Adventure Comics: Early Bronze Supergirl

Though I wasn't born when these were published, I had a cousin ten years older who collected comics in junior high. He was off at college and then the U.S. Army by the time I and his younger brothers discovered his comics stash in their attic. We read them to pieces on Sunday afternoons when it was too rainy or cold to go outdoors.

Adventure Comics was given over to Supergirl starting with #381 in 1969, usually with two stories per issue. Most of the pages in this gallery come from the lead story in #397 (September 1970), entitled 'Now Comes... Zond.' It illustrates the transition from Silver to Bronze Age stories at DC, responding to changes in other DC titles. First, in Wonder Woman #178 (October 1968), the new writer/artist team of Denny O'Neil and Mike Sekowsky gave the Amazon a controversial overhaul, stripping her of her powers and costume, turning her into a Modesty Blaise-style kung fu queen in regular (but mod) clothes, complete with a blind Chinese mentor, I Ching.

By Wonder Woman #186, O'Neil was gone to his famed run on Green Lantern/Green Arrow with Neal Adams. Sekowsky was not only penciling but also writing and even editing Wonder Woman, the same freedom that Jack Kirby enjoyed when he came to DC in 1971 for his (eventually) celebrated Fourth World stories. Sekowsky continued penciling Wonder Woman until 1972 when Denny O'Neil returned to write and edit the title, with Dick Giordano taking over as regular artist. Diana regained her powers and costume in 1973.

In addition to the bimonthly Wonder Woman book, Sekowsky took on similar duties for the Supergirl lead stories in Adventure Comics for a year, beginning with issue #397 (September 1970), updating Supergirl's look and the feel of her series. A costume contest among readers produced several ideas, and Supergirl hopped between numerous looks, a trend that has continued ever since. Adventure Comics #397 was the first costume change, but Sekowsky wanted a plot reason for this development, which had implications for merchandising.

By 1970, cracks were spreading in the 1954 Comics Code. Marv Wolfman's surname challenged the prohibition against mentioning horror monsters. Both Marvel and DC wanted to do stories addressing the epidemic of illegal drug use. In contrast with their soapy stories of the 1960s and before, suspenseful DC covers of the early 1970s routinely showed Lois Lane, Supergirl, and Wonder Woman helpless, often bound. Additionally, the soap opera Dark Shadows had brought gothic horror to mainstream America.

Sekowsky's first issue dives right into those waters. An evil wizard leaves Supergirl totally wrecked, her Silver Age costume in tatters, so that she must seek haberdashery aid from Diana Prince, whose book Sekowsky still controlled at the time. To fight Zond, Sekowsky brought back Morgana, an obnoxious witch he had created in Wonder Woman #186 seven months earlier. She never graced another pre-Crisis story, but the move shows unusual willingness by a DC writer to pull in characters from another book, making them integral to the plot with relatively little exposition of what happened before.

Similar horror themes predominated for the next couple of years, with Supergirl often depicted either unconscious or else restrained and terrified on the cover. Adventure #421 was the apex of the horror trend, as Supergirl was murdered and then (yes, afterward) psychically tortured by her own suicidal subconscious before clawing her way back to life.

All in all, Sekowsky's tenure on Adventure Comics serves as one of the signposts for DC entering the Bronze Age. Some of the pages in this gallery come from slightly later issues which showed the same spirit over the next two years, until Supergirl got her own book, and a new creative team adopted a milder tone.