The Super-Men (and -Women) of All-Planets

[Jim Kelly]

One would expect the 200th issue of WORLD'S FINEST COMICS to feature a Superman and Batman team-up. But not so.

It did come close to that by having the Man of Steel and the Teen Wonder--two-thirds of the World's Finest Trio--and a flashback to Dick's origin story does feature the World's Greatest Detective.



As well, there's a special text page where Superman, Batman and Robin discuss "200 Issues of the World's Finest Comics."



The Caped Crusader made a belated visit to the comic book that used to be his home, two issues late for the party, in WORLD'S FINEST COMICS 202 (May 1971).



This was the issue where Superman retired his robots, on account of pollution. One malfunctioning robot happens to survive the recall, but that's not the source of all the trouble. Malis--the "Tomb-Thing"--is an alien robot that radiates red sun energy. Entombed for eons somewhere in the Middle-East by unknown aliens, when the mechanical mummy is released, it's nearly curtains for the World's Finest Friends.

[Jim Kelly]

Starfire vs. Supergirl

ADVENTURE COMICS 402 (February 1971)--1st story, "Love Conquers All--Even Supergirl" by Sekowsky and Abel
ADVENTURE COMICS 404 (March 1971)--1st story, "Super-Girl?" by Sekowsky and Abel; cover art by Sekowsky and Giordano
ADVENTURE COMICS 405 (April 1971)--"Starfire's Revenge" by Sekowsky and Giordano
ADVENTURE COMICS 406 (May 1971)--"Suspicion" by Sekowsky and Abel; cover art by Sekowsky and Giordano
ADVENTURE COMICS 407 (June 1971)--"Suspicion Confirmed" by Sekowsky and Henry Scarpelli

[Jim Kelly]

The villain called Starfire--she wears a starburst eyepatch over one eye--sends a young man to Stanhope to seduce Supergirl. The young man, Derek Marlowe, must be British because he uses the word "luv" a lot.



A gang of Starfire's confederates beat up Derek on campus to make it look like he's a victim of a mugging, so the Stanhope Sensation will come to his rescue. When she does, Derek kisses her and the Blonde Blockbuster is immediately smitten.



At a picnic rendezvous, the Carnaby cad has spiked her drink with a fast-acting drug. Meanwhile, the Starfire gang stage an armoured car heist to draw the Girl of Steel into action.



As the Daring Dame does so, her powers fail her, and Kara drops to the ground, seemingly dead.

Note: This Starfire isn't the first with that name. There was already a Starfire in TEEN TITANS 18 (November-December 1968), a Soviet super-hero (later renamed Red Star). There would be two more women named Starfire after this one.

Art note: This issue also has Tony DeZuniga's ADVENTURE COMICS debut, inking Sekowsky's Tracey Thompson feature--Tony will later pencil Supergirl.

[Jim Kelly]

After a break for the Giant ADVENTURE COMICS 403 [G-81] (March-April 1971), devoted to the Legion of Super-Heroes, Supergirl returns in issue 404.

It turns out she isn't dead, but when she regains consciousness, she discovers that her powers are on the blink. In the bottle city of Kandor, a group of scientists conduct a series of tests and determine that some foreign substance is causing her powers to come and go. They fit her with a super-powered exo-skeleton she may rely on when her natural powers fail her.



Meanwhile, Derek returns to Starfire for his reward, but she shoots him instead. The villain then gathers an army of female followers, who believe that she is leading a woman's movement to make the world a better place.

They descend on the town of Carvale--which is near Stanhope--for the Mardi Gras parade, to commit a series of robberies.



Reading about the crimes being committed in Carvale, Supergirl tries to stop the costumed crooks but is knocked unconscious. Taken captive and held in Starfire's hide-out, the wicked woman beats up on the Stanhope Sensation in her weakened state.



However, Kara's powers return long enough for her to defeat the gang of women. In the confusion, Starfire and the doctor beat a retreat.

[Jim Kelly]

The fellow who was called the doctor in issue 404 is now called the professor in issue 405. Starfire wants him to develop a stronger formula that will permanently rob Supergirl of her powers.

At the villain's place just outside Paris, Derek's identical twin brother, Rodney, meets with Starfire, who informs him that Supergirl killed his brother. Rodney can't believe the Maid of Steel would commit murder, but Starfire explains that the pill they gave the Blonde Blockbuster turned her into a killer. She sends Derek's twin on a mission to shoot the super-heroine with a more powerful drug, that will make it possible to kill her in revenge for his brother's death.



After Starfire appears on the Paris fashion scene, Linda Danvers reads about her in the papers, as well as the fate of poor Derek Marlowe.

In Paris, the lady with the eyepatch has assembled another gang of women to steal the new fall collection from the salon of Paul de Paris. The Caped Kryptonian arrives too late to stop the women from killing Paul de Paris and stealing his fashions, but she does take Rodney to a safe location where she convinces him that she's not a murderer and then enlists his aid in getting to Starfire's hideout--which is a castle.



When the villain tries to make her escape from Supergirl, she falls into the moat outside the castle. Her powers on the blink, Kara Zor-El is unable to save Starfire, who is presumed dead. However the last panel of the story suggests otherwise.

[Jim Kelly]

406 opens with Linda Lee Danvers graduating from Stanhope College. Supergirl is there to make the commencement address, but the ceremony is disrupted by protestors. As Linda and her parents make an exit from the pandemonium, Nasty Luthor has a "Suspicion" that Linda Lee is in reality the Woman of Tomorrow.





After a graduation dinner with friends and family, Ms. Danvers jets her way to Metropolis.

Note: Distance is hard to judge during this run of comics. Some stories suggest Stanhope is close to Metropolis, but here it's far enough that Linda needs to take a jet to get there.

[Jim Kelly]

Even though she just graduated, Linda Lee is in a great hurry to leave her life as a student and find a job in Metropolis. And yet, she has done nothing before graduation to find a placement and must pound the pavement, searching for employment.

Out of options, she calls Clark Kent from a phone booth--while Nasty spies on her. Kent tells her there's no jobs at Galaxy Broadcasting in Metropolis, but there's a sister station in San Francisco--Station K, SFTV. So she must jet to the other side of the country for that job.





There, both Linda and Nasthalthia are hired by Geoffrey Anderson as field reporters.



When the two novice newswomen are sent to cover a fire, Danvers switches to Supergirl, despite her powers still being on the blink, so she can rescue others. She switches back to Linda (her costume burned in the fire), before Ms. Luthor has a chance to catch her out.

Note: This job set-up and the whole Supergirl storyline seems to just parrot what was going on at the time with Superman in his Amazing New Adventures. The one difference is that Linda has no qualms about pursuing a romantic relationship with her boss, Geoff Anderson.

Art note: Murphy Anderson gave Clark a facelift in a few panels.

[Jim Kelly]

In the following issue, the news crew investigate a theatre that is supposedly haunted and one of their number, Johnny Drew, is abducted by someone who looks like a phantom.

Meanwhile, Supergirl visits the bottle city where her scientist friends hand her a stack of costumes (all designed by readers) which will be invulnerable under a yellow sun. Also in the Kandorian lab is professor doctor (from issues 404 - 405), who developed the pill that caused Kara Zor-El's power failure. He's hard at work on an antidote (never to be heard from again).



Led by their boss Geoff, Nasthalthia and Linda return to the theatre, for another night of ghost hunting and this time it's Lady Luthor who is taken by the phantom. Investigating further, the Adventure Amiga finds the two kidnap victims in a secret tunnel. And the person behind this whole scheme is Starfire, who did not drown in the moat.

The villainess and her macabre partner dunk the Caped Kryptonian in a vat of acid--but her invulnerable costume protects the powerless crimefighter long enough for her to get out of the vat and capture the two evil-doers.



When Starfire and her crony are brought to justice, he turns out to be the owner of the theatre who reported the haunting in the first place.



Note: Linda's three supporting characters for the rest of Supergirl's run in ADVENTURE can be summed up so--Geoffrey Anderson (boss) is in love with Linda (and she maybe with him) and probably knows she's Supergirl; Nasthalthia Luthor (co-worker) suspects Linda is Supergirl but never confirms her suspicions and always wants to hang out with Linda for this reason; Johnny Drew (co-worker) is in love with Linda (and she not so much with him) but never catches on that she's Supergirl.

Art Note: Henry Scarpelli inked Sekowsky in issue 407 and in the next issue, but the bulk of his work for National Periodicals at this time was on their teen humour comics, in the style of Archie Comics. The Archie publisher must have taken note, as in a year he would start work on their Riverdale gang and for a span of four decades.

[Jim Kelly]

Even though the Legion of Super-Heroes got the Giant treatment in ADVENTURE COMICS 403, Supergirl didn't go without a Giant helping in 1971, as she was the featured star of SUPER DC GIANT S-24 (May-June 1971).

That was the issue that reprinted Lex Luthor and Lena Thorul stories, already covered in posts #479 - 483. In addition, the Giant has all new pages of reader designs for Supergirl costumes.







Note: One of the things that fascinates me with the classic National Periodical Publications are the job numbers. When I read these comics back in the day, I was always checking out the job numbers. Every cover, story, letter page and miscellaneous feature had its own job number. These job numbers had a letter and three or four digits (editors who had been working for the publisher a long time started to go into four digits by 1971). The job number for the reader designs in SUPER DC GIANT S-24 is N-233. The letter stands for the editor, but many editors had names with the same initials, so it wasn't always obvious which editor these letters stood for. Since E. Nelson Bridwell was the editor of this Giant (and most Giants), the N stands for Nelson.

Any jobs from editor Mike Sekowsky had an M. For example, the job number for "Suspicion" in ADVENTURE COMICS 406 is M-257 and the cover is M-258. If the jobs were done in numerical order that would mean the story came before the cover. The job number for the letter column in that issue is M-262, suggesting the letter column was done later.

Other editors were identified as follows: B, Murray Boltinoff; D, Dorothy Woolfolk; G, Dick Giordano, later Roy Thomas; J, Joe Orlando; K, Joe Kubert; R, Robert Kanigher; S, Julius Schwartz; W, Mort Weisinger; X, Jack Kirby; Z, Denny O'Neil. C was used for many different editors including Gerry Conway, Paul Levitz, Ross Andru,Len Wein and Al Milgrom. Joe Simon got two letters on his jobs, JS.

[Jim Kelly]

SUPERBOY 176 (July 1971)--1st story, "The Secret of Superboy's Sister" by Dorfman, Brown and Anderson
SUPERBOY 191 (October 1972)--1st story, "The Kid with the Super-Brain" by Dorfman, Brown and Anderson:

The Smallville Samaritan saves little Kathy Warren's life when she and her mother are in a car accident.



While Kathy is unharmed, Mrs. Warren must recover in hospital. Being a girlhood friend of Martha Kent, Lisa Warren entrusts her daughter to the Kents, until Kathy's father can return from South America.

So for the time being, staying in the Kent home, Kathy is like Clark's little sister.

Alerted to an alien satellite orbiting the Earth, the Kid from Krypton retrieves the octopus-like device and takes it apart in his basement lab. However, the device's Space Brain, which has siphoned all the knowledge on Earth, flees upstairs where it blows up in Kathy's face. This leaves the child with a vast storehouse of knowledge, which she puts to use in creating new technology.



Later, two Truhls arrive on Earth in their spacecraft, searching for their brain-drain satellite and discover that Kathy contains the most massive concentration of knowledge on the planet. Superboy has met the Truhls before. They are pirates from a distant galaxy and the Boy of Steel led their captives in revolt against their tyranny.

The super-intelligent child uses her seemingly innocent doll to fire an energy blast that knocks out the Truhls and the Boy of Steel sends them on their way.

[Jim Kelly]

The blast of energy from the doll seems to have erased Kathy's storehouse of knowledge, as she returns to being an ordinary little girl.



Clark meets his little sister again when the Warrens invite him for a two week cruise on their boat. He believes that Kathy has no memory of what happened to her brain. However, when her parents are abducted by treasure-hunters, Kathy reveals to her super-bro that she was just faking her loss of memory. And now that her powers are needed, she isn't holding back.



After freeing Mr. and Mrs. Warren from their captors. Superboy tells them that the rocks they had gathered from the sea are a rare geological find. Actually, Kathy has let her big brother claim that knowledge, when it was actually she who had made the discovery.

[Jim Kelly]

ACTION COMICS 402 (July 1971)--2nd story, "The Feud of the Titans" by Dorfman (as Geoff Browne), Swan and Anderson:



In another Tales of the Fortress feature, the Super-Cousins are bent on destroying one another after being exposed to a hate gas.

The Man of Tomorrow destroys the Woman of Tomorrow's mementos from their Hall of Trophies: "a sword she got for saving the gem planet, Tresor, from space pirates"; "the gold statue from the Amazon world, Feminol." But he can't bring himself to destroy a globe containing a twin-headed bird they both "brought from the planet, Duplor, where life forms mutated and evolved" as conjoined twins.



Once they are free of the hate gas in the Fortress, the Super Duo return to normal.



Note: While these past adventures on other planets haven't exactly been published, they do have elements of previous stories. There have been a few encounters with space pirates (and another one comes up soon); there have been Amazon worlds and there's the planet Feminax; and there hasn't been a planet called Duplor, but there is the Duplor galaxy.

[Jim Kelly]

ADVENTURE COMICS 408 (July 1971)--2nd story, "Invasion of the Mer-Men" [part 1] by Sekowsky and Giordano
ADVENTURE COMICS 409 (August 1971)--1st story, "Invasion of the Mer-Men" [part 2] by Sekowsky and Giordano; 2nd story, "Fight With Fire Drake" by Bridwell, Art Saaf and Giordano; cover art by Dick Giordano:

At the beach in a bikini, Linda Danvers is hanging out with her co-worker, Johnny Drew, when two aliens come walking out of the sea and take Drew hostage. Johnny was just snatched in the previous issue and now again he has to play the same role. The Mer-Men wear green and black outfits that make them look like an offshoot of the Green Lantern Corps.

[Jim Kelly]

While the world's military is put on high alert to fight the alien invasion force, Supergirl visits the scientists in Kandor to be outfitted with a breathing device so she can go underwater to find where the Mer-Men are keeping Johnny.

[Jim Kelly]

In the next issue, the Red and Blue Beauty frees Johnny and defeats the aliens.





As they hoped to save their own planet from dying, when they realize they will be too late, the Mer-Men give up attacking Earth and prepare to head home for the final days of their homeworld.



Note: This story is the last from Mike Sekowsky as editor-writer (he returns as a penciller later on in this Supergirl ADVENTURE run).