A few weeks ago I acquired the largest haul of my comic book collecting career, several hundred comics from the early 1960s into the 1970s, almost all of them DC. I was at a birthday party for a neighbor when I started chatting with another neighbor. I mentioned my collecting craze. It turned out she had all her comic books from when she was a little girl and wanted to get rid of them to clean out her storage space. She wanted them to go to a good home and didn't want to have to drag them to a dealer. So I volunteered to take them off her hands.
My eyes nearly popped out of my head when I say she had four boxes stuffed to the gills with Silver Age stuff. I did have quite a lot of them already, but many I did not including a lot of Teen Titans, Aquaman, Green Lanterns, Inferior Fives, etc. We agreed on a price and with my granny shopping cart, hauled them back to my place. I haven't been able to read much else since--I did finish Homer and Langley by E.L. Doctorow and The Last Thing He Wanted by Joan Didion, both short novels which did not interrupt the flow of Superman, Lois Lane, and Jimmy Olsen. I also postponed my reading of the Fantastic Fours I had recently acquired, deciding to take a break from Marvel's nonstop soap opera of the past few decades.
Among the stories I had not read before where several of Supergirl's adventures. She was the second feature in Action Comics for many years before migrating over to Adventure. Hers is in interesting saga reflecting the shifting attitudes towards women in American society. When she lands on Earth after surviving the desctruction of Argo City, she is 15 and her cousin Superman decides she is not ready to start serving mankind. She must be his secret emergency weapon and hide as an orphan. the idea of a Superwoman equally as powerul as Superman was too alien and threatening a concept for the DC creative team. If there is a female superbeing, she must be a girl, not a grown woman. Later she is sprung on an unsuspecting public, but unlike her manly cousin, the maid of might is suspectable to female failings, like romance.
In one of the weirdest relationships in comics, Supergirl acquires a pet Superhorse. You know the stereotype that all girls love horses, right? Well, this one is special, and not just because he has superpowers. Comet the Superhorse is actually a centaur from ancient Greece transformed into a full horse by a magic spell from an evil wizard. Circe the sorceress cannot reverse the spell but takes pity on him and grants him the powers of the gods like flying and superstrength. He time travels to the present and Supergirl adopts him. She is unaware of his unnatural attraction to her--he is really half-human after all. When a certain comet is within earth's orbit, the spell is broken and Comet can become a man. He assumes the guise of a cowboy and Supergirl in her secret identity of Linda Lee falls in love with him. The implications of interspecies love are lost to the comic writers. Fortunately, the comet leaves Earth's orbit and Comet reverts back to being all horse. What kind of children would they have had?? Though he is telepathic, Comet never reveals his true feelings for his human mistress. Sick, I know.
More on Supergirl: The mighty Supergirl later forgets about Superhorse. Later comics in the early 1970s reveal another weird shift in her depiction. Just as the Women's Liberation movement is gaining power, DC removed Supergirl's full strength. She falls victim to a plot by a female villainess named Starfire who arranges to have a superpower-depriving pill slipped to her by a handsome stud--again she is tricked by her female weakness for love. As a result, her superpowers come and go. Interestngly just a year or two earlier Wonder Woman lost her powers and become mortal, opening a mod fashion shop and becoming a judo expert. It's no coincidence that DC decided to weaken its two strongest female heroes just as real women were becoming more powerful and demanding to be given equal rights.
There are many more observations serious and otherwise to come based on this gigantic comic haul.
