The Amalgam Universe was born from the cross dimensional being known as Access during the pages of Marvel vs. DC back in 1996. This birthed a total of 24 one-shot comics spread across 2 waves that showed stories of characters that were amalgamations of characters from the DC and Marvel universes. The Amalgam universe has several numeric designations such as 1996, 962, 9602, and 496 as well as just being referred to as the Amalgamverse. My coverage of this universe will feature 5 entries for Supergirl in the Multiverse and my initial plan was to use some of these alternative number designations for each. However, to make categorizing them easier I will just be using what seems to be the most likely DC designation of 496.
As mentioned above, the Amalgam universe would take a character from the DC universe and one from the Marvel (sometimes more than 2 characters would merge). There are 2 canonical Amalgam characters that fit the Supergirl role, but I am also going to be putting together 3 of my own amalgamated Supergirls. This week’s entry is not a canonical Amalgam character, but it is a fairly obvious amalgamation of Carol “Captain Marvel” Danvers and Kara “Supergirl” Danvers.
As we all know, Krypton was destroyed decades ago and a rocket with what was meant to be a survivor was sent to earth. This survivor didn’t survive the journey, but his DNA was used in the Super-Soldier program that brought us heroes like Super-Soldier and American Girl. What you may not know however, is that another survivor made it off the planet. This rocket didn’t go to earth and instead traveled in stasis for many years before landing on the planet Kree which was in the midst of the infamous Kree-Thanagar war. The young child grew up and was raised as a Kree and was given the name Kar-El. She would enlist and fight in the Kree-Thanagar war and would help lead her planet to victory moving her way up the ranks to captian. Now with the war over, Kar-El would look into her past and learn more about Krypton and hope to find her family. Unfortunately she instead finds the desolation of her home-planet and thinks all is lost when she picks up the trace of the other rocket that was sent to Earth. She follows after it but she instead finds the Super-Soldier that informs her of her predecessor’s fate. Instead of returning home she would work alongside the heroes of earth, maintaining her title of Captain. Captain Kar-El of Krypton would continue on as a quite Marvelous hero honoring her Kryptonian heritage.
As with all my Supergirl in the Multiverse posts, this is my own artwork. Captain Kar-El is walking towards the viewer with her eyes burning with heat vision. Behind her we see her space ship landed on a rooftop helipad and a cityscape in the background. The top right has a motif of the Captain’s symbol with a 496 on top of it.
Sometimes when picking a random Supergirl comic to talk about sometimes I’ll re-roll the random number generator if it’s from a series I’ve covered recently or a book I’ve talked about recently in another post. So when it came up that I should read Adventure 401 as the next entry in Supergirl Surprise after reading Adventure 398 just last month I almost skipped it. However, I did take a look at the cover and saw one of my favorites, Nasty Luthor. Now Nasty hasn’t shown up so far in any major capacity on my blog, but along with Lesla-Lar and Reactron, she’s one of my favorite foils to the girl of steel so I figured I’d dive into what would surely be a wonderful battle of wits between the enemies. Boy oh boy was I wrong. This issue was not particularly good but I think that’s some of the fun of Supergirl Surprise, it’s always a surprise which story I’ll read so let’s dive in and see what this issue has in store.
Adventure Comics #401, from November 1970, starts with a story titled “The Frightened Supergirl” Which had Jack Abel inking, John Costanza lettering, and Mike Sekowsky doing just about everything else including editing. My particular copy of this book is quite bad shape with a cover that’s nearly ripped in half but aside from a bit of a panel on page 9 missing, it’s still in perfectly readable condition and 55 years old so I can’t be too upset. The story is told from the perspective of Nasty Luthor as she relays the story of how she captured Supergirl to her uncle Lex which starts with Nasty attending a luncheon at Stanhope College honoring Supergirl’s achievements. Here is where Nasty puts her plan into action.
Nasty puts a Fear Formula, invented by the genius that is Lex Luthor, into Supergirl’s water that she needs because she’s so parched giving her speech. This Fear Formula, as the name suggests, causes Supergirl to be terribly afraid of everything like spiders and rats and even a boy dressed up like a cowboy. The Frightened Supergirl is not only frightened, but also running around like a bull in a China shop absolutely destroying anything in her path as she tries to flee to safety.
Police are unable to subdue the girl of steel, but Nasty offers her help and is able to get Supergirl into her care with gentle and kind words. Nasty then takes her back to her hideout and frightens her again with a rat. Nasty and Lex are thrilled at the success of their Fear Formula and look to show it off at the next crime convention, but not before Nasty has a bit of fun.
Nasty has acquired a special remote control car that will follow a sensor that can be clipped to anything, including Supergirl’s cape. Nasty puts the sensor onto Supergirl, which causes the car to chase her and in Supergirl’s rush to safety away from the car she can never escape she destroys the building that the Luthors are in and it seems nothing can stop the frightened Supergirl’s rampage when suddenly…
We find out it was all a dream. That’s it. Story’s over. Nothing happened and nothing mattered. Jan Butler, Linda’s roommate stumbles in with the same remote control car that was in her dream. As it may be apparent, “it was all a dream” stories kind of bother me, as it feels like the story just doesn’t matter and it’s a waste of time. I think this story especially isn’t great because it is also Nasty’s second appearance and is referenced in the Direct Currents page as a big deal that she’s back, and since it’s just a dream it’s kind of like Nasty wasn’t really in the story at all.
While we’re talking about Direct Currents, let’s take a look at the whole page. My understanding is that Direct Currents was a running feature in all the DC books being published and it served as a bit of promotion to get DC readers interested in the rest of the books in their line. The first title mentioned here is Strange Adventures which I’ve been getting into recently since they often have nice one and done science fiction stories. The Atomic Knights are also mentioned and long time followers of the blog might remember the Atomic Knights from my Earth-17 entry of Supergirl in the Multiverse. On the right side of the page, we get mention of Adventure Comics itself which has the mention of Nasty’s return to menace Supergirl. There is also mention of the backup feature starring Tracy Thompson who debuts this issue. I did read this backup story and it didn’t really interest me, it was a sort of horror/ghost story but it wasn’t particularly interesting and I can’t imagine the character stayed around for very long.
The next 2 pages are advertising “A new beginning for Superman” and it has a couple panels exploring the evolution of Superman as a character all to get readers hyped up for Superman in 1971. We do also get 1 panel previews of the other Superman related titles and Supergirl gets a panel showcasing her new costume that she began using back in Adventure 397.
Most of the letters on the Super Fe-Mail page are talking about people’s like or dislike of Supergirl’s new costume and while it isn’t my favorite Supergirl costume by any means, it has grown on me slightly, although if I was reading the comics in 1970 I probably would have been on the side against this particular costume. I didn’t notice any interesting ads this time out but before I go I did want to let you know there were 21 panels in the Supergirl story where Supergirl was screaming.
The Amalgam Universe was born from the cross dimensional being known as Access during the pages of Marvel vs. DC back in 1996. This birthed a total of 24 one-shot comics spread across 2 waves that showed stories of characters that were amalgamations of characters from the DC and Marvel universes. The Amalgam universe has several numeric designations such as 1996, 962, 9602, and 496 as well as just being referred to as the Amalgamverse. My coverage of this universe will feature 5 entries for Supergirl in the Multiverse and my initial plan was to use some of these alternative number designations for each. However, to make categorizing them easier I will just be using what seems to be the most likely DC designation of 496.
As mentioned above, the Amalgam universe would take a character from the DC universe and one from the Marvel (sometimes more than 2 characters would merge). There are 2 canonical Amalgam characters that fit the Supergirl role, but I am also going to be putting together 3 of my own amalgamated Supergirls. This time out is one of the canonical ones, American Girl. American Girl is an amalgamation of Supergirl, specifically the Pre-Crisis Kara Zor-El version, and Bucky Barnes. This character only shows up as part of the Amalgam Universe trading cards, specifically the Classic Power Blast series in a card titled Secret Crisis of the Infinity Hour #7. This card, like all cards in this series, is an homage and for Secret Crisis of the Infinity Hour #7, it is an homage to Crisis on Infinite Earths #7. Super Soldier stands in for Superman and the now deceased American Girl stands in for Supergirl. The back of the card mentions that “although American Girl was patterned after his old partner, the two characters had never met before this issue.” This is cleared up a bit more in the Secret Crisis of the Infinity Hour Canvas Cards set, specifically #9, which mentions American Girl was Super Soldier’s successor, as well as naming her Carol Barnes. While I couldn’t find any specific “old partner” in either Super Soldier or Super Soldier: Man of War, this seems to be referencing a Bucky Barnes type. American Girl being Super Soldier’s successor points to the possibility that after Super Soldier’s icy fate after his face off with Ultra-Metallo, perhaps the Super Soldier formula was used on another person, Carol Barnes, granting her similar super-abilities.
As with all my Supergirl in the Multiverse posts, this is my own artwork. American Girl is taking up the center foreground, running towards the viewer. She is running down a path with fields on either side of it. The top right corner has a motif of American Girl’s symbol with a 496 on top of it.
The DC Book of Lists is a book by Randall Lotowycz that takes the 85 years of history (at the time) of DC Comics and reorganizes legacies, histories, and hierarchies – as it mentions on the cover – as well as loads of other information into easy to digest list format. Published by Running Press and released in 2021, this is a fun book that seems to have a lot of research put into it and, by Lotowycz’s own admission, doesn’t care about continuity resets and instead takes the entire history of DC when organizing such topics as Superman and Batman’s first meetings (page 64), all the colors of Kryptonite (page 115), and all the times we’ve seen Darkseid sitting down (page 105). While the book has an absurd amount of references to the girl of steel (as you might be able to tell by the mess of post it notes in my copy shown above) but today I’m going to focus specifically on the 2 pages Lotowycz dedicated specifically to Supergirl, and specifically when she strayed a bit from the heroic ideal.
I’ve had a wonderful time reading through this book over the past week or so, but my biggest issue with it is that it doesn’t always give issue numbers for the stories and characters it references. I do understand that it’s probably an insurmountable task when you’re talking about 242 pages of non-stop facts. That being said, the fact that some of the lists do reference specific issue numbers (like the list of times Suicide Squad members died in the field on page 4), just makes the lists without feel a bit underdeveloped. Because of this, I’m going to take the 13 baddie Supergirl’s that are listed on pages 145 and 146 and do my best to give you at home a good editors note on where to find out more about each not-so-good maid of might.
The first entry, which also has an image associated with it, is titled “Black Magic”. This is one of the entries from the list that I wasn’t particularly familiar with so tracking down the issue (Action Comics #324), and reading the story was a fun diversion into wacky silver age comics. I do really love the silver age Supergirl stories and this is no exception. Supergirl encounters a weird guy, gets into some shenanigans that cause her to grow devil horns and go evil, and by page 13 everything is right back to normal like nothing happened. It’s fun, it’s exciting, and the story features probably the only iteration of “Flame Kryptonite”.
Next up is “Brain on Fire” and readers of the current Supergirl comics may be familiar with the character this entry is referencing, Nightflame. Nightflame first showed up in Adventure Comics #421, and isn’t quite a bad version of Supergirl in my opinion, but more so the Innerverse version of all of Supergirl who lets all her bad thoughts come to life and tries to get control of Supergirl’s body. It’s possible I’m in the minority but Nightflame isn’t one of my favorite pre-crisis Supergirl villains so maybe my reaction to her inclusion here is a bit biased.
“Bad Hair Day” was the other of the entries that I didn’t know right off the bat, but it comes from Supergirl #8 from 1972 in a story appropriately titled “A Head-Full of Snakes!” This story opens with Linda rehearsing for a play at Vandyre University where she is playing the role of Medusa. She then gets cursed by the actual Medusa’s ghost and she gets cursed to start turning anyone she looks at to stone. This story actually has a similar story structure to the one from Action Comics #324 with Supergirl helping someone at the start, getting cursed where she turns on her fellow heroes, and then everything just going right back to normal at the end. A perfectly serviceable story but I do feel like “turn people to stone” doesn’t have quite as much potential as “devil ring that gives you 3 wishes” so it doesn’t quite hold up to me.
From here we move into the Matrix era of the list with “Identity Crisis” and while this isn’t a reference to the critically acclaimed miniseries of the same name from 2005, it is a story where Supergirl thinks she’s Superman and tries to take out the man of steel all while sporting a gray and brown costume that’s particularly striking. This storyline went for a few issues in 1989 across the various Superman titles of the time, I’ve got Action Comics #644 called out specifically here for the simply astounding George Pérez cover that really shows off the brown and gray version of Superman’s costume that Matrix is wearing.
After many months of being in a relationship with Lex Luthor II (who was actually just Lex Luthor I with better hair), Matrix finally finds out that he’s bad news in her 1984 miniseries Supergirl (Vol. 3). The image shown here is from the cover to issue 4 of the mini and shows Supergirl’s reaction to finding out Lex had been cloning her for nefarious deeds and Superman is trying his darndest to stop her from killing Lex. Does this really count as Supergirl going bad if she’s just getting Lex back for being a tool? That’s for you to decide! I will say this is one of my favorite alternate Supergirl costumes and was used as inspiration for me in my most recent Supergirl in the Multiverse post on Super-She-Hulk.
Very soon after the Matrix merged with human (earth-born angel) Linda Danvers, the hero got her mind taken over by a certain gorilla named Grodd in Supergirl (Vol. 4) #3, but issue #4 is where she really starts getting up to monkey business. The cover to #4 seems to be referencing Angel and the Ape, another DC property, with the tagline “The Ape and the Devil”, and throughout the issue Supergirl is under the thrall of the psychic ape. It takes Linda seeing her father endangered by her actions, and a little help from Wally, to break free of Grodd’s influence and back to rights, but she does eventually overcome the fiend.
“Matrix Returns” is actually a story I referenced way back in my Supergirl vs. Supergirl Part 2, specifically 1999’s Supergirl #30. Once again this storyline took place over many issues and eventually ends with Linda overpowering the gooier version of herself but not before Superman steps in and it’s finally revealed to him that Matrix isn’t just a protoplasmic organism anymore and is actually merged with a sort of human.
That was the last of the Matrix era entries and now we move up to the Pre-Flashpoint Kara Zor-El and her first bad girl form “Welcome to the Dark Side”. Once again this is a storyline I covered from the Superman/Batman title in my post Superman/Batman: Apocalypse. This was the second story arc of the title and served as the re-introduction of Kara Zor-El who had been absent in comics since her death in Crisis on Infinite Earths. The story arc started in issue 8 of the title, but issue 12 has the cover that shows off Baddie Kara the best. I did want to note, in regards to this entry, this story got mentioned fairly recently in the pages of New History of the DC Universe by Mark Waid and Kara being under Darkseid’s control was actually how Waid tied the pre-crisis and post-crisis Kara Zor-El characters together. In my opinion I think it’s a really smart approach and feels like a pretty seamless way to merge the 2 characters without too much retconning.
Kara would soon get her own title after re-debuting in Superman/Batman, but would quickly get split into “Supergirl Black, Supergirl Blue” by Lex Luthor using black Kryptonite. This split happened in the back half of Supergirl (Vol. 5) #3 (I covered the first half of this issue in Nightwing and the 4 Supergirls) after Supergirl left the Outsiders she got ambushed by Lex Luthor who instigated the split and it would take until issue 5 (shown above) before the pair recombined with a little help from Wonder Woman and the Lasso of Truth.
Speaking of Wonder Woman, “Executive Mistake” refers to the Amazons Attack event (the 2007 one not the 2023 one) where Supergirl and Wonder Girl (Cassie Sandsmark) tried their best to help out and ended up probably causing more harm than good. The event as a whole was a 6 issue mini-series as well as a handful of tie in issues but the cover I always think of when thinking of this event is the one show above from Supergirl (Vol 5) #20 which I’m pretty sure is when the event the entry is referencing happened.
Much like the last entry, “Supergirl at the End of the World” also references a “bad Supergirl” that wasn’t under the influence of anything and was doing what she thought in her heart was right. Unfortunately what she thought was right was heavily influenced by H’El who was obviously manipulating her throughout the H’El on Earth crossover which ran for a handful of months through all the Super titles in 2013, specifically Supergirl (Vol. 6) #14-17.
“Raging Out” of course refers to Kara’s brief stint as a Red Lantern and my personal favorite Supergirl arc from the New 52. The arc started in Green Lantern #28 and would continue on in the Supergirl and Red Lantern titles for the next few months until Supergirl would remove the ring and return to her normal red/blue slightly-less-angry self. The story arc would explore Kara’s anger about her home world being destroyed and all the nonsense that she had gone through since landing on earth.
The final entry is one I am familiar with and is shown referenced on the page, from Supergirl (Vol. 7) #36, although I don’t think I’ve read the whole event. “Supergirl the Infected” is referencing the Year of the Villain and specifically Supergirl the Infected. In my defense however, this is an event heavily influenced by the Batman Who Laughs and I cannot stand that loser.
And that brings us to the end of the list. I think this was a fun look and it was an interesting thing to list in regards to the girl of steel. This sort of off-the-wall list grouping is pretty common in this book and it makes for a much more exciting and fun read as opposed to a strictly referential text. As I mentioned before, my main issue with the book is that it doesn’t list issue numbers all the time. I will say that when I went through the Supergirl entries, it was hard to nail down a single issue for some of the entries so I can see where sometimes it would be tricky. Another minor issue, for the Supergirl list specifically, is the exclusion of Satan Girl! Satan Girl is like the epitome of Supergirl going bad (and if you want to read more about her check out my blog post on her here). Thanks so much for reading and if you’d like me to go over the rest of Supergirl’s mentions from the book let me know and be ssure to check out this book as a whole if you can.
The Amalgam Universe was born from the cross dimensional being known as Access during the pages of Marvel vs. DC back in 1996. This birthed a total of 24 one-shot comics spread across 2 waves that showed stories of characters that were amalgamations of characters from the DC and Marvel universes. The Amalgam universe has several numeric designations such as 1996, 962, 9602, and 496 as well as just being referred to as the Amalgamverse. My coverage of this universe will feature 5 entries for Supergirl in the Multiverse and my initial plan was to use some of these alternative number designations for each. However, to make categorizing them easier I will just be using what seems to be the most likely DC designation of 496.
As mentioned above, the Amalgam universe would take a character from the DC universe and one from the Marvel (sometimes more than 2 characters would merge). There are 2 canonical Amalgam characters that fit the Supergirl role, but I am also going to be putting together 3 of my own amalgamated Supergirls starting with Super-She-Hulk. This is obviously an amalgamation of Jen “She-Hulk” Walters and Supergirl, but I did base this specifically on the protoplasmic shape changing Matrix Supergirl, partly because these 2 characters appear together in a panel in the DC vs. Marvel crossover extravaganza, but also because I had a good idea for the character herself.
Everyone knows Mae Walters, she is one of the most famous super heroes of the West Coast, Super-Girl, and is often see helping out wherever she can with a friendly face. That is as long as you don’t make her angry, you won’t like her when she’s angry. When angered, Mae looses control of her protoplasmic form and she changes shape into the hulking aggressive monster known only as Super-She-Hulk!
As with all my Supergirl in the Multiverse posts, this is my own artwork. Super-Girl is shown in the foreground and behind her is her much larger, much angrier, Super-She-Hulk form that is crumbling the ground beneath her. The background has a pink-purple sky. There is a large yellow question mark on the left side of the page with the text “Is she HERO or is she MONSTER”. The top right corner has the symbol of Super-She-Hulk with a 496 on top of it.
The Daring New Blog of Supergirl 