JLA: Act of God was a surprisingly good read that told a story about how the DC Earth would react if suddenly all the super-powers suddenly stopped working. A black light overtook the world for a moment on May 23rd (which is how we get our number for Earth-523) which briefly shut off all electronics and more permanently stripped all the heroes and villains and anyone else with any sort of super-human powers. The story by Doug Moench explores some facinating scenarios and touches on how many of the Earth’s heroes would react in such a situation. We get to follow heroes that are taking the change poorly, heroes that never had powers stepping up to lead the next era of heroes, and we see a group of heroes that formerly had powers train and become a new heroic team called the Phoenix Group.
The Phoenix Group consists of former heroes; Arthur Curry, J’onn J’onzz, Wally West, and Linda Danvers. The Linda Danvers as we all know is Supergirl, and in this story she is specifically the Fallen Angel, merged with the Matrix Supergirl. Of course, during the black light event she lost all her super-powers. Linda still wanted to help save lives and initially took after her dad and started a career as a police officer. Still feeling unfulfilled, she instead goes to Batman, along with the other former heroes mentioned above, to train how to be a super hero without powers. This new team debuts to save Rex Mason, Ted Kord, and Mike Carter who had been captured by a group of super-villains. Their heroic debut is a rousing success and promised a great future for the world with new heroes like Red Devil (Wally West), The Green Man (J’onn J’onnz), The Hand (Arthur Curry), and Justice (Linda Danvers).
As with all my Supergirl in the Multiverse posts, this is my own artwork. Justice is crashing through a skylight with glass all around. The night sky is seen through the skylight and Justice’s right boot is coming toward the viewer. The Phoenix Group logo is in the top right corner with a 523 on it.
We’re travelling back decades to the 60s for this month’s entry in Supergirl Surprise. From 1969, we have Adventure Comics #388 with 2 stories featuring the maid of might; “The Kindergarten Criminal!” and “The Romance Machine!”. This is fairly early in Supergirl’s solo magazine so we’re still firmly in the Stanhope College era of her life, although the first story could very easily be part of any part of her early super-heroic career. This first story, by Leo Dorfman (writer), Win Mortimer (penciller), Jack Abel (inker), and Milt Snapinn (letterer) is a continuation from the previous issue (#387) featuring Lena Thorul’s son Val Colby working with the villain Lex Luthor (secretly Lena’s brother).
We open this issue with Supergirl talking with Lena and she has an ESP vision that her son is on a question mark shaped island. If you have no idea who Lena Thorul is or what her ESP powers are, check out my post on her here. This odd shaped island is of course where Luthor’s current hideout lies and it is where Lex has been training his nephew to hone his own psychic powers to commit crimes.
There’s a weird bit here where Lex has the thought that since Supergirl has such great powers but is vulnerable to Kryptonite, Val too would be susceptible to the mineral. I don’t understand Lex’s reasoning here, surely he knows Kryptonians are weak to Kryptonite and that it’s harmless to everyone else. It just feels like an unnecessary plot point to have Lex show off his Kryptonite safe that doesn’t make any sense. This is where we are first shown Lex’s safe full of synthetic Kryptonite blocks which Val quickly takes a liking to and uses them as toys.
Supergirl has flown over to the island by this point and hasn’t noticed anything suspicious – that is because Lex’s layer is lead lined and unable to be seen with x-ray vision. Luck is somehow on Supergirl’s side however, since this is when Val decides to bring his blocks out to play with them. The exposure to Kryptonite brings Supergirl crashing down to the island and she quickly comes up with a cover story as Linda Danvers a castaway stranded on this isolated island. Val immediately takes a liking to Linda and this allows Linda to stay on the island and investigate.
Linda and Val continue to get along and one day when Lex is away Linda heads into the secret lair and convinces Val to use an Imago-Helmet to imagine monstrous beasts that start trashing the secret lair. Lex comes back to Val and a dozen beasts and is thankful for Supergirl who coincidentally comes to his aide. Lex agrees to get taken to prison if she saves him. Once back to safety, Lex of course refuses to go with Supergirl and states that he’s in international waters and thus the laws don’t affect him.
Supergirl solves this by pushing the whole ass island back into jurisdiction and the coast guard soon comes to take him away. In his final act, Lex tells Val he’s not really his uncle to help protect both Val and his sister, Lena. Supergirl thinks of this as Lex’s “one decent act in a lifetime of crime!” while flying away with Val. Also it seems this adventure burnt out Val’s powers which is rather convenient.
We then hop into Cary Bates story “The Romance Machine!” with art by Kurt Schaffenberger and letters by Joe Letterese. This story has Stanhope as a set, a romantic partner for Linda, and Brainiac, what more can you ask for? Brainiac is tired of always losing to Superman so he decides to instead target the girl of steel thinking she’ll be an easier foil. His plan involves picking up a handsome alien felon named Kimbor and using him and lifelike android duplicate to fall in love with Supergirl.
Kimor is discarded by Brainiac after he’s gotten all he needs from him – his chick magnet personality – and dumps him on a “barbaric planet”. The robotic version of Kimor, Kim-puter, is now tasked to go to earth and work his way into Stanhope College. Kim-puter takes on the name Kim O’Ryan and easily gets enrolled into the college and finds his way to the Supergirl Fanclub. Linda has just recently been appointed temporary head of the club and meets Kim who wants to learn all he can about Supergirl.
Kim soon cuts to the chase and asks Linda out on a date which to everyone’s surprise (even Linda) she readily agrees to the date. While Kim was a real catch when asking Linda on a date, once she gets to the date she realizes just how bad Kim actually is. Kim stiffs the bill on their dinner making Linda pay, uses her as a human shield so a puddle wouldn’t splash him, and then when Linda approaches Kim as Supergirl he refuses to date her! The issue ends there with a promise for more answers to come in the next issue.
When I was reading through the whole of Supergirl’s Adventure run I noticed this structuring a lot. Most of the stories would be the standard 24 page tale, but would be split between 2 issues with the B story in one issue being finished as the A story in the next issue. It’s an interesting practice and it’s why we got a part 2 in the front half of the issue and a part 1 in the back half. It seems like an easy way to generate cliffhangers without having to write stories that last more than 24 pages, but I think I would rather have 2 standalone stories or one continuing narrative and one standalone backup story, but the book came out nearly 60 years ago so maybe it was just the style at the time.
My copy of this issue is rather banged up with various rips in the cover (and one of my cats stepped on it as I was writing this up), but in addition to that we also get a couple pages where the book’s previous owner wrote their name in pink pen on a couple pages. Kevin Zarempa, if you ever wondered what happened to your old Supergirl comic, it ended up in my collection. There weren’t any particularly notable ads from what I saw, but the letters page (Super Fe-Mail) there were a few interesting ones. A lot of these letters were people fact checking small details of an earlier issue, but the letter from Renata Riveras was particularly interesting. The letter writer mentions Wonder Girl recently getting a new costume and thinks Supergirl should follow suit. The editor comes back and mentions that fans should send in their new Supergirl costume ideas and that DC will use their favorite for Supergirl’s new look. This will of course result in Supergirl’s various new costumes in the next few years of her comic and the iconic cover to Adventure Comics #397. I do like that the editor mentions a couple specifics about what they’d like for Supergirl’s costume to maintain, notably the blue color and the signature S symbol.
Against all odds, the tie-in comic for the Imaginext toy line has an official universe designation of Earth-508. Named as such for the month the comic series started (May 2008). I always try my hardest to be as thorough in my research as possible, but as hard as I tried I could only get my hands on 3 issues of the 29 issue run to read but it did seem to give me a pretty good vibe of the series. The series follows the Super Friends of Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, Green Lantern, and the Flash as they get up to do-gooding in a way that appeals primarily to younger audiences. This comic series is based on the Imaginext line of toys that has been partnering with DC Comics since around 2008 when the comic started and continues to put out figures and play sets to this day.
Supergirl herself doesn’t appear in any of the main comic series, but she does appear in at least one of the children’s books and she has a few figures that were released. Instead of leaning into the comics, I instead focused more on the toy line here. Not only did I base the Supergirl figure off the Imaginext toy, I also looked at the Imaginext Fortress of Solitude playset. This Fortress playset is interesting, it seems to be based on the scene in Superman 2 when Superman tricks Zod into loosing his powers with the containment chamber shown. This may be somewhat speculation on my part but it does seem likely. The odd part of the set however is the visual look of it, it seems like the colors have some influence from the Snyderverse movies but the shape and abstract shapes almost feels like how Argo was depicted in the Supergirl (1984) movie.
As with all my Supergirl in the Multiverse posts, this is my own artwork. The Fortress of Solitude (based on the Imaginext playset) is shown with Supergirl (based on the Imaginext toy) is flying in the foreground. There is a S symbol in the top right with a 508 on top of it.
For long time fans you may have seen my previous posts exploring my Supergirl merch collection that I’ve shown off in 2 looks at my Supergirl trading cards (Part 1 and Part 2) and one where I explored my Supergirl figures. I had initially planned on waiting until the end of the year to show off an updated look at my collection and make it an annual tradition. That was until I was looking at my collection and realized just how much new stuff I’ve added recently. It has been a rather good year for Supergirl merch with the movie coming out, however I’ve also gotten my hands on some older items as well bought second hand. From what I can figure I’ve got about a dozen new figures and a handful of new cards to cover as well as a few other items that I keep on my Supergirl shelf that I haven’t covered before so stick around. The image above is the current line up of my Supergirl shelf and if you see anything that I don’t cover here definitely check out my earlier posts.
I’ll start with the most recent additions to my collection that really pushed me over the edge to bump this post up to October instead of December. I had some friends that went to a convention a couple weeks ago and they kept me posted on anything I might enjoy and graciously picked them up for me. The big get for me was the newly released Supergirl Super Powers figure. I do not actively collect the Super Powers figures and this is only my second in the line (I also have a Nightwing Super Powers) but when the Supergirl toy was announced I knew I wanted to get it. Unfortunately it was only released as a 6 pack with 5 other characters I didn’t care about so I didn’t pre-order it. I am happy to have finally gotten it though (and for a not unreasonable price). The Supergirl wave also included a Power Girl figure that I may try to track down at some point, and there’s a second Nightwing figure I’d also like to get but looking at the whole line, that’s about all I would care about.
The other addition from that convention was a Supergirl LEGO Minifigure. This is not an official LEGO product and I generally stay away from bootleg LEGO products on personal principle but this figure based on her look in the Supergirl (2026) movie looked pretty good and seemed like a good addition to the rest of my movie related merch. This particular custom was made by Awesome Minis (Here’s their Facebook page) and they seem to do some pretty good work so definitely check them out. Also they threw in a Krypto figure as well so that was nice of them.
Along with the custom minifigure, I got a few other items specific to the movie including these 2 figures from McFarlane. McFarlane did a full line of toys based on the film but these 2 figures were the only ones I was particularly into. I think the line had a total of 3 Supergirl figures, one standard and 2 deluxe. The standard figure was pretty similar to the first deluxe figure but the deluxe one came with a sword and I wanted the sword. I’m not positive if the second deluxe figure (with the coat) came as a later part of the wave or if I just didn’t see it until later. The coat is a really cool piece though, I’m generally not that into cloth capes, and I didn’t care for the coat in the movie, but cloth coat on an action figure is something really exciting for me it turns out. Also all the parts for these two figures are interchangeable so I’ve swapped parts around to give me two figures that I’m really happy about. Each figure also came with a Krypto, one in puppy form and one in big guy form. I’ve also got the cards for each figure shown above. I probably won’t pick up any of the other figures in the line because I don’t really care to have a Lobo or Krem figure and McFarlane didn’t think to give Ruthye (the other main character behind Supergirl) a figure.
We weren’t totally out of luck on the Ruthye front, KFC had us covered. KFC for the months of June and July (I think) had a Supergirl meal that came with keychains based on the movie. I think there were 5 in the line; Supergirl, Supergirl in coat, Krypto, Lobo, and Ruthye. Ruthye was the main figure I wanted to pick up and it was the first figure I picked up (and also the second). I’m not thrilled that I got a duplicate, but if I were to get any duplicates I’m happy it was Ruthye. I wish I would’ve gotten the standard Supergirl instead of the coat variant, but Ruthye and Supergirl were the main draws for me so I’m not upset.
A couple items to close out the movie section of this post, I’ve got the cup topper that came with my Supergirl cup from my first viewing of the film (shown off in full alongside my initial thoughts on the movie post). I’ve also got a ticket stub from one of my viewings, I think this one is from the third viewing I went to seeing as the first 2 times I went they didn’t give me a ticket. I’ve also got a Woman of Tomorrow bookmark that I picked up at my comic shop at some point, probably around Superman Day because the back has the same advertisement of all the different ways you can buy the comic that the Superman day release had. I have not yet picked up a copy of the movie on Blu-ray yet but I do plan on getting it soon and it will find a home somewhere on the shelf once I get it.
The last item that’s newly released merch is this charm keychain sort of thing. There was a series of dolls and such based on DC characters and it felt in some ways a tie in to the Supergirl movie since she was prominently featured in this line from Jakks Pacific. While I was excited to see Supergirl included in a line advertised towards young girls, it was the inclusion of Streaky as a charm that really pushed me to pick this up. Because of the Woman of Tomorrow comic, it seems more and more that Krypto has become seen as Supergirl’s pet and Streaky has been pushed to the side. All that being said, Krypto also shows up here in purse form, along with a DC bullet logo charm, and what seems to be a sunstone or fortress crystal. I may be looking into it a bit, but it sorta feels like the Supergirl design has some inspiration from the G1 DC Super Hero Girls costume with the short sleeves and collar on the shirt.
Next let’s take a look at quick look at all the new card additions to the shelf thanks mostly in part to finding a bunch of VS System cards a couple months back. Of the 7 new VS Systems cards I’ve added, there are 2 new Kara Zor-El Supergirl cards – one by Mike Mayhew ddrawing the traditional blue costume and one by Diego Latorre presenting her Apokolips outfit that debuted in Superman/Batman Apocalypse. You may be surprised to see Brainiac 12 included here, but if you look real close at Travis Kotzebue’s art, you will see Cir-El makes another appearance. I also put two Plot Twist cards here, one that prominently features the girl of steel, and one showcasing the Legion of Super-Pets. I’ve also put Mary Marvel and Andromeda on the shelf in honorary Supergirl positions. Also this last card is part of the Overpower card game that I covered a bit in Trading Cards Part 2. I actually had this card in the collection when I made that last post, but this card didn’t make it into the post.
Speaking of items I’ve had in my collection but not on the shelf, we’ve got this large scale Supergirl doll from the DC Super Hero Girls line. This was part of the initial SHG line of toys and I picked it up probably around 2016 or 2017 but it’s been stuffed in a box for a while now. I cleaned her up, brushed her hair, and got her a place on the shelf. The costume here is a bit weird, I’m not exactly certain what it’s going for but I always like having more SHG representation.
These next 2 figures were both picked up for me by my husband at his job working at a secondhand book and music store. The first is from a line called DC Minis and while I don’t love the baby doll proportions of the figure since it makes it really hard to balance her, it’s nice to see a non-white Supergirl and I can only assume it’s at least somewhat based on Sasha Calle’s version of the character. The other one, which has a sort of boxy quality to it, is another Wendy’s toy (we saw another Wendy’s toy in my initial coverage of my Supergirl figures). It doesn’t really do anything but it’s cute.
These next few figures don’t really have anything in common but didn’t fit anywhere else. First is a Crisis on Infinite Earths era 4 inch figure from the Infinite Crisis line. It fits nicely alongside the larger CoIE Supergirl figure I have and the die-cast figure since they all match. I also picked up another figure based on the Superman animated series. This one is bendy and I don’t love it, but I did get it for like $2 so I can’t complain too much. This last one is really exciting though, a figure based on the Elseworld’s Finest: Supergirl and Batgirl. I really enjoy this Elseworlds comic and it will be covered later in November for my Supergirl in the Multiverse series.
With the addition of the Awesome Mini’s Supergirl movie mini-figure, I decided to move all my Supergirl LEGO mini-figures into the rest of my Supergirl collection. I’ve got the classic figure next to the rest of my CoIE Supergirls, and the Super Hero Girls LEGOs with my SHGs and the movie figure with the rest of my Supergirl Movie stuff. I also put a cape on an orange LEGO cat for Streaky representation alongside the LEGO Kryptos I have. I am also planning to get a LEGO Comet put together for the shelf but I don’t quite have everything I need for it. But with that, I have covered all the new additions to my Supergirl shelf, I hope you enjoyed!
Earth-483, sometimes Earth-50, is home to the Wildstorm universe. The Wildstorm universe was initially part of the Image comics shared universe but after the 1996 Shattered Image event, a few of the titles would split off into a seprate universe which would become the Wildstorm universe before later merging with the main Earth-0 in the New 52 era. These Wildstorm titles included; Gen 13, Grifter, Wildcats, Planetary, and most relevant to this post The Authority. The Authority was a group of metahumans that would often travel through the bleed and visit alternate universes and generally get up to no good while trying to save the day. The Authority team included members such as Midnighter, Apollo, the Engineer, the Doctor, Jack Hawksmoor, Swift, and their leader Jenny Sparks.
Jenny Sparks was the spirit of the 20th Century and as such possessed powers based on the technological advancements of her century, often representing themself as electricity. Due to Jenny being the leader of the team and her prominence as the Spirit of the 20th Century, I am viewing her as the Superman analogue of the universe, which points to her successor Jenny Quantum the Spirit of the 21st Century as this universe’s Supergirl representative. Jenny Quantum was born at the start of the century, when Jenny Sparks died which was shown in The Authority (Vol. 1) #12 and would soon be adopted by the Authority and would continue to be a part of the team up until it’s merging with the main DC Universe. In Jenny Q’s Wildstorm appearances she mostly just existed as a baby and then a carbon copy of Jenny Sparks, down to the smoking and wearing union jack t-shirts and having electricity powers. In the New-52 Stormwatch title however, she really became her own character. This young Chinese girl would wear a hoodie styled after the Chinese flag, and her powers would instead be based on the technilogical advancemets of the 21st century. Because of the unknown advancements to be made in the next 100 years, Jenny’s powers are still being realized and often present themself as bordering on science fiction, often visualized as her writing complex math equations in the air.
As with all my Supergirl in the Multiverse posts, this is my own artwork. Jenny Quantum is stood in the foreground writing equations in the air. THe background is the bridge of the Carrier with open windows showing the red skies of the Bleed and a display table showing a hologram of the Carrier ship. A yellow star with a 483 on top of it is in the top right corner.
