Action Comics #255
Cover Date: August 1959 | Written by Otto Binder | Art by Jim Mooney
Read in Supergirl - the Silver Age vol. 1 | NOTE: These commentaries are going to be very spoiler heavy.
When we last saw Kara, she had just returned to the orphanage after spending a couple of days adopted by the Dales, a couple that only wanted Linda Lee to help run a con at their sideshow. Now that she’s back it’s time for her to focus on training her powers in “Supergirl Visits the 21st Century!”
So far most of her stories have revolved around orphanages and adoption. Plus she’s a refugee and a survivor of the mass extinction of her people. Supergirl really has always been the hero of people who’ve been discarded or “left behind”. I know modern comics lean into this sometimes, I wonder when we’re going to start seeing it more explicitly leaned into.
From the title alone, as well as the splash panel, we already know that we’re going into the future. Maybe it’s still a thing and I just haven’t noticed, but I didn’t know that Supers could time travel under their own power back in the silver-age. I’m sure by the time Supergirl shows up we’ve seen Superman do it before, but I didn’t read those.
I’d be making a bigger deal of this if I hadn’t already seen Supergirl doing it in Action Comics #267 (yeah I skipped around a little bit when I first started this, I wrote a whole note about it).
We start our adventure off with Linda in charge of babysitting some of the younger children at the orphanage. They’re behaving and playing at the playground so Linda takes this opportunity to relax and read the newspaper, where she reads about an unfortunately unsuccessful attempt to send a probe to Venus. She doesn’t get to read for too long before her relaxation time is interrupted by a spear being thrown into the tree behind her!
Linda investigates and finds a piece of paper with what looks like a simple dot on it, but upon inspection with her microscopic vision, Linda sees that it’s a note from Superman written so small that only Linda could read it.
It seems Superman’s happy with how Linda’s training is going, and gives her the homework assignment to work on her ability to break the time-barrier.
She waits until the night when the rest of the orphanage is asleep and flies out into space. Apparently the key to time travel is to travel faster than the speed of light. The art makes her seem like she’s also spinning as she flies, I wonder i that helps with the time travel.
Supergirl decides to travel to the 21st century, and away she goes!
She’s traveled about a hundred years, so around 2059, where she discovers that space travel has been invented (wild to think that the first manned flight into space in the real world was still almost two years away at the time of publication of this book), as well as fully established colonies on asteroids.
Well damn, that’s less than forty years from now, we better get a move on!
Supergirl doesn’t have time to enjoy her success though as almost no sooner does she arrive that she witnesses a tiny meteor pierce the dome of one of the colonies. And upon inspection realizes that it’s the Venus probe that she just read about, but has been hurtling through space for the last hundred years.
I give the writing of these old comics a hard time sometimes (playfully though, I love these silly stories), but this is a legit nice callback, so props to Otto Binder for that.
Supergirl races into the colony after the probe, and uses her x-ray vision to fuse the hole shut. But while she’s doing that, that’s left the colony in danger of the probe crashing into it. Using her telescopic vision, Supergirl sees that it’s heading right for a group of orphans playing. I don’t know how Supergirl knows they’re orphans, but she calls them that. Maybe she read the splash panel at the beginning. She also declares that they’re from all worlds, and that one is pretty obvious as most of the kids shown are aliens.
Thankfully, one of the orphans is able to save everyone using his anti-gravity gun that he invented himself. We know that last part because his alien friend tells us so. And he also tells us that the boy’s name is Tommy, who just happens to be a blonde-haired white person. (because this is a 1959 comic book what else would he be?)
The ant-gravity gun sends the probe flying back up into the air where it slams directly into Supergirl, shattering upon impact.
The minor explosion gives Supergirl the cover to slip away from view. As she slips down into what looks like a forest area with a lot of exotic shrubbery, Kara muses that it’ll be good practice for her to keep her presence here a secret just like she does in 1959.
And she immediately happens upon a green kryptonite meteor. It effects poor Kara immediately and despite her effort to blast it with her x-ray vision and her super-breath, she’s already too weak to destroy it.
Rapidly losing her strength, Supergirl ponders if she’s going to die here in the future.
WELL THAT’S A BUMMER.
Luckily, Tommy and and his alien friend, who’s name we learn is Jik, are wondering around the area, playing with Tommy’s Changer Ray that alters atoms to let matter transform into anything Tommy wants.
By chance the two happen upon the kryptonite meteor and decide that they’re going to turn it into a block of ice. And somehow they don’t see Supergirl lying there near death just a few feet away. Supergirl celebrates her miracle rescue.
Supergirl insists on repaying her debt to Tommy before leaving the future. And lucky for her the boys wander into a very dangerous area because the caution sign had been knocked down.
Pretty soon Tommy and Jik come across a giant green monster that looks like a brontosaurus with alien antennae. Supergirl thinks this is her chance to repay Tommy but before she can Tommy whips out his Hypno-gun and hypnotizes the creature.
Next the boys get caught in some quicksand because a “rainbow aura prevented them from seeing (it)”.
Ah yes, luring children into quicksand, exactly what rainbows are known for.
Supergirl thinks it’s her chance, but as she’s about to swoop in, Tommy pulls out his Sky Hook (disappointingly not a basketball move), enabling the two to climb out on their own.
This all leaves Supergirl frustrated. She follows Tommy back to the orphanage where witnesses Tommy being told that a scientist and his wife want to adopt the child at the orphanage with the best scientific mind, making gadget-boy Tommy the obvious choice.
The couple are on their way currently from Earth and should be there soon. Kara uses her x-ray vision to get a look at the adoption certificate vision to see who is the family is and decides to use her telescopic vision to spy in on the family’s ship to see if they look like kind people.
Which, seriously Kara, boundaries. But, it turns out that the family’s ship is in trouble so I guess it all works out.
They’ve run into a field of crystalline mirror meteors which honestly look really cool.
Supergirl flies out to help, but is having trouble making out the actual ship from the reflections (it’s a fun house, IN SPACE). So Supergirl finds a stone meteor and smashes it with one super-blow, creating enough dust in the area to cover the mirror meteors.
From there Kara is able to safely push the ship to safety. She hangs around long enough to see Tommy gleefully meeting his new family, then heads back to 1959.
She says that she’s going to write about her day in her diary, which she writes in Kryptonese for secrecy. I sure hope no one ever finds her diary written in a weird alien language! That’d be awkward.
In the last panel she’s writing her diary entry, where she proclaims that her test flight through time has ended, and also commenting on how now that Tommy’s with his new family, he’s going to be known as Tommy Tomorrow.
For those of us that didn’t know, the Tommy that we followed this issue was the child version of DC character Colonel Tommy Tomorrow, Ace of the Future Planeteers. I personally know nothing about this character outside of what I read in this Supergirl story, but he seems to be a moderately popular DC character at the time that debuted in 1950s and regularly ran as backup stories in Action Comics, and also featured in World’s Finest Comics, as noted in the panel. From what I can tell, he seems to be DC’s answer to popular sci-fi heroes of the era like Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers.
I mentioned it earlier, but I often give the writing of these comics a hard time. It’s coming from a place of fondness though, I genuinely enjoy reading these adventures, it’s fascinating learning about what comic storytelling was like back then.
And I bring that up to say that I quite liked this issue. No, there wasn’t anything outlandish like throwing a boulder through the world, but it was a fun little tale with solid pacing and a consistent arc and some genuinely neat ideas.
Until next time, hope, help, and compassion for all!
