“And I can’t wait to meet all your friends and fight evil with you.” “Um…about that…”
Action Comics #252 (Facsimile Edition)
DC Comics (May, 1959; reprint version: December, 2025)
The Silver Age doesn’t have as many stories per issue as the Golden Age, but we are still at multiple stories per issue. Superman began in the first Action Comics and slowly took the comic over, but we still have that bad comedy page I always ignore in my Golden Age reviews and three stories. It’s just two of them feature Superman. The third has Congo Bill, a character that never reached the heights of Superman but still did better than most of the characters Superman debuted with.
Of course, this comic is known best for the first appearance of Kara Zor-El. While Supergirls and Superwomen were one-shotters in previous comics, Kara would go on to become one of DC’s more well know heroines, though she hasn’t gotten as much exposure as her cousin. She didn’t even break out comics until the 1980s live-action movie as the Salkinds tried to see what else they could exploit in the Metropolis group. She wouldn’t get another post-comic appearance again until the DCAU that I’m aware of, with a few live-action cameos after that until she got her own series on CBS, later moved to the CW. Even Hawkgirl got a couple of Superfriends appearances.
However, the first story features another Superman character, one of his villains, making his debut as well, and that’s where we start.
The Menace Of Metallo!
While the Grand Comics Database lists creators, none of them are getting credited in the reprint I own. Yes, this is Metallo’s first appearance, and much like Black Adam it should have been his last. Yeah, he dies in this story. He’s a reporter who is also a thief who thinks he got away with the perfect crime, even mocking a radio show villain who got caught because he forgot to wipe his fingerprints off the gun while John Corben wiped his prints off the gun and made it look like a suicide. (At the end of the story, adding insult to injury, he didn’t wipe off the cartridges and the cops were coming for him.) Then he gets into a roadside accident and a professor turns him into a Silver Age version of a cyborg to save his life. He starts using uranium to power his robot body but they only last a day so he has to steal more, the cops dubbing him “Metallo The Metal Man”. (Lawsuit from Doc Magnus incoming.) After learning Kryptonite could keep him alive forever, he gains a sample and tries to kill Superman with it, but he switches one he’s carrying with a fake and Corbin has a fatal heart attack.
I’m surprised Sasha Woods of Casually Comics on YouTube hasn’t covered this one. It’s a new origin, and one he doesn’t really live through. (DC would bring him back and he’s made a few appearances thanks to Superboy, Lois & Clark (both using the same terrible costume), and a complete remake in Superman: The Animated Series to the version we know today unless the comics beat them to it. Lois is sure he’s Superman when she sees him get shot. Superman doesn’t have heat vision but uses the heat of his X-Ray vision to melt a piece of Kryptonite, and he keeps getting pulled away from Metallo’s appearances for other emergencies, including a crazy actress who thinks going over Niagara Falls in a barrel so Superman will rescue her is a great idea for a publicity stunt. It’s got her brand of crazy, and it’s a good story.
Congorilla: “Congo Bill Dies At Dawn”
Foreign Legion mutineers plot to use a nearby oasis as a literal tourist trap with drugged water. They also plan to kill the commandant and a caravan that Congo Bill is leading. Separated from the others so he can’t rally them, Bill instead switches minds with the golden ape and becomes Congorilla, teaching the villains a lesson. I can kind of see why this guy never really caught on, especially after we got Gorilla City or stories involving other kinds of intelligent super-apes. The story isn’t terrible but he’s not that interesting a hero.
The Supergirl From Krypton
Now here’s the story you’re all here for. It’s one we all know because it pops up now and then in some of her appearances in other continuities both in and out of comics, while others had different origins. (The 80s movie and DCAU for example.) A Kryptonian neighborhood somehow is blown free of Krypton with a ball of atmosphere. Unfortunately the ground slowly changes to Kryptonite. Using lead sheets to protect the town, scientist Zor-El marries and has a daughter. Then asteroids destroy the lead (and somehow not the atmospheric bubble) just enough to let the radiation through. Zor-El and his wife learn of Earth and Superman, and so get their daughter free of the dying planetoid with a costume resembling his so he’ll know she’s from Krypton. He also learns that Zor-El is his uncle, making his cousin. Instead of taking her in, he brings her to an orphanage in Midvale, Kara picking the name Linda Lee as she’ll learn to use her powers and someday reveal herself to the world as Supergirl. (If you readers want to see more of her, let them know.)
I want to start by going over the often lampooned idea of Superman taking her to the orphanage instead of taking her in. I even did it in the caption gag for the cover. I actually don’t think he’s wrong. Even if Supergirl was revealed early, him getting a cousin the same time as Clark would arouse suspicions, plus single fathers adopting kids wasn’t exactly “proper” in the 1950s. With Clark’s parents dead in the pre-Crisis world she couldn’t go live with them. The orphanage would be a good place for her to learn about Earth, train her powers in secret like Clark did before becoming Superboy in this timeline before going public, and have a safe place to live. As long as he somehow visited with and kept an eye on her I don’t see the problem.
The story also contains other pre-Crisis things, like mentioning that Superman’s powers came not from the yellow sun but Earth’s lighter gravity. I’m not sure how that explains the X-Ray vision and unknown flight propulsion but maybe that’s the solar side of things, plus an enhancement of his existing powers since yellow/red sun radiation was still in there by then if memory serves. (Superman’s original power set of invulnerability and superstrength can still totally be blamed on gravity while his superbreath could just be his Kryptonian heritage like his superbrain.) Nowadays all his powers come from the yellow sun, but I wouldn’t mind them going with a mix. Also, Kara gets her powers pretty fast for how little exposure she’s had to the planet, but they could have just wanted to get her story going for fans. Of course they would ask to see more and more is what they got.
overall
While hindsight plays a factor in the origins of Metallo and Supergirl, who both went on to be remembered and succeeding as part of the Superman cast, both stories are also rather good both as origin and as stories of the period. Metallo’s story ends a bit short but not by much. Kara is shown to have great potential, which she lived up to until more recent years with writers who think all trauma is burying yourself in misery instead of trying to rise above it. I very much enjoyed this comic.
Too bad next week I’m back to “I can do it, I will do it…when I stop hating civilization long enough and actually use the knowledge and skills I learned since I was a child to actually so something useful”. Yeah, back to pre-DC for a while, and Thunderbolt.
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