Paneling: Superman Family #221

Today is Superman Day, but because of her upcoming movie, it’s also Supergirl Day.

Given that the Maid of Might is having a moment, and I recently made a reference to her Bronze Age acting career, I thought I’d take a look at a panel that has stuck with me throughout the years.

It comes from the penultimate issue of The Superman Family, which wraps up a two-part adventure that brings the Girl of Steel into conflict with one of her cousin’s enemies.

The story by Paul Kupperburg, with pencils by Win Mortimer, inks by Sal Tapani, colors by Jerry Serpe, and letters by A. Kubert – I don’t know which one – opens with Supergirl, in her secret identity of Linda Danvers, watching a news story about her encounter with the Master Jailer, who managed to escape becoming the Master Jailed.

Because she has the night off from her day job on a daytime soap opera, she decides to switch to her costume and head out in search of the villain. However, despite having a super-memory, she forgot that she had plans to go shopping with a friend.

But her super-resolve wavers in the face of her friend’s insistence, and so she sets aside the never-ending battle to pursue neither truth nor justice, but just the American Way: spending money!

After finishing the shopping spree and walking out onto the sidewalk, her friend Marilyn steps away to hail a cab, and while she’s doing that, a woman approaches Linda, asking her if she is Margo Hatton from Secret Hearts.

Linda replies that she does indeed play that character and thinks about how nice it is be recognized in her civilian identity for a change.

But that nice feeling only lasts until the third panel of the fourth page, which is when this moment that has always stuck with me happens:

You see, Linda’s character is a villain on the show, and she apparently plays her so convincingly that this woman cannot distinguish between the show and reality.

She especially abhors the way Margo mistreats her nice old aunt, and she wants her aunt to know that Emily Finestein is on her side!

I seem to recall this sort of thing happening in real life fairly regularly back then. Not that it doesn’t happen now in the modern era of parasocial relationships, but I just remember it being something that made the news a lot, particularly whenever it took an even darker turn.

There were just a lot of stories of stars who had to keep their marriages a secret so as to avoid enraging their fans – and lowering their shows’ ratings – and threatening letters, and people breaking into celebrities’ homes.

So this stuck in my mind because it was sort of “ripped from the headlines” years before Law & Order was around to do it.

As for the rest of the story, another run-in with the Master Jailer ends with his escape once more.

Later, we get to see Linda on set, vamping it up as the villainous Margo…

…but shooting is interrupted by someone on the set listening to the radio too loud.

However, fortuitously, the radio was broadcasting a breaking news story about a Master Jailer sighting.

Linda decides to play the diva – which is the sort of thing I suggested should have been part of her adventure with Blade – as an excuse to slip away.

She quickly finds the Master Jailer, who is actually lying in wait, ready to spring a trap! He hits her with an energy beam that somehow turns her into a ray of light and sends her shooting off into space, unable to slow down or change direction!

However, she does manage to slightly alter her course just enough to fly towards the sun and use its gravitational pull to slingshot her towards a space warp that she happens to know about, which leads to another memorable panel just because of her face.

She quickly heads back to Earth and finds that the Jailer had taken advantage of her absence to rob a jewelry store.

With the element of surprise on her side, she’s able to make quick work of taking out the villain, and even manages to get in a pun to accompany the punch.

Superman Family was one of my favorite comics as a kid, though I must admit it wasn’t because of the Supergirl stories. Not that I didn’t like them, it’s just that the Mr. and Mrs. Superman and, of course, Lois Lane features were the biggest draws.

Beyond that, an issue of the series is the first comic I remember looking at.

When I bought this as a kid, I had no idea it was the second-to-last issue, and I didn’t actually pick up the final issue, though I do have it now, as part of my complete run of the series.

After Superman Family ended, Supergirl got her own title, with Lois Lane as a back-up feature, and the other characters who had been featured in the anthology book were left in limbo or limited to their appearances as supporting characters in Superman’s other books.

I still think the idea of Supergirl playing a villain on TV is a lot of fun, and I hope it’s something that gets revisited in her current series, though that tends to focus more on callbacks to the Silver Age rather than to the Bronze.

Oh, and a fun thing about Secret Hearts is that it had been the title of a Romance comic that DC put out back when those were still a thing. I thought it was clever to revive the name as an in-universe soap opera.

One of my favorite little details in the live-action Doom Patrol TV series was the frequent references to – and clips from – a daytime soap called, you guessed it, Secret Hearts.

Sadly, I never caught any references to Margo Hatton.

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