Red Kryptonite + Supergirl = Hilarious Circumstances!
This issue begins with Linda/Supergirl getting used to her new ‘adopted’ life. One of the boys who made her life miserable at the orphanage (he correctly guessed Linda was Supergirl and tried to ‘out’ her) now has the hots for her. Since her other two boyfriends are unavailable (one is a merman and the other is a green dude from the future) Linda decides to give Dick a try.
Supergirl eventually gets bored with her mundane boyfriend and decides to see what Superman is up to. Superman is busy on a mission to another dimension … on a mission to outer space … running experiments at the Fortress of Solitude … super-spying on Lois … on his way to the future so Supergirl decides to use her Kryptonite invulnerability to look for nearby Kryptonite hazards. She finds a group of six red Kryptonite meteors which she decides to destroy. Unfortunately, Supergirl is immune to green Kryptonite but not red Kryptonite . The other unfortunate fact is that Supergirl doesn’t realize this until a bit later in the story.
The effects of the red Kryptonite start manifesting themselves while Linda attends the Midvale Fair. First she gets fat (she pretends to be a balloon) then she turns into a jealous were-girl. The ‘girl’ that were-Kara is jealous of is her Linda-bot who took her place on a date with Dick when Kara sprouted a full-face beard. One wonders if the Linda-bot has feelings and if she’s ‘fully functional’. She has been locked up in that hollow tree for a long time.
Her third bout of red Kryptonite sickness causes Linda to shrink down to microscopic size. This is actually fortuitous since Dick’s father suddenly becomes ill and Kara goes on a fantastic voyage inside his body to destroy the bacteria causing his disease.
That’s 3 down folks, tune in tomorrow to see the effects of the last 3 Kryptonite meteors!
On my patented Supergirl Wink © scale this issue gets:
I started reading DC comics about a year or so after the story was printed where Supergirl’s existence was made known to the world, and I was excited a few years later when an 80-Page Giant (dated April 1968) was published reprinting the entire sequence of stories from the time Supergirl lost her powers and was adopted by the Danverses (?) until the big public revelation. Imagine my disappointment to learn some years later that the Giant had actually cut out entire chapters of this saga, including portions of the stories it did reprint (like the wolfgirl Red K transformation). Nice to see all of these issues recapped here.
If you’d like to get caught up on the issues you missed for cheap they are all collected in DC’s Showcase Supergirl Volume 1 & 2. They are printed on cheaper paper and in B&W but still a great read.
Thanks. I have both Supergirl Archives, Volume 2 of which takes her appearances up to Action 285 and the revelation (that’s how I finally found out about the missing chapters). Too bad that the chances of a Volume 3 seem slim.
Just to close off this topic, here’s a link to a posting of a DC inhouse ad for the 80 page Giant that featured the (incomplete)Supergirl revelation saga: http://marvelmasterworksfansite.yuku.com/topic/13399/t/Steve-Ditko-s-Creeper-What-they-were-saying-then.html