In the wake of Superman’s death, DC comics was suddenly left with 4 monthly ongoing comics without their lead character. While comics like Superman, Adventures of Superman, and Superman: The Man of Steel couldn’t really change their titles, Action Comics could. Action Comics while currently (currently meaning 1992) was using the title “Superman in Action Comics” it was historically an anthology comic and not always solely focused on the man of steel and even just recently before these issues the title changed it’s title to “Action Comics Weekly” so switching to “Supergirl in Action Comics” was a fairly easy change. Supergirl would not however maintain headlining status and would only be the star of the book for issues 685 and 686 (and 706 but we’ll cover that later). Both of these books have the same creative teams of Roger Stern (writer), Butch Guice (penciller), Denis Rodier (inker), Glenn Whitmore (colorist), and Bill Oakley (letterer), most of which we saw last week as well with Supergirl and Team Luthor.
These Action stories take place in the same post death of Superman time period, although I think I covered these a tad out of order and the Supergirl and Team Luthor story is actually a later story than this. Action Comics #685 has a cover clearly playing homage to the iconic Action Comics #1 with Supergirl instead holding the green car above her head although we do get some text on the cover reading “The All New Metropolis Marvel!”. The story opens with getting the reader up to speed on the fact that Superman just died via a Daily Planet newspaper headline and WLEX news coverage before we get into the meat of the story titled “Re:Actions” where we’ve got Cadmus and the SCU arguing about who get’s the rights to Superman’s and Doomsday’s recently deceased bodies.
Lex Luthor the Second hears of this nonsense and quickly sicks Supergirl and his Team Luthor goons on the situation and they seem just as cautious about property damage as they were in the Team Luthor special. Supergirl seems particularly upset about the government treating Superman’s body this way and knocks out the whole affair with a rather concussive psycho-kinetic blast. By the time everyone has woken up, Lex has shown up and is announcing that with the approval of Mayor Berkowitz a section of Centennials Park will be set aside as the final resting place for the Man of Steel.
From here we cycle through some of the supporting cast, we get Lois at the Daily Planet where Perry White sends Lois home along with Superman’s cape that she hasn’t let go of. Then we cut to Lana calling the Kents hoping that what she heard of Superman’s passing wasn’t true. Then a brief montage of people around the world reacting to the news of Superman’s passing. Then we hop over to see Lex II obliterating a chair over the corpse of Doomsday while thinking “Superman was mine to kill”. Then we have Lois back at home and giving us the dialogue revealing that it’s the same day still of Superman’s death with her mentioning she just had breakfast with Clark this morning. A brief look at the maximum security wing where Parasite laments never being able to siphon the powers of the Man of Steel ever again.
We are now back to the star of the show, the Maid of Might! A handful of goons thinking the city is easy pickings without it’s resident hero thinks to rob a jewelry store and on their way out nearly run over a cop. The felons are briefly scared by the S-Shield before they realize it’s just “that Supergirl bimbo” and think they can easily get away. Supergirl doesn’t let them off easy, tossing their car (more Action #1 homage) and flinging their bullets back at them and turning them over to the police. The issue ends with a scene of Bibbo crying and praying in a rather touching scene.
We then move on to Action Comics 686 and the story “Who’s Buried in Superman’s Tomb” which opens with the Guardian chasing down aa van full of gunmen and we get a rather Jack Kirby looking shot of the gold-clad vigilante. This Guardian prologue serves to show that Metropolis still has heroes even without Superman flying about and we soon shift toward a limousine driving by with none other than Lex Luthor II inside.
Here we get some backstory revealing that Lex II is actual just Lex I’s brain in a younger sexier body. Guardian is seen getting called back to Cadmus rather suddenly and Lex, Supergirl, and the Metropolis SCU join up together in Centennial park to take a look at Superman’s empty tomb. The SCU pesters Lex because there are a series of tunnels under and around Superman’s tomb that they blame for Superman’s disappearance. Lex writes this off as what could easily be the truth but is likely a cleverly delivered lie but regardless Lex didn’t take the body as Supergirl and inspector Henderson reveal the tomb was broken into not out of.
The SCU begin to journey into the tunnels to see if they can discover anything while the reader gets to take a peek back at Cadmus where we – and Guardian – find out that Superman’s body was taken by Cadmus. Guardian is thoroughly pissed off but is calmed down slightly by the former Newsboys revealing that they plan to clone Superman just as Guardian had been cloned before. Supergirl, Lex, and the SCU encounter some rubble that the maid of might has to strong arm her way through when suddenly a left over bomb goes off. Supergirl only just saves everyone by extending her protective aura but they all have to work together to get back to the surface once the tunnels start flooding after the explosion.
After they are all safely topside, they bear witness to a religious cult that seems to worship Superman, Turpin and Sawyer discus their thinking that Cadmus is likely the culprit behind Superman’s death while Lex and Sydney Happersen come to a similar conclusion. The book then ends with a scene at the airport with Lois sending off the Kents and Lana. Lois and Lana have a nice exchange where they each let the other know they’ll always be there for one another.
Something I’ve come across in these 2 issues, and to some extent the Supergirl and Team Luthor special, is that when only reading a single issue at a time or even 2 issues, there’s a lot of story you miss out on. Just in issue 686 I counted no less than 7 editor notes referencing previous issues of story telling and there’s obviously a gap in the story just between issues 685 and 686 of Action Comics. There is a lot of love for this “Triangle Era” of Superman comics and when reading through all the titles it really does give way to some fantastic story telling. Unfortunately it makes just looking at 2 isolated issues a bit trickier and a lot of page real estate is dedicated to following up on ongoing minor stories and not so much on the main hero (Supergirl this time). Supergirl really only has a couple scenes across these 2 issues where she was headlining, a major psi-blast at the start of 685 against the Cadmus Lab boys, then not again until the end with the car chase/Action 1 homage scene. And then in 686 we only see her exploring the tunnels below Superman’s tomb and Guardian is much more the focal character this time. In the 44 pages I looked at for this week’s entry, Supergirl was only in 16 (about 1/3rd) which was a bit disappointing to me because I had been really hyping up these stories to myself leading up to this and was a bit let down.
I did take a quick peek at the letters page to see if the editors had anything to say about Supergirl stepping into the spotlight and only saw a couple mentions in Action 685. In response to a letter from Ed (and Cassie) Catto, we get a promise of “a lot of Supergirl in the upcoming issues” and a tag at the end of the page a mention of Supergirl having a lot to live up to with Superman gone. Also a shoutout to Jackson Guice paying homage to Shuster’s Action Comics #1 with the cover. I didn’t see any other mention of Supergirl in either letters page so possibly Supergirl was initially supposed to be a more prominent presence and was shifted aside when the 4 replacement Supermen entered the scene. I have quite a few more Matrix stories coming up to cover including the 1994 mini-series as well as Panic in the Sky and the Showcase issues with Supergirl starring.
The Daring New Blog of Supergirl 
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