Adventure Comics #390. A Supergirl in love.

The good news is I've recently bought a pile of comics to review.

The bad news is most of them are Supergirl comics. So, if you're not fond of Kara Zor-El, the days to come might prove to be grim reading for you.

Fortunately I can't believe anyone could not be a fan of Supergirl. Over the decades, she's given us some of the most bizarre and twisted tales of perversion and weirdness ever inflicted on the human race, and Giant Adventure Comics #390's no exception as our Herculean heroine once more winds her way through the minefields of the land we call Romance. Frankly, I think anyone who's ever been young and in love will be able to empathise with the binds she finds herself in here.

In the issue's first tale, after watching a soppy romance film, Kara decides she must find Superman a wife. Clearly she's under the impression that her all-powerful cousin's incapable of finding one for himself.

After a dream that tells us she thinks his ideal woman is someone to do his cooking and cleaning, she decides Helen of Troy's the perfect fit.

Erm, that'd be the Helen of Troy who's a queen and therefore not too likely to be into cooking and cleaning?

This genius plan fails when, jealous of Supergirl's powers and beauty, Helen banishes Supergirl and Superman from her kingdom.

Showing the block-headed stubbornness that makes us all love her, Supergirl decides to fix Superman up with the grown-up version of the Legion of Super-Heroes' Saturn Girl. This all goes wrong when, after Superman gives Saturn Woman a snogging that threatens to suck her intestines out, it turns out she's already married to Lightning Man who isn't at all pleased to see Superman coming on to his wife. After no doubt pausing to give Saturn Woman her digestive tract back, Superman returns to the present day where he infamously declares that he knows the ideal wife for him.

It's Supergirl!

Sadly, he can't marry Supergirl because Kryptonian law forbids cousins from marrying. Seemingly, judging by the fact it never occurs to him to mention it, Kryptonian law doesn't stop grown men from marrying thirteen year old girls. Bafflingly undisturbed by this revelation, Supergirl scans the universe for a super-heroine who looks just like her but isn't Superman's cousin.

Happily she finds just the girl, in Luma Lynai, who presumably doesn't know about the existence of Supergirl, judging by her showing no signs of being completely repulsed and sickened by the whole back story of how Superman came to seek her out. Clearly she's the ideal woman for Superman because, not only does she ask no questions, but her initials are LL - just like Lois Lane, Lana Lang, Linda Lee, Lori Lemaris, etc, etc, etc.

Sadly, it turns out Luma Lynai can't live on Earth because the rays of Earth's sun have the same effect on her that kryptonite has on Superman.

Finally admitting defeat, Supergirl gives up on the idea and accepts that maybe Superman'll just have to slum it and settle for Lois Lane or Lana Lang, or presumably any other Earth woman whose name begins with LL. Lindsay Lohan, you have been warned.

Next up, Supergirl goes deeper into weird pervert love overdrive as Comet the Super-Horse sets out to win Supergirl's heart. Now, the more observant reader'll have noticed that Super-Horse is a horse. The even more observant reader'll have noticed that Supergirl is a girl. This should've set alarm bells ringing in DC Comics' editorial office.

Needless to say, it didn't.

Visiting a planet where magic reigns supreme, Super-Horse is transformed into a man whenever a comet's in the vicinity. In this guise, he becomes known to Supergirl as Bronco Bill and she's quite the smitten kitten until the comet leaves our solar system and he has to flee in order to turn back into a horse, leaving our heroine none the wiser as to what's been going on. Will our love-struck horse ever get his chance to climb on top of Supergirl like she so often climbs on top of him?

Of course he will. In the very next story he travels back in time and gets the sorceress Circe to turn him permanently into Bronco Bill.

Unfortunately he's mistaken for a dangerous criminal of the type whose first instinct upon seeing a horse is to set it on fire, and, when a posse comes after him, he has to flee and turn back into a horse for his own protection. He then rescues Supergirl from some kryptonite he's accidentally unearthed, leaving Supergirl to yet again wonder if she'll ever see Bronco Bill again.

Next, despite this being touted as a "Romance" issue, we have a tale from Supergirl's early days that has nothing at all to do with romance, when she tries to stop a kid called Dick from revealing to the world that Supergirl exists. She does this in a whole bunch of unlikely ways, involving cliffs, dummies and dumbbells, before convincing him that the flying female he saw was just a robot built by Superman.

Lastly, Supergirl meets her perfect man, a last survivor of Argo City who turns out to be an escaped criminal from the Phantom Zone. He's out for revenge on her, despite never having met her, and she almost falls for it, even getting as far as arranging the wedding.

Happily, her psychic friends, Super-Horse, Jerro the merboy and Saturn Girl, realise there's something up and, between them, they send the villain off to the future where he'll stay in a kryptonite cage until he can be returned to the Phantom Zone. Seemingly, Supergirl's adoptive parents have no problems at all with their schoolgirl daughter marrying a fully grown man. If they do, his knocking twenty years of their ages and giving them a load of jewellery seems to quell those objections.

So there you have it; Helen of Troy, lookalikes, robots, randy horses, merboys and alien super-villains. Just a typical teen love-life. No wonder we all love Supergirl so much. In so many ways, despite her powers, her day-to-day problems are just like those of the rest of us.

Teen Titans #33. The caveman and the Flasher.

First of all I owe an apology to Dr Strange. In my recent review of Super Spider-Man and the Super-Heroes, I declared his story therein to be incomprehensible. Clearly I didn't know what "incomprehensible" was back then because I hadn't yet read Teen Titans #33.

As far as I can make out, Kid Flash and a friend named Mal -  who rather unfortunately keeps calling him "Flasher" - are stuck in some weird medieval land with a wizard who seems to be a bad guy - not to mention a skeletal caveman and a sorceress. At some point Kid Flash has to fire an arrow into a lock, which, by some means unexplained, he manages to do despite being Kid Flash and not Speedy the Robin Hood wannabe. Then again, why's Speedy called Speedy when it's Kid Flash who's the fast one?

Clearly not bothered by such concerns, the bloke who keeps saying, "Flasher" grabs a helmet from a very odd bunch of characters who seem to have appeared from nowhere and, erm, that sort of sorts everything out.

Then the evil wizard starts acting like a good wizard. Then they drink some crystallised water and they're suddenly fighting a real-life caveman who they have to stop without killing, in order to put right whatever it is that's been going wrong. I'm sure this all makes complete sense to anyone who's read the previous issue, but coming to it cold it really is amongst the most disorienting things I've ever read.

Those who've suffered the long dark night times of this blog's soul will of course know this is one of the very first American comics I ever owned and that all I could remember about it was that its last panel featured a caveman bursting out of a van. Happily, thanks to the wonders of eBid, I've now got a copy of it and, sadly, my memory of that ending's turned out to be somewhat inaccurate, as it's a camper van the thing bursts out of and it's not actually at the story's very end.

But from where did this camper van caveman appear?

Having sorted out things in the past, Mal and "Flasher" return to the present, only to discover they've brought the caveman back with them. A man called Mr Jupiter won't let them send him back. He insists they instead keep the caveman in one of the iron cages he just happens to have handy. Personally I'd be a bit on the suspicious side of anyone who just happens to have some cages handy. Still, his ownership of cages aside, the Titans seem to trust him and he otherwise seems a kindly soul.

After christening their captive "Gnarrk", the Titans set about trying to educate and civilise him.

Sadly, the Titans'd make a total a pig's ear of it if not for a girl called Lilith.

I must admit I'm not at all familiar with Lilith but she's some sort of witch-come-psychic and I have to say she's rather nice. Thanks to Lilith, they manage to make some moves towards civilising Gnarrk but then, while on the loose in the city, he spots a local politician committing an act of criminality, meaning Gnarrk's needed in court. Will our heroes be able to turn him into a credible witness in time?

Of course they will. They're heroes. And by the end of the tale Gnarrk isn't only a civilised man but appears to now be Lilith's boyfriend. So, well done to them, well done to her and especially well done to Gnarrk.

I can't deny it. My total confusion over the earlier section aside, I really do like this tale. It's got a wholesome amiability about it that sort of rubs off on you. I even like the fact the Titans have an adult boss. While having an adult boss never did the early years of the X-Men any good, here it works, possibly because the Titans are already long-established as characters in their own right and therefore there's not the same problem of them being seen as mere puppets of their leader.

But there's more. Not only do we get this groovy tale of teens and caveman but, in lieu of a letters section, we get a full page bio of arguably DC's greatest ever cover artist Nick Cardy, revealing his activities in the war years. Judging by the events recounted in that, it looks like we were even luckier to have him around than we thought.

The Fantastic Four. An age in comics.

Reader, can you spot what it is in this issue that
proves one of these characters is clinically
insane? 

Working out the ages of characters in comic books is a fraught business at the best  times. How for instance could Superman have been having adventures as an adult in the 1940s when, ten years later, he was having adventures as Superboy?

Mostly, for the sake of my sanity, I avoid such matters but the issue's been thrown in my face by my recent re-reading of a whole bunch of 1960s' Fantastic Four stories.

It comes down to the events of Fantastic Four #82 which throw a spanner and a half into the strip's already straining chronological cogs.

To work out the ages of the Fantastic Four, I suppose we have to start with Dr Doom. Thanks to his origin story in Fantastic Four Annual #2, we get a good look at his early life and career but the thing that strikes you is that nowhere is there any mention of the Second World War.

This is odd.

We know Reed Richards and Ben Grimm were old enough to be involved in the War because Reed Richards turned up in an issue of Nick Fury and his Howling Commandos. As, according to Doom's origin, everyone in Latveria seems to be called Boris and wears lederhosen, I think we can assume that Latveria's meant to be slap-bang next to Germany where - as we all know from reading any Jack Kirby drawn comic - everyone's called Boris and wears lederhosen. It seems unlikely that people in Latveria therefore could have failed to have noticed a World War going on in their own backyard.

This lack of a mention of the War implies Doom left Latveria and went to America to study before it broke out. This means the youngest he could have been in 1939, when hostilities erupted, was 18.

Now, we also know from that tale that Reed Richards started university on the very same day, as did Ben Grimm, which presumably makes them the same age as Dr Doom. This means that, in 1961 when the Fantastic Four made their debut, Reed Richards and Ben Grimm would've been at least forty. The Human Torch in those early stories is old enough to mess around with cars but not yet attend university, which I assume makes him around 17.

Now, we're led to believe from the start that the Invisible Girl's older than her brother.

But how much older?

In one of the early issues, Reed says that she and he were childhood sweethearts, which suggests they're the same sort of age as each other and therefore she's around forty. This makes her at least 23 years older than her brother.

OK.

It's a bit unlikely but not impossible.

But then Crystal of the Inhumans comes along. As she's his girlfriend and is portrayed as being a bit on the impetuous side, logically she's around the same age as the Human Torch who's now old enough to attend university and so should be 18.

The trouble is, in Fantastic Four issue #81, when she applies to join the FF in place of the pregnant but forty-odd year old Sue Storm, she says, "I'm no younger than Sue herself was -- when your team was first formed!" So, that makes Crystal in her forties and her boyfriend the Torch in his late teens.

The problem is that one issue later we're told Crystal's still a minor. This means that, one, the Human Torch is carrying on with an underage girl and, two, that Sue Storm was a minor when we first met her and her forty year old boyfriend. Not only that it means that when Reed Richards was fifteen, his "childhood sweetheart" was minus ten, making her a figment of his imagination.

Is that what this is all about? Is this like that Russell Crowe movie A Beautiful Mind where it turns out that hardly anyone the hero knows actually exists?

Suddenly it all makes sense. What are the chances that Galactus exists? A fifty-foot tall planet-eating alien who just happens to land on Reed Richards' roof? What are the chances that Reed Richards has been to the moon and met a fifty foot tall alien called the Watcher, shortly after fighting super-powered apes? What are the chances that, in his apartment, Reed Richards has built a gateway to a whole other universe called the Negative Zone?

There's no chance.

Clearly Reed Richards is a man beyond sanity. A man who spends his days on his own in an empty skyscraper, talking to himself, lost in imaginary adventures.

And if not for Fantastic Four #82, we'd never have known about it.

What was Supergirl up to exactly 40 years ago?

As you've no doubt noticed, one of this blog's sensational new features that's sweeping the Internet like a raging wildfire of chat is the one where I post a bunch of covers that tell us what our favourite heroes were up to exactly 40 years ago, and then briefly comment on them.

But those of you with senses as sharp as Eagle-Eye Action Man and minds as grasptastic as his gripping hands'll have noticed it only tends to concern Marvel heroes. No doubt the more astute among you'll have concluded that, like any competent blogger would, I'm going to have a separate set of posts dealing with the DC heroes.

And you'd be wrong.

I'm not competent.

In fact I planned to do the DC heroes alongside the Marvel ones but, looking at the DC covers, I didn't recognise any of them or have the slightest clue what happened in the pages within.

Now, as I've sometimes demonstrated, I'm perfectly happy to review comics I've not read - take my sterling Iron Man recaps in that 40 Years Ago feature - but doing it for seven or eight comics at a time is pushing it even by my standards. Therefore I've chosen the troubadour's approach and bottled it.

The one exception is Supergirl.

I'm not going to claim I've read every Silver and Bronze Age Supergirl story, because Silver Age Supergirl stories are like that thing you do as kids where you challenge yourself to come up with the largest number you can imagine. No matter what number you produce, you can always think of a bigger one. And so it is with Silver Age Supergirl. No matter how many stories you've read, there always seem to be more that you haven't. I happen to know from a scientist - the kind who knows that Gamma Rays turn you green - that the infinite number of Silver Age Supergirl stories means they form a body of work so huge that their mass threatens to suck the universe itself into them.

However, I have read several million Supergirl stories from that time frame and therefore at least recognise most of the covers.

And that means I can launch my latest feature: What was Supergirl up to exactly 40 years ago?

As if to prove the point, I have indeed read the above Adventure Comics #401 from January 1971, but I can't actually remember anything about it. Clearly there're bad people trying to turn Supergirl into a scaredy cat but that's all I could say. There's a man who might be Lex Luthor and a woman who might be her arch-pest of the era Nasty; Lex Luthor's niece. In the absence of either knowledge or wisdom, I will however say it clearly features one of Supergirl's many costumes of that time - the one first introduced in Adventure Comics #398 - and that I like her boots, although the gloves scream of sexual repression and an unhealthy fear of human contact.

As for the story, I'm feeling there's a 98% chance that Supergirl loses her powers at some point and a 95% chance she fakes being scared in order to turn the tables on the villains. There's also a 10% percent chance Superman shows up at the end, to say something like, "I saw with my super-vision that you were in danger but decided to let them kill you to teach you a valuable lesson in life. In fact, so keen was I to see you taught a valuable lesson in life, I was tempted to kill you myself."

If this has happened, there's a 60% chance that Supergirl responds with, "Please don't banish me to another planet," and a 95% probability that Superman says, "Banish you? Why, you silly little fool, I think you're wonderful. If it weren't a criminal offence, I'd marry you. By the way, have you met my new Supergirl robot? She's just like you."

Supergirl would then say, "I know. It's not a robot. It was me all along, pretending to be a robot because I know a robot Supergirl is the perfect wife for you." I honestly think I should be paid to write Supergirl stories. I like to think I have it down pat. I also think I got it off Pat, but Pat doesn't like to talk about it.

Fantastic Four #64. A Sentry not out.

Sometimes in life, unlikely strands combine to focus our minds on a single matter. With me, a combination of reviewing The Avengers' Kree/Skrull War and reading of the not-that-recent-death of Zecharia Sitchin has brought me to the front doorstep of The Fantastic Four #64.

For those not in the know, Zecharia Sitchin was in the Erich Von Daniken envelope of claiming the Earth had been visited in the dim and distant past by aliens who'd then interfered in its development, a theory that formed the bedrock of the whole Kree/Skrull epic and that, in Marvel Comics terms, was first laid down in this very issue.

Now, you or I, when we need to get away from it all, resort to the nearest travel firm but the Fantastic Four rely on a much more reliable source of a good holiday. They get the Thing to throw a dart at a map of the world. Despite the dart clearly landing in the North Pacific, they decide it's landed on an island in the South Pacific and determine to go there for their holiday. Never mind that the Thing's "choice" is uninhabited, has no hotels, no people, no amenities and seems to be only a hundred yards wide, this is the Fantastic Four and clearly all common sense was destroyed when they got zapped by those Cosmic Rays.

Sadly for them, they're not the first to visit the place. An archaeologist's beaten them to it and he and his lackey have just been captured by the Kree's Sentry 459, guardian of the ancient alien base that lurks beneath the island. Awakened from his slumbers, by the duo's intrusion, he sets up a force field to keep everyone else out, just as the Fantastic Four arrive. Needless to say this leads to a fight, one that only ends when the Human Torch shows up and accidentally blows the island up, leaving the FF to flee with the archaeologist and his flunky, as the Sentry stays behind to perish with the base.

Although the writing's credited to Stan Lee, the story feels like 100% Jack Kirby, especially as he regurgitated an awful lot of the ideas behind it for his 1970s' Eternals strip. Even the deriving of the name "the Kree" from the Krel in the classic Leslie Nielsen movie, Forbidden Planet - as seems to be the case - feels like pure Jack Kirby.

One of the things that strikes you, reading this tale, is how mysterious and alien the unseen Kree seem, in comparison to the distinctly human-like race we know later. To a large degree it's a shame their sense of alienness wasn't maintained in future appearances.

For me, The Fantastic Four at this time found Jack Kirby at his peak as an artist, due in no small part to Joe Sinnott's bold and unambiguous inking. And if this issue's characterisation of its women is less than dynamic, at least it makes up for it with the vigour and intrigue of its central tale. Such is the pulse-pounding power of this outing that it's hard to believe that the start of Jack Kirby's decline on the strip was just four issues away. But, as Johnny Morris used to say on Tales From the Riverbank, that's a story for another day.

Peter Parker and Gwen Stacy. New Spider-Man movie photos.

News has reached the Steve Does Comics throne room that on-set shots from the new Spider-Man movie can be found here. Personally I'm pleased they decided to reboot the franchise. Ted Raimi's first two Spider-Mans are my favourite super-hero films of all time but, for me, Peter Parker should always be a teenager and therefore they can't stick with the same cast members forever.

Big hair aside, Andrew Garfield looks much more like Peter Parker to me than Tobey Maguire ever did but I do have to admit that, as far as Emma Stone goes, that's not really how I see Gwen Stacy. Isn't Captain Stacy's favourite daughter supposed to have eyes?

Still, she's got the Gwen Stacy boots on and, as my more long-suffering regular readers will know, for me, when it comes to comic book characters, it's all about the boots. Sadly, it would appear there's no place in the movie for Mary Jane Watson.

Supposedly the villain's going to be The Lizard. This is good news. This site has and will always have a large place in its heart for The Kangaroo but, in that heart, Doctor Curt Connors' evil alter-ego will always rule supreme.

But will the herpetological heel be defeated by talcum powder as he once was in the original comics?

Only time - and the insanity of the scriptwriters - will tell.

Iron Man mystery. Name that Comic.

I have this strange thing that, for some reason, the comics I remember most clearly from my youth are the ones I got in 1974 and 1975. As I didn't start collecting comics till late 1973, the ones I got before then are coloured in varying shades of vague, while the ones I acquired after 1975 get progressively fuzzier in my memory the further away their purchase gets from that date. This is why I need your help.

In 1981 I had a copy of Iron Man. I can remember nothing whatsoever about it except that the final panels involved Tony Stark kissing what I assume to have been his girlfriend who was wearing a white short-sleeved shirt under a black waistcoat, and also a pair of the obligatorily spray-on jeans. She had her back to us as she kissed him. I've looked on the Grand Comics Database but don't recognise it from the covers on there.

So, if you have the slightest clue what issue this was, I'd be delighted to find out. Even though I got it in 1981, I can't guarantee it was published in that year, as these things could sometimes show up in the shops a couple of years after publication.