A few months ago, as reading through various Supergirl stories, I noticed something quite interesting. Both Action Comics #376 and Superman #376 somewhat serve as the end point of an era of Supergirl stories and it feels fascinating to me that both issues had the same number. There is a similar thing with Amazing Spider-Man #252 being the first appearance of the black Spidey suit and Action 252 being Supergirl’s first appearance. I’ll be taking a look at the stories themselves, as well as how they serve as stepping stones in the girl of steel’s career.
Action Comics #376 (as well as #375 that we’ll be looking at in conjunction) was written by Leo Dorfman, with art by Kurt Schaffenberger, and lettering by Ben Oda. This 2-part story served as Supergirl’s final 2 issues as regular back up feature in Action Comics which she had stayed at for over a decade. The story is titled “The Hated Girl of Steel” which when I first realized this was the title of Supergirl’s last Action Comics backup, I figured it would be a story where Supergirl and her alias Linda Danvers, would be kicked out of Stanhope or something to that effect. So possibly my invented scenario before reading the story played into a bit of my expectations of the story and my thoughts after reading it, but let’s get into it.
I won’t be covering any of the lead stories in any of these comics because none of them relate to Supergirl in any way, so we’ll get right into the backup feature “The Woman Who Hated Supergirl” . This story opens with Linda babysitting the son of one of her Stanhope College professors when Professor Alexander exclaims that she just discovered a red nebula shaped like a hand. Dr. Alexander wants to take a closer look at the nebula in hopes of attending the dedication of the new World Science Center. Soon enough Linda (as Supergirl) is taking her professor across the cosmos in a kitted out bubble observatory and the pair soon make it to the hand nebula.
Out of nowhere, a bright flash of light overcomes the Professor. While everything seems okay after an initial shock, Supergirl still decides to quickly return to earth where Marla Alexander suddenly starts acting odd. She is quickly acknowleged and accepted as a brilliant scientist but begins acting rude and standoffish where before she had been quite friendly. She refuses to make a speech about her nebula findings, she smashes a solar system model, and she even sends her son off to a boarding school. All of this fury seems to be targeted specifically towards Supergirl, hence the title of the story being “The Woman who Hated Supergirl”. It is when Dr. Alexander is in the process of losing her teaching position where Supergirl puts the pieces together. Marla has become blind after her encounter with the red nebula and instead of addressing her new disability she has instead lashed out at everyone around her, and has taken up a personal vendetta against Supergirl.
We now get into #376 proper and the story “The Hated Girl of Steel”. The story wastes no time getting to the title of the book and we quickly see all of Stanhope turned on their former hero. This hatred from the student body is used as a framing device to recap the events of the former issue before we then cut to Supergirl’s vain attempt to restore Marla’s vision with a doctor working in a remote jungle. After this Marla rejects Supergirl’s offer to attend her at the World Science Center and instead goes by herself with a seeing eye dog.
I gotta say this story is not particularly kind to blind people and treats Dr. Alexander’s blindness almost as a fate worse than death in what I can only assume is a sign of the times but it really doesn’t read great. Anyway, the science center is apparently an alien space ship and all the world’s greatest scientists are rocketed away to an alien planet where the aliens cure Marla’s blindness and then attempt to hook up all the scientists to a Brain-Drain machine that would’ve drained the scientist’s brains and rendered them basically robots had it not been for Supergirl bursting onto the scene.
We are informed that the night prior, Supergirl realized that the Science Center was a rocket in disguise and decided to take on a disguise herself. That of Dr. Marla Alexander, so that she could follow the rocket to where it was headed and stop whatever threat was on the other side. The issue ends with Supergirl sending the aliens away with a wrecked brain drain machine, curing Marla’s blindness for real this time, and no mention at all of Supergirl no longer being in this comic.
As I mentioned before, I think I went into this book with unrealistic expectations for what this book would be. All in all, this is a standard Dorfman Supergirl backup story in Action Comics and it tells a decent story. I think my more modern sensibilities expected something more akin to a backdoor pilot sort of story that would help set up the maid of might’s new status quo. That is of course silly because her status quo doesn’t really change for a couple more years and she continues to just be a student at Stanhope until about halfway through her run in Adventure Comics. What we did get however was some dialogue from the Editor in the letters pages. Issue 375 doesn’t directly mention Supergirl jumping ship to Adventure, but there are a couple letter responses where the Editor almost slips up and breaks the news a month early that I thought was quite comical. While my (current) copy of 376 is tragically missing the letters page, Dr Anj (fellow Supergirl blogger) was kind enough to share a scan of the page that I’ve included above. You can see the first response (to Allan Latawiec) explains to the readers where Supergirl is going and who is taking their place.
Hoping forward about 12 years, to Superman #376 we get a 6 page backup story simply titled “Supergirl”. Written by Paul Kupperberg, with Carmine Infantino pencils, Bob Oksner inks, Todd Klein letters, and Ziuko coloring, this story falls much more in line with what I wanted from the Action Comics story, and has a stellar creative team that really presents a compelling story. The story opens in New York with Linda Danvers walking out of her starring role in the soap opera “Sacred Hearts” in a move that seems great for Linda but a rough time for the producers of the show.
Linda, now dressed as Supergirl, flies off to go find her cousin to have a talk, stop a tornado, and let him know about her new base of operations. The pair make a great team and seem to have a certain joy in working together and stopping a natural disaster. Clark does seem to be a bit hesitant to accept his cousin’s decision, noting his own work/life balance, but eventually he comes around noting that it’s hard to believe how much she’s grown since the 15 year-old girl that crash landed all those years ago. We find out that Linda plans to take all the money she made from her television career and re-invest it into returning to college in Chicago.
This is a great set-up to Supergirl’s new status quo and it’s baffling to me that it wasn’t included as part of the Daring New Adventures of Supergirl trades that were released a few years back (also not included on the DC Universe app?!?), but I’m sure if a DC Finest collection of this era of Supergirl were to release it would be included and I will be buying it. My only real problem with this story is that it’s part of the Superman comic, which I don’t think Supergirl was a regular feature in. I feel like this story would’ve made more sense in the Superman Family title which had issue 222 releasing the same month and would’ve made more sense to pivot subscribers of that series (that was ending) to a new series (just beginning) but maybe they thought the Superman title would have a wider audience and thus a wider reach. DC periodically will do similar previews to this for their new #1 issues although in general these are just the first few pages of the new story, but I think there’s a certain charm to the way this story is presented as a totally original step between status quos that I’ve not really seen elsewhere.
While there’s nothing tying these stories together more than mere coincidence and even my reasoning for saying they’re similar is thin to say the least, I still had a good time looking at them. Also I have to once again thank Dr. Anj who has been working on his own Supergirl blog Comic Box Commentary for much longer than I have and I urge you all to check it out for some really great Supergirl content, (he even covered this same backup from Superman #376!)
The Daring New Blog of Supergirl 
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