It was actually a secret villain plan with a microscopically laced Kryptonite shrinking headband that would slowly and imperceptibly, even to her senses, cause permanent brain damage until it killed her. It is true, I have a source.
According to a mid-eighties interview (post-Crisis, yet pre-Byrne) with George Perez, the final decision from above to go ahead and kill off Kara in the Crisis came as a result of the poor critical and box office performance of the Helen Slater movie. Until the box office returns came in, she was on the bubble and the decision wasn't set in stone yet. The movie sealed her fate.
@@dngillikin Movie studios back then didn't realize that films that flopped in the theaters would be best selling or top rented videos (VHS). I saw the movie in the theater & thought it was horribly written, but Helen Slater was terrific.
@@dngillikin Yeah, I believe there was a lot of people inside DC who didn't like Supergirl, or rather they didn't like the cast of spin-off characters Superman had acquired over the decades. The final decision came down to DC President, Jennette Khan, who seems to have taken it on purely commercial grounds, given that the movie had performed badly, so wasn't likely to lead to any further movies or licensing opportunities for the Supergirl 'property' in the near future. According to the famous note (a scan of which you'll find online) Khan was asked by editor Dick Giordano: "Can we kill Supergirl in Crisis? ... Yes / No / Only if we have a new Supergirl soon / None of the above" -- Khan originally ticked "None of the above", then scribbled out the tick and selected "Yes". So (if that note is genuine) then it appears to have been a close run decision.
Honestly, I love the headband. But mostly because of a single panel in Crisis on Infinite Earths during Kara's battle with the Anti-monitor. She's crouched, about to bounce like a coiled spring, looks fierce, wild, ready to destroy anything. And she wears the headband. It's probably my favorite image of hers.
I never knew that Supergirl in the 80's was actually a fleshed out character as this Supergirl series is rarely examined by fans or critics so I appreciate you for covering this.
I was going to comment on Solo #1 (Dec 2004) but also that her parents made their last appearance in the epilogue of Superman 414 (Dec 1985) where Superman takes Kara’s body to Rokyn (New Krypton) for burial.
Just wanna say that you’re one of the few RU-vidrs I watch when I just genuinely need to be reminded that honest friendly people exist. Also I love random comic history. But mostly it’s for you!
Kara is my favorite superhero of all. Her backstory of being old enough to remember and mourn Krypton, coupled with being then an alien who didn't grow up on Earth, could really lead to some amazing character and character development. I believe I read this series when it was originally out. I don't remember the plots, but totally remember the magic comb!!! I love Kara Zor-El and all her incarnations, including Power Girl.
Totally agree with you about how well Supergirl is treated in this series. It is a shame that people only see her through the lens of her goofy Silver Age adventures, when this series had so much potential. The reason why her birth parents being alive isn't mentioned is because DC were beginning to worry that Kara's age had slipped older and older over the years, so she was now only a few years younger than her famous cousin. So issue one is a quiet retcon that reverts Kara back to just 19 years old (see the editorial page of issue one, or was it two(?)), and in doing so they needed to silently streamline much of her history by conveniently forgetting parts of her past.
The claim she was only 19 years old after all that she had done, and the fact that nobody recognized her from the soap ( or as a former silver age Miss Universe) that she literally had just finished appearing on, are two things that bugged me about this series. Joan just seemed the type who would have watched soaps and recognized Linda.
To be honest, in the second volume of her own series, Supergirl would have been in her 20s timeline wise because she crash landed on Earth and was sent to an orphanage at the age of 15 or 16 years old, went to high school and college, and got a series of jobs that led her to become a radio announcer, an student advisor, and an actress. In my head canon, Supergirl would have been active for ten years between her first appearance and her death in Crisis On Infinite Earths, thus making her 26 years old (because she was born on September 22 in Argo City and landed on Earth on May 18 based on the DC 1976 calendar) while her cousin would have been active for 29 years between his debut as Superboy and Crisis On Infinite Earths (because he made his debut as Superboy on June 11 before he made his debut as Superman at the age of 21 based on the DC 1976 calendar and Superman: The Secret Years), thus making him 37 years old.
@@joshuaingobo1559 Be aware that your headcannon actually frames the problem they were having. Superman was only 30. That was the rule back then, Superman and Batman were forever 30. Making Kara 26 meant that she was now only four years younger than Superman, which creates a problem with her origin story from the silver age. Generally comics back then operated on a timeline that would kind of wend back and forth a bit. If you wanted to relate things to the characters around the DC universe, at this point Robin (Dick Grayson) was 19 in the New Teen Titans. Supergirl was probably on a couple of years older than Robin, if not the same age as him. So 19 does make some sense. Also, keep in mind that DC would regularly ascribe some of their more outlandish (goofy) stories to the "imaginary tale" category for the characters canon. Let's face it, a lot of Supergirl's stories were easily put in this category.
@@katnerd6712 Pre-Crisis Superman was always officially 29 years old since an editorial decision in the 1970s until the Death of Superman bumped it up to 35. This was a plot point when a hippy magically made it so only people under 30 could enter Metropolis.
I love this channel because Supergirl’s history in comics has always confused me to no end. After watching these vids, I’m still confused but at least I giggled along the way.
The Post Crisis “Matrix” Supergirl was one of my favorite versions of the character. Peter David’s series went a little off the rails in my opinion (but loved his pseudo sequel IDW series) and it was bitter sweet to see Kara return in Superman/Batman.
This would have been a MUCH better series to follow/start on for the CW series than what we got! It makes Kara/Linda so much more interesting and dynamically different from Clark. I love her drive and wish to know who she is as a kryptonian transplant. It's so much more interesting.
In the 80s, John Ostrander was a young actor in Chicago. This series was set in Chicago in the 80s. It's fun to see places in my new city get name-checked. Linda and crew live in Rogers Park, which is a neighborhood in the far north side.
What I learned from this: The Supergirl movie wasn't faithful to the narrative to the source material BUT it was pretty damn accurate to the tone and style of the source material. This stuff is insane.
I used to love Supergirl , I don't think anyone really did her character justice. The headband was a bit much, even back then. Love your hair in this video, looking pretty super, girl! Lol
She was originally going to wear the headband in the movie, but the producers changed their minds, too late for DC. They'd already changed her costume.
In random information that no one probably cares about: Despite the implication here, the Orient Express was still running at that time and, in fact, outlived this series by a quarter century.
Infantino created Black Canary, and he drew Supergirl to look like Black Canary. It was kind of cool to see a Supergirl drawn as a young woman rather than a teenage girl. ;-)
May I suggest covering Supergirl's adventures with the LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES? Kara's relationship with Brainy feels more authentic than any of these love interests, but maybe that's nostalgia talking.
Don't have time to watch gotta go to work...just want to throw out a challenger to "Most Underrated Supergirl series", in the form of "Cosmic Adventures in the 8th Grade!" Also, hoping she covers the final Supergirl Silver Age story, where Superman discovers Kara's secret marriage (Continuity is weird, as this occurs after her death, but somehow before Crisis climaxes)!
This series is very special to me. When I first started collecting comics in the early 90s, issue 1 was among the first batch of comics I bought at a store called Cover to Cover (which I still miss). And I made it my mission to get as many issues as I could. Very soon I had all of them except issue 10, which I could never find (pre-internet so you couldn't just go to eBay etc) The owner would let you keep comics in a bag that you planned to buy later, sort of like layaway, (which was helpful for a kid in grade school with no income) and one day when my mom took to buy what was in my bag, we got to the car before we realized that he had put issue 10 in there! He out a note that said "surprise! I finally tracked down a copy of issue 10 of Supergirl for you." He didn't even charge us for it! I really miss Cover to Cover! That was kind of a long story, but it's a big part of why I always loved this series, and Supergirl in general.
Actually, Matrix Prime would be a fun villain to add to the CW Supergirl series (small tweaks to the story would be needed, but it would be nice though)
They could also mix up the robot with the matrix Supergirl and make some sort of evil (or misunderstood) Supergirl robot. Seems like something right at the CW alley.
18:58. According to the telepathic extension course I took from the Xavier Institute taught by Prof.Gwen Poole, this person was in fact a reality warper and unaware of it.
This is my all-time favorite classic Supergirl run. It nicely straddled the line between the realism the New Teen Titans was bringing to comics with just enough early Bronze Age/early Silver Age fun thrown it to give it a very distinctive voice.
Loved your thoughts on this run! Glad you enjoyed it and shared your thoughts on Kara as a character. You actually ID'd a lot of problems DC keeps giving to Supergirl recently, making her feel like a guest star in her own book, overloading with cameos, not allowing her to develop as a character. Great work Sasha :)
You're so good, but so young; headbands were not a wide-spread fashion accessory in the 80s; they came out of the health-club & jogging milieu to keep sweaty hair out of the face, and spilled over only a little bit into a kind of sweatsuit subculture.
And while Kryptonian males had worn them, so did the original Invisible Kid all the way back in the 60s. And how it is really all that much different than Wonder Woman's tiara?
A friend was writing for a magazine ("Ginchy" I believe it was called) and he was granted an interview with John Ostrander. He described him as the nicest person he'd ever met in the industry. That surprised me because I'd always been under the impression that Louise Simonson was MADE of sugar.
Do the Crisis On Infinite Earths tie-in Superman #415: "Supergirl's Secret Marriage!" Not a dream! Not an imaginary story! Set after her death but before the merging of the worlds, Superman learns that Supergirl had a brief period of wedded bliss! Just before it was retconned out of existence! (It's also on Comixology.)
@@johnpjones182 Yes. Amnesia does play a role in the story. Still, Kara got hitched! For real! In the real timeline! Before it wasn't the real timeline any more!
If you think about it unless the clone Linda was killed by a Shadow demon during crisis she should have lived through the merging of the earth and have been on the new Earth and any other subsequent reboots. But then again ever since that convergence miniseries I've been totally confused because didn't they send flash and Supergirl back and they didn't get killed so wouldn't that have totally changed everything anyhow? it makes my head hurt
I remember buying this title off the newsstands back in the day before I discovered comic stores, so I have an incomplete run. I do remember seeing a lot of these scenes so I probably did get most of them. I seem to remember the costume change was somehow linked to the movie version somehow though not by story. My guess is the 70's version was more difficult to do for a movie. I also seem to remember reading one of the later Crisis crossover books that a was published after Supergirl's death and it was revealed she was secretly married. She sure had alot going on in her personal life Thanks for the look back.
I've read that the headband was adopted for the comics because the Supergirl Movie at one stage planned to give her a headband. But the filmmakers ultimately abandoned the headband design. So it's an odd relic of a tie-in that never happened.
As a Supergirl fan, I am loving this series. I hope you do the 90’s, but the 80 issues… The 2004 series is my favorite, but has a lot of crossovers. It’s a short box of books all by itself. But she teams up with Green Lantern, Lobo and others. Trained by Batman and Wonder Woman, was a member of the Justice League, spent almost 2 years in the future with the Legion.
Blackstarr was in my very first youtube video (since deleted). From her reappearance in "DC Comics Presents". I wonder if any Supergirl plot threads continued in those cameos before Crisis.
I was very peeved when they canceled this Supergirl run! I was livid when they did it to use her as a martyr! The clones and redo's for a while after left me cold. So cold I stoped reading comics that I had been reading for 20 + years.
I love that you covered this series! It's one of my favourite comic books series of all-time! I grew up in the 80s; my introduction to the Supergirl character was through the totally rad 80s film (I'm a huge fan of it) and this is THE Supergirl of my youth.
Not only do I have every issue of this series, but it was set in Chicago, where I grew up, so I could literally go read the comics at the locations they were taking place (I assume that "Lake Shore University" was UIC). And, no, there was no big fangirling for Georg Solti, the real world musical director of the Chicago Symphony in the 80s. However, I did once take a date to see Les Misérable, and after the performance, we encountered the performer who had played Marius. My date expressed it would have been a perfect night had she been able to get his autograph. Really?? THAT would have made it perfect? Not the nice dinner I took you to? Not the front row center seats at the Chicago Theatre? Not a night night out with moi? What was I saying?
While this is not my favorite Supergirl series, it still holds a place in my heart, because this was the was my first time reading about Supergirl! For me it was fun to see her cast of villains! I also felt that yes she was fleshed out more! I have this whole series in trade form and it was differently worth the read so I could pick read the all the issues! My favorite issues from that run are the clone arc and Decay! The head band I didn't mine it as I remember that time in the 80's when the head bands were in so I was used to seeing. I would also love to see a Supergirl place list with you covering all the eras of Supergirl all the way up to the current age. I'm currently reading the new 52 run of Supergirl and I'm enjoying that one now, that new 52 Kara is very different from the 80's version.
Supergirl in the DCAU is a force to be reckoned with and a dynamic character to boot. The first time I watched Superman/Batman Apocalypse(one of my favorites out of their animated line up)my jaw dropped a bit during her fight with Darkseid. Her Justice League Unlimited story arc was also top notch.
This was indeed an order-of-magnitude improvement over her 1972-73 solo series, as well as the bulk of her appearances in the SMF Dollar books where for the most part she was cursed with lifeless artists like Don Heck and Win Mortimer. Paul Kupperberg has published a volume reprinting the two scripts he wrote with Eduardo Baretto's pencils for the proposed successor Superboy-Supergirl "double book". Suffice to say, the story picks up where it left off with Dick Malverne making a clumsy pass at Linda, Supergirl in turn undergoes a period of self doubt, visits her birth parents on "Rokyn" and considers the possibility of giving up the hero biz. The double book alas, was canceled prior to publication when DC Publisher Jeanette Kahn handed down her death sentence for Kara Zor El & Barry Allen in the COIE. The book is called the "Unpublished Comic Book Scripts of Paul Kupperberg" I'm sure its available out there somewhere (I have an autographed copy, live in person conventions are the best!). Great Podcast please keep up the good work!
I loved this series it was a continuous story from her adventures in superman family loved the villains wish they bring back reactron and decay next please Sasha do a look at my favourite red tornado from the seventies and the eighties
I’ve always loved Supergirl. Daring New Adventures of Supergirl was a fun series, which led me to find Adventure Comics #381-~424 (which kind of was all over the board). This series had promise and should have completed fully before ending. I agree there was a lot that could have happened and developed. Sadly, DC wanted her to die. I was to see a video on Martix-Supergirl that leds to her merging with Linda Lee (Peter David series). Then Batman/Superman series that my favorite artists, Michael Turner, done. Also, should do a video on her death and post-Crisis before matrix. Supergirl was still used at this time in couple of issues in different titles. This was to allow readers to have a hidden “farewell”.
Love your channel. Superman 415 tells us Supergirl lost her memory and got married. Her battle with Blackstar brought her memories back. It also gave her a premonition of her death.
YES!! One of my favorite scenes from Crisis was Supergirl meeting up with Batgirl atop a skyscraper...Kara was concerned for Babs cuz she could hear the worry in her voice. As Supergirl was leaving, Barbara's thoughts were about how special Kara is, how much hope she has and that she is a true hero while she questions her own convictions & purpose...her ending thought is something like "what have i become". The scene is memorable cuz it was the last time Kara & Babs wre together and it sets up the "Kara is a true hero" sentiment before The Anti- Monitor kills her.
I actually collected this series when it came out. This series introduced me to the New Doom Patrol, which led me to track down the original Doom Patrol and the original Teen Titans, Superman Family and Batman Family. Great recap. You are my favorite Geek Girl.
I remember reading about Blackstarr, the Gang, Matrix-Prime and Psi in the Who's Who books and thinking this series had to be a wild ride! Nice to see I was right!
Can't say that I sampled 80's Supergirl but there was one story in Christmas With The Super-Heroes #2 (Should Auld Acquaintance Be Forgot) which I'll never forget . Speaking of which, would you consider a pre-Christmas review of DC and Marvel's past oversized Holiday specials?
It is so cool that you release this now as I am reading a collection of the first 12 issues of this series and really enjoying it. I think Paul Kupperberg is kind of an underrated writer for this time.
BTW, the headband thing was really a nod to Olivia Newton John's fashion hairpiece in her "Physical" video, from 1981. However, DC's costume change halfway through the 80s SG series was prompted by movie producers for the 1984 movie adaptation starring Helen Slater, which eventually got ditched in screen tests anyway.
I really dig how deep you go in on your research. No one else would let us know about a man who pencils 1 back storyline in a 60's Supergirl comic...love it 😎
Like i said in a earlier post the 80's costume was my Favorite. But even better, is they Round Glasses! the add infinitely to the Salt in the video! I LOVE THEM!
Oh, and one little tidbit of trivia: if you pay attention you'll note that this series actually lists the street and house number where Linda Danvers has her apartment. Well, turns out that this is a real street in Chicago, and there is indeed a house at that number Sadly, it does not look like the one in the comic. Apartment 12A, 1537 West Fargo Ave, Chicago.
I seriously love how you pick a thing to explore and see it through to the end like every series you do makes me want to get the next episode and I don’t have to wait a yeah and hope you decide to finish it out. You also are great at picking interesting topics to talk about
I never read any Supergirl series before but with all these retrospectives you've been doing I've really been missing out some stories are funny or weird, I love all the alternate costumes, get to see more of her villains, I always figured she'd just go up against Supermans villains.
I really enjoyed "The Girl Who Stole Supergirl's Life" even if the way they got there was convoluted. How did the unconscious depowered mini clones combine to form one Supergirl? They just do. I'm guessing the writers couldn't come up with a story for six 12-inch Supergirls without any powers. Anyway, I wanted more of the clone; did she ever turn up again before the reboot? And what was Phil doing on Wednesday?
I remember a story where Supergirl was fighting a Tornado and when she finished she was in Chicago and decided to relocate there. Having reread the first issue it clearly wasn't this. It must have been one of those backup features where they teased a new series in another book. Like the way that had a preview for Zoo Crew in the Teen Titans.
I love this run of Supergirl and proud to own it in 2 thick Trade Paperback volumes !!! The stories are great and Kara was amazing in this entire run !!!
THE HEADBAND(S) WAS A BIG THING BACK IN THE SILVER AGE AND IN THE GOLDEN AGE, AS THEY REPRESENTED EARLY KRYPTON. SO I CAN SEE WHY KARA WOULD DEVELOP THAT IN HER WARDROBE.
Blackstarr returns in DC Comics Presents (Superman's team-up title at that time) #86 which is a Crisis On Infinite Earths tie-in and one of Supergirl's last stories before she's retconned out of existence after the events of COIE #12. There was another story in one of the Superman titles after her death in COIE #7 where Superman meets Kara's long-lost husband (not a hoax! not a dream! not an imaginary story!) that brought the sadness big time.
The costume and head band was Emma Porteous’ idea for Helen Slaters movie appearance, but it was dropped as was the rest of the costume design for a more basic superman look. The comics followed the movie’s original design with the headband but when the film dropped it it was too late for the comic book which put a back story to it and could not get rid of it.
