp.

Also needless to say, Supergirl polishes the lot of them off in about two seconds and then sets about trying to find a cure for her condition.

It turns out that the ghost of Medusa is to blame and Medusa has a brilliant master plan, which is to get the ghost of Perseus to possess poor old Mitch and get him to chop Supergirl's head off with his magic sword. Then Medusa's ghost will be free to take over Supergirl's dead body and conquer the world with it.

Now Supergirl has to sort out Mitch and his magic sword and find Medusa's tomb to put a stop to all this.

It has to be said that the main attraction of this issue is that you get to see Supergirl with snakes on her head and no cape on. Oddly enough, I have to say she looks a lot better like that and I can't help feeling they should have left her looking like that forever.

Other than that, I'm not sure it's a story that makes any sense at all. Medusa's plan would involve her taking over a headless corpse which, I would have thought, would pose certain practical difficulties when it comes to using it to take over the world.

Also, Mitch sees Supergirl's snakes on at least two occasions and suffers no harm.

Not only that but Supergirl and Mitch see the original Medusa's snakes at the climax and it has no effect on them at all.

With its illogical villainous scheme, petrification anomalies and the JLA and Supergirl showing no sense at all in their brief showdown, it does come across like a story that was written in a bit of a rush, without any great thought.

Still, Supergirl looks nicer in it than she's ever done before and that has to be something.

Supergirl #8. Kara Zor-El's baddest of bad hair days - Part One.

Krackling Kandorians! This is a unique moment in this blog's history because Supergirl Sunday has now reached issue #8 of our heroine's 1970s solo series.

With my stupendous mastery of organisation, it turns out I randomly reviewed it a whole four years ago. Therefore, it's time for me to dust that old post off and, in the interest of sequential correctness, re-post it right now.

Because the post was more of a general look at the series, I'm going to treat it as Part One of the review and tomorrow I shall endeavour to write a more specific critique of the issue in question.

So, here it is, what I had to say about that very issue way back in April 2010...


I was never sure if the deal Supergirl got in life was raw or simply half-baked. Either way, it's a miracle she didn't end up in therapy. First of all her home planet's blown up then her home city's destroyed and then her own cousin puts her in an orphanage while telling her to keep her trap shut and not get noticed.

That's not to mention that, for decades, all her boyfriends turned out to be aliens or robots or ghosts or crooks, or spies, or women or horses.

Still, through all these setbacks, Kara Zor-El battled on, for year after year, until, at last, in 1972, she got her own comic.

The odd thing was that while she'd been able to sustain a lengthy run of stories in Adventure Comics for three years, her own title lasted just ten issues, which poses the obvious question, why would people buy the exploits of Supergirl in Adventure Comics but not in her own mag? Was it that boys, the main comic buying audience, were happy to buy a mag with "Adventure" in the title but not one with "Girl" in the title?

Either way, it was their loss because the comic has a charm all its own. No longer in that orphanage, Superman's cousin's packed her bags and gone to university. If she thought this was the start of a fresh new life, free of the trials and tribulations that fell on her like a sack of anvils at every opportunity, she was to be much disappointed. Her bad luck simply grew and and, by issue #8, she'd sprouted a headful of snakes, and her boyfriend - possessed by the ghost of Perseus - was out to kill her.

Apparently it was all a plot by Medusa who, imprisoned somewhere or other, was out to get him to slay Supergirl so she could take possession of the Maid of Might's (presumably hacked up) body. With Supergirl chopped to pieces and Perseus still on the loose, I can spot two problems with Medusa's plan right there but, clearly, the gruesome Gorgon was an optimist. Still, as always, it all ended nicely, with Medusa defeated and Supergirl off back home, no doubt to prepare for her next romantic catastrophe.

For Cary Bates, coming up with Supergirl plots must've been even more of a challenge than coming up with Superman tales. He had the same problem of dealing with a character who was far too powerful for the sake of good drama but with the added problem that this was about a girl and - this being the 1970s - you couldn't show a girl getting a good chinning from a bad guy, meaning the violence levels had to be toned down even further. Still, Bates was nothing if not resourceful and did his usual charming job of it.

But the stories' real selling point was Art Saaf's artwork. With Saaf in charge, it was a whole new Supergirl. No longer the wholesome and blandly pretty ingénue of Jim Mooney, or the plucky girl next door of Kurt Schaffenberger, here she's all legs, cleavage, lips and eyes. For some of us, it's the most visually appealing portrayal of Supergirl ever but maybe in the end that's what did for the strip. Should Supergirl be sexy? Maybe, ultimately, the strip didn't know who it was aiming at. If boys were never going to go for all that romance, and girls weren't going to go for the legs, cleavage, lips and eyes, then who exactly was going to buy it?

www.artsaaf.com


Potential further reading and viewing:

Stone. Don't risk being the last on your block to get it.

It's time once more for all readers of Steve Does Comics to despair as I plug my latest eBook that's now available on Amazon.

Stone tells the tale of what happens when the 12th Daughter of Destiny goes in search of her lucky hand and finds instead the effects of a curse that ties the world of Ancient Mythology to the present. I won't give away too much but if I use the phrase, "A head full of snakes," I think you might have a clue where I'm coming from.

Such is its sensational selling power that, after mere hours online, Stone has already hit the dizzy heights of #90 in Amazon UK's Fantasy Short Story category and is currently available for just 99 Cents, 77 Pence or 0.89 Euros, depending on your geographical location.

Remember, you don't need one of those fancy Kindle machine things to download it. All you need is one of those fancy computer machine things that I suspect you already have, or you wouldn't be reading this.

Download Stone from Amazon.Com, Amazon UK, Amazon Germany, Amazon France, Amazon Spain, or Amazon Italy, right now - because your brain deserves it.

Of Miracle Men and Invisible Girls. Fantastic Four #139

By the time I was eight, I'd realised a marker pen was a wonderful thing. For one thing, you could sit there smelling it - although you had to give up after a while, as you started to get dizzy - and, for the other, you could use it to join the dots on the Invisible Girl.

For those unaware of the significance of the Invisible Girl's dots, way back in the weekly Mighty World of Marvel reprints of the early 1970s, jolly Jack Kirby used to get round the problem of how to let us see an invisible character by drawing her with dotted instead of full lines. "Well," I reasoned, if being dotted meant her foes couldn't see her, then joining those dots meant she'd no longer be invisible and the enemies of the Fantastic Four could find her and kill her.

Now, this may seem a mean thing to do but, even at that tender age, I'd decided Sue Storm was a bit of a useless article. All she ever seemed to do, for issue after issue, in those tales was get kidnapped and have to be rescued.

On top of that, there was the whole Reed vs Sub-Mariner thing with her. Catch yourself on, love, you're supposed to be a good guy. Stop lusting after someone who wants to destroy the human race - especially one who's half fish - and find yourself a proper boyfriend.

So, you can imagine my delight when I got the Fantastic Four #139 home from Sheffield's Sheaf Market and discovered Sue Storm was no longer a member of the world's greatest super-team.

Instead, she'd been replaced by Medusa.

Now, as an adult, I can see that Medusa's power - being able to trip people up with her hair - wasn't any better than Sue's power of invisibility and, given that she was in the habit of wearing a halter-neck top, despite being a well-endowed woman with a lot of running about to do, clearly wasn't of a very practical bent either but I didn't care. When it came down to it, useless power aside, there was always something more kick-ass about her than Sue.

She wasn't the only one because this issue featured someone else gone kick-ass; the Miracle Man.

I knew of the Miracle Man from those reprints and knew his miracles were no more than hypnosis.

From that we were supposed to view him as a fraud - although hypnosis seemed as valid a super-power as any to me.

Still, a fraud he was declared to be and a fraud was how we were meant to see him. But here, somehow, by means never really explained, hanging around with Wyatt Wingfoot's tribe had made him all-powerful.

Needless to say, being all-powerful didn't stop him quickly getting his come-uppance again, this time at that hands of those self-same Indians who were now giant ghosts.

The other great thrill for me was the tale was drawn by John Buscema. If someone forced me to name my favourite comic book artist of all time, I'd have to go for Buscema. He might not have been an innovator like Kirby or Adams, or have put in the care and attention of a Barry Smith - and he might have had an alarming tendency to not be able to remember anything at all about any of the comics he'd drawn - but his work was just so easy on the eye that, heretical as it might be, I do enjoy actually enjoy reading his FF and Thor tales more than the Kirby ones.

Anything else about this tale stand out for me?

Not half.

The Human Torch.

His costume was red.

It might not seem important now but, for a kid, that was more than enough to seal the deal.