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.
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