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“nice blog”

thank you im really good at clicking reblog

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Supergirl '60: Sometimes You Can Have Nice Things

I had to take some time off from this weird comic blog thingy due to some personal stress. It's fortunate that the next few comics on my to-do list are some genuinely sweet comics about Supergirl, who is one of my favorite characters. Welcome to the gutters!

Yes, sometimes, comics are about people you like having a nice time, and then you read them and go "oh, that's nice. Good for them!" As much as I rib on these comics for their storytelling choices, a lot of the appeal of Superman comics of this era is a sense of honest, good-hearted fun. These aren't life-or-death struggles, they're just characters who enjoy each other's company having a good time.

The Supergirl story from Action Comics #267 is the first encounter between Supergirl and the Legion of Super-Heroes. Like they did with Superboy back when they first appeared, they play a few games with her beforehand, performing a few clandestine feats out of costume and hinting that they know her secret identity.

After a little fun, the Legionnaires reveal themselves as being Cosmic Boy, Saturn Girl, and Lightning Lad, the three founders of the Legion of Super-Heroes. In the original published version of the story, they identify themselves as the children of the original founders, using Marty McFly logic, but later reprints would change that part of the story. It's an interesting bit of story because they don't retcon it away, they just pretend it never happened.

The Legion invite Supergirl to visit the future with them and see all the wonders of the 30th century. It's meant to be a fully automated utopia where labor is obsolete, but judging by their ice cream technology, our standards of living have taken a nosedive. Only nine flavors in the year 2960? Baskin-Robbins had more than that in 1949! I mean, okay, they're space flavors, and I am interested to see how they gave ice cream the flavor of a planet hot enough to melt lead, but still.

Supergirl and the audience are introduced to Chameleon Boy, Colossal Boy, and Invisible Kid, three long-time members of the team. The Legion is still very functionalist, with the characters not having much development beyond their unique abilities. In fact, they don't even do anything in this story besides show off their abilities once each. I'm reasonably sure that Colossal Boy is the first superhero with the power to embiggen himself, which would be interesting if he actually did anything with it.

Supergirl passes her super-initiation test by digging a tunnel through the earth, but gets rejected because a lump of Red Kryptonite causes her to age into an adult. That is barely a disqualifying factor for Jury Duty let alone a team of superheroes. Then again, they are kids, and nothing's more sacred than "no adults in the secret club."

I haven't mentioned Red Kryptonite before, because it's the kind of comic book element I dislike. Each lump of Red Kryptonite has a different effect on Kryptonians that are exposed to it. The effects could be anything from shrinking to uncontrolled hair growth to turning into an ant-man. Each effect is temporary and each lump only works once. I'm not fond of it because it's such a naked plot device with no internal logic or consistency. I think Smallville did it best by giving it a standard effect of lowering a Kryptonian's inhibitions, but its more common form has been left in the Silver Age where it belongs.

Nevertheless, Supergirl would go on to join the Legion, in a much better story.

Action Comics #270 gives us the story "Supergirl's Busiest Day," which is exactly what it says on the tin. She does everything a supergirl could possibly get up to. This comic shows Supergirl's impulsive side and her yearning for adventure. Superman was already settling into his persona as Clark Kent, a man with the personality of a display mannequin, but Supergirl was young and vital and wanted to be out saving the world and having adventures.

This day, while Superman is off on a space adventure, Supergirl is responsible for the safety of the earth and all her friends. And my god, her friends just cannot stay saved. Krypto goes off on a walkabout in space and gets trapped by an alien dog catcher. Atlantis is under attack by an evil merman with a magic trident. Batman and Robin have a cave-in and are slowly running out of oxygen. Supergirl has to handle all of that while keeping her existence a secret, and by the end even she's getting exhausted.

Once Supergirl comes back to Earth, he calls Supergirl to the Fortress of Solitude, and the poor girl is worried that after all her hard work she's going to get super-grounded. But nope, it turns out that everyone in the comic was taking part in a big show to give her a day of adventure, and why? Because it's her birthday! Everyone gets together to have a big party with a statue and super-gifts and a cake the size of a small car.

This is the kind of twist that these comics use, like, every other issue or so. The protagonist goes through a series of bizarre events, and it's revealed that it was just a big hoax set up by somebody - usually Superman - without their knowledge. Sometimes and it's all a big laugh at their expense, or some kind of patronizing attempt to keep them out of the loop, or a complicated rigamarole to avoid a ten-minute conversation. This story works for me because it's a twist on the twist. They're not trying to prank Supergirl or hide important information from her, they're going to great lengths to make her feel celebrated. It's still an improbable amount of effort and a flimsy excuse for a narrative payoff, but it leaves a better taste in my mouth so I'm willing to cut it some slack for that.

Until next time!

[sarksarkos]

Bryan Lee O'Malley remarking that he had Scott explicitly spell out that his relationship with Knives was inappropriate in Scott Pilgrim Takes Off because he feels like a lot of the comic's readers maybe didn't pick up on that is very funny not only because how do you not, but also because the original Scott Pilgrim comics are some of the most didactic media I've ever read outside of, like, medieval Christian allegories about the wages of sin. It's just constantly explaining to the reader exactly why Scott is a bad person, sometimes with little annotated diagrams. Genuinely, what's it gonna take for the twentysomething male audience not to idolise a loser?

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Estrogenium Dobonhonkerus could have saved her.

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It’s crazy how low self-worth fucks with peoples lives

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- Johannes Kepler, 1601

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Supergirl '60: Vaccines work. This isn't a joke title. They work. Get vaccinated.

This is Action Comics #262, showing Supergirl absolutely stunting on her cousin. How did she get this way? Vaccination. You love to see it. Welcome to the gutters!

So I hear you asking, "Didn't we already talk about Supergirl?" Wrongo-bongo, we were talking about Supergirl specifically in the context of Superboy. Now we're seeing Supergirl as her own protagonist. Totally different things. All Supergirl all the Supertime.

One thing I like about these Supergirl stories is that she's not presented as inherently weaker because she's a girl, and she's not presented as Superman but a girl. She's impulsive and inexperienced and chafing against her restrictions in society, and that can lead her into situations, but she's every bit as capable of saving the day as Superman. She also has her own interests, including Kryptonian science, something that Superman doesn't seem to focus on.

A throughline of the comics that we're going to be looking at this time is Supergirl trying to create a cure or a treatment for Kryptonite. In Action Comics #261, Supergirl finds a small chunk of Kryptonite and begins experimenting on it in the chemical laboratory in her Orphanage. ...gonna move past the question of how come that's a thing that exists. She experiments on the Kryptonite but is seemingly incapable of removing its harmful properties.

After just tossing the radioactive rock into the woods, Supergirl as Linda Lee interacts with the Feline Distribution System and acquires a new cat. The cat has a white streak down both sides of his body, so Linda calls him "Streaky." However, Streaky is still orange, and so he decides it would be a fun idea to eat a radioactive space rock. Luckily, this rock gives him superpowers instead of cancer, and he becomes Streaky, the Super-Cat!

Supergirl has accidentally created "X-Kryptonite," a form of Kryptonite that's capable of temporarily empowering humans and animals with kryptonian superpowers. This is an incredible discovery, and not something that Lex Luthor ever managed. I know that Streaky is a recurring figure, and X-Kryptonite shows up a few times in the Silver Age, but I'm not sure if Supergirl ever figures out what she did here. Either way, I feel like she deserves recognition for her discovery.

In Action Comics #262, Supergirl gets the idea to inoculate herself against Kryptonite. She openly calls out the polio vaccine, a thing that, at the time, was actually somewhat unpopular because of an improperly prepared batch that caused 260 children to contract polio. So, you know, history does repeat. At the time, an oral treatment was being tested in the Soviet Union, which would later become the standard. Having Supergirl support the polio vaccine was probably a controversial move at the time, and I feel like this would be lost on modern audiences, and it's absolutely great to see somebody wearing the S to take an unpopular stand for the greater good. This has nothing to do with the comic, but like, I live in America, our government is trying to make it harder and harder to get vaccines, if I can just take a moment to talk about how important they are, and how we've been here before and we got back, I am going to take it. All of this is going in the final draft. No editors, we die like men. Having been vaccinated against editors.

Anyway. There's some rigamarole with Superman's alien zoo, which seems like filler but I have to include it because it will be important later. Superman tells Supergirl that he's tried to inoculate himself before and it hasn't worked, but Supergirl counters with the idea that she's younger, her body isn't used to kryptonite radiation, so it might work better on her. She flies off to find one of the 17 million lumps of kryptonite on Earth at any given time.

Supergirl rolls the kryptonite into a handy cave, and starts setting up a makeshift dosing setup. She starts trying to approach the Kryptonite, and marks off when she starts feeing the effects of the radiation. Each day she comes back and she manages to get a little closer. This is genuinely a pretty good setup. She's able to safely control her exposure to the kryptonite and measure her progress objectively. I think this and the previous issue are making a clear case of Supergirl as having a clever scientific mindset. Unfortunately, she made one of the classic blunders and forgot to include a control group.

When Superman is trapped by another massive lump of kryptonite just lying around, Supergirl rushes out to rescue him. Unfortunately, when she gets near her cousin, she too succumbs to the kryptonite and collapses. Working together, Superman and Supergirl melt a convenient deposit of gold onto the green K, and somehow their heat vision transmutes the gold into lead. You know what, by comic book standards, this is almost good science.

When they get back to Supergirl's experiment cave, Superman reveals that the lump of kryptonite she was using for her tests was being eaten from within by one of Superman's goofy alien zoo animals. Her tests were faulty from the get-go! I mean, it's a type of radiation, you can't even inoculate against that... So... wait, is this saying that vaccines don't work? Is that... oh god did I fall into the trap? Oh fuck me, comics are bad again. I'm not good at my job! End the blog, end the blog!

Until next time!

[sarksarkos]

You can gaslight folks in your story too!

When Spock's death in Star Trek II was leaked, the filmmakers put in a fakeout death scene in the intro and moved his actual death from the middle of the movie to the end.

You don't need to change what happens if you can change when or how it happens.

“oh no, my audience has begun to guess the big twists of my story and are accurately predicting what will happen!”

incorrect response: write the rest of the story to be as twisty, shocking and counter to expectations as possible, regardless of whether this is a logical or satisfying way for the plot to go

correct response:

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Andrew Hussie in 2012: "It'd be silly and weird if the fall of human civilization was caused by a coalition of boorish pop cultural figures who took over through the sheer power of their anti-charisma and the utter disbelief that such a thing was even possible."

Apollo, Lord of Light:

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This should have been every Yakuza game from 3 onward.

Dude was running an Orphanage, he was a professional Dad!

After an anon mentioned it here i realized there's no reason not to post it so might as well

I call it "kiryu if he was awesome"

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Never forget

if you make that female character less goth as a sign of her ~healing~ or ~improving her life~ I will kill you

make her MORE gloriously dark and over-the-top. she's growing into herself. she's getting comfortable being who she wants to be. do you see the vision. I am crying and throwing things

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The inability of a certain subset of blockheaded fans to notice Kris's gender is so. This is a game which places a nonbinary protagonist in a narrative that has them struggling explicitly with how much control they are allowed to have over their own life, whose best friends are a girl who is gleefully unfeminine and a boy who has no idea who he's supposed to be but sure seems to like being pretty, after the first few seconds of the game consisted of us trying to create our own form and then being told point blank "no one can choose who they in this world," where the above three children are all being railroaded into and struggling to escape their roles in a religiously per-ordained questline that we know ends very badly for them. If you think gender is not being employed here in a way that is specific, intentional, and thematically relevant then you are not serious

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does anyone wanna hold hands until we feel a little braver

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Superboy '60: Somebody SAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAVE Me~

This is Adventure Comics #271, which tells the story of the first meeting between Superboy and Lex Luthor. That's right, super-fans, we're going into the Smallville zone! Welcome to the Gutters!

Lex Luthor, Superman's unquestioned archnemesis, has had an odd relationship with his super-foe. Briefly, he goes back and forth between Superman's life-long Frenemy and a constant foe ever since his days back in Smallville, and a man with no personal connection to the Man of Steel. Every time DC reboots their universe, it seems to flip from one to the other.

In the Golden Age, Luthor was just some guy who wanted to rule the world. In the Silver Age, he a mad scientist who was as much a part of Superman's life as his own family. Post-Crisis, he was a billionaire industrialist opposed to Superman as much for philosophical reasons as personal. In his current incarnation, he's kind of an amalgamation, retaining his Smallville origins while still being a billionaire supergenius.

Different adaptations have played with this relationship. The Christopher Reeve movies removed his past with Superman, making him more similar to the Golden Age Luthor. The DCAU mostly followed the Post-Crisis Status Quo. The DCEU just did whatever the fuck. Meanwhile, Smallville took the idea that Clark Kent and Luthor had a past relationship and ran a whole marathon with it. That whole relationship started here.

We start when Lex Luthor, slender, optimistic, and with a full head of hair, moves to Smallville and happens to save Superboy from a Kryptonite meteor. Luthor shows Superboy his collection of Super-memorabilia, and Superboy, who is not the least bit creeped out, decides to show his appreciation by building Luthor a state-of-the-art lab to pursue his love of science.

I want to give special attention to the character art here, which somehow manages to capture the appearance of Luthor without relying on any of his traditional distinctive features or expressions. This is also the first time we learn that Luthor's first name is "Lex." This came after Superman already had three girlfriends and one cousin he likes to make out with with the initials "L L," so I can only assume that the creators were deliberately feeding the shippers.

Lex Luthor is so grateful to Superboy that the first thing he does with his lab is create an antidote for Kryptonite poisoning. Unfortunately, an accident causes a chemical fire that spreads through his lab and threatens to kill him. Superboy blows out the fire, but he accidentally destroys the antidote, wrecks Luthor's life's work, and the fumes cause Lex's hair to fall out.

This right here is classic Lex. Superboy probably was a bit reckless taking care of the fire, but Lex was the one who started the dang thing, if he's not willing to take care of his own lab safety then he's got to be willing to pay the price. On a personal level, Lex has always admired Superboy, despite his own pride in his scientific acumen. With this, his admiration has become jealousy, and his pride is making him project that jealousy onto Superboy. He can't have failed. He's Lex Luthor, the smartest man the world has ever seen! It must have been Superboy setting him up to fail, because he, with all his alien power, is jealous of the genius of a human! He's not owned! Lex Luthor is not owned!

Comics of this time period aren't really character-based stories, but this is some really nice work. I think it was a brilliant move to have Lex's baldness be something that always reminds him of Superboy "ruining" his life. It's a very silly origin story, but I like how modern works like Smallville recontextualize this episode. This would have been a fitting end to the first chapter in the book of Lex.

Unfortunately, this comes at the middle of the story, and there's another six or seven pages of Lex making science experiments that go wrong and getting pissy when Superboy has to clean up his messes. So let's switch to the other great man-love of Superman's life.

The story has Superboy able to just casually see the future with some kind of time-view-o-scope, and as such he already knows that as an adult, he's going to be best super friends forever with Batman, AKA Bruce Wayne. The next day, it turns out that one Bruce Thomas Matches Adam Michael Kevin Val George Benjamin Robert MARTHA Wayne has moved to Smallville! For some reason, he's a high school student but his parents are somehow still alive? I don't think there's any way to reconcile that.

When a goddamn tank man with guns for nipples decides to rob a bank in a town with less than 5000 people, Bruce Wayne immediately suits up as Cultural Appropriation Man, dressing up in a priceless Native American artifact and just knocking the dang thing over with the strength of a regular teenage person. And he immediately lets Lana in on his secret identity, because this Bruce Wayne hasn't learned about OPSEC yet.

Superboy and Flying Fox quickly wind up working on the same crime, and they immediately start trying to sus out each other's identity. Superman already knows who Batman's gonna be in the future and he has X-Ray vision, so that's a little bit of a cheat. Meanwhile, Bruce Wayne has to come up with a plan to record Superboy's voice and compare his voice patterns with the other people in Smallville.

The actual like, plot of this issue is some bizarre scheme about some criminals stealing a giant Kryptonite meteor and Superman and them building a giant crook Mount Rushmore out of wax instead of like, tracking down the guys who done did the crime. At the end, Bruce Wayne reveals that he's discovered Superboy's secret identity, and Clark reveals that he already knew because of that big future television thingy. Bruce agrees to be hypnotized to forget about this whole thing, but, crucially, Superboy still knows what's going to happen. He can just look at the time viewer at any time. This isn't a one-off thing, it's an established part of the Superman mythology! Even All-Star Superman kept that thing off the page for the most part.

I've talked about the problems of Superman being omniscent before, I don't wanna re-litigate that. I think this is a fun story, and I like the idea of Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne being friends as kids and helping each other along their destiny. But the characters absolutely should not have come into this with any kind of foreknowledge about their relationship. Dramatic Irony exists for this exact reason, it came free with the concept of storytelling. I know that these were made for kids, but a lot of the time they just feel like they're talking down to their audience, unwilling to let them figure things out for themselves. It makes for an extremely frustrating read as an adult.

Honestly, I did read a lot of these comics when I was a kid, my library had some collections of old Superman and Superboy stories. I really enjoyed them at the time. If I feel any kind of frustration with these, I guess it comes from a place of nostalgia, of frustration that they don't hold up to the feelings I had in my memory.

I don't exactly know what to do with those feelings. I guess that's what this blog is for. Until next time.

[sarksarkos]

The Phantom of the Opera is a guy in a mask who pretends to be a supernatural creature to harass his opera house into giving him ransom money, causing disasters when they don’t pay him.

Clearly, they should have hired these guys to stop him:

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...and then there was the time Elvis beat the shit out of Thor