Sunday, October 24, 2010

WhooOOooO*perheroes Week, Part 2, Adventure Comics #408: Supergirl in "The Face at the Window"

It all begins as Linda and her fellow reporters at K-SFTV are standing around, using hip lingo and making politically incorrect analogies.


After a lengthy introductory sequence, they get in the news van and drive around all day until they finally find the splash page.

Yes, it's another creepy house, and this one is also owned by an old man, as in our last tale of the mighty and the macabre. Exactly why the reporters are going there is not clear. Anyway, the old man's not too keen on reporters snooping around the place, which is obviously a dead giveaway that all is not kosher with the property. The old man supposedly lives alone in the house, but-

Creepy! Let's zoom in on that -

As they say in Pepe le Peau cartoons - le yipe! Well, I've got goosebumps. It's the kid in Three Men and a Baby all over again! Well not really all over again, that movie hadn't been made yet.

As all this is going on, there has been a bit of a sub plot involving Linda's co-worker at the station, Nasthalsia, though more commonly known by the apt name of Nasty, getting up to all sorts of shenanigans to try to prove Linda is Supergirl. What a terrible person, coming up with a crazy story like that! Well, except we know she's actually right, but we don't want her to know that, and we definitely don't want her telling other people about it, and Nasty is a notorious blabber mouth. Who works at a TV station. Yeah, you get the picture.

So anyboo, Supergirl has developed the picture she took at the house, only in the picture there is no face! Don't front like you're not terrified by now, don't even play that!

She goes back to the house determined to prove she was right lest she face the good-natured condescension of her co-workers. Nasty also heads to the house, correctly believing Linda will investigate as Supergirl. Nasty dons a black cat-suit not unlike Diabolik's. Speaking of outfits, it is important to note at this point Supergirl is wearing a suit made for her by the Kandorians, because she is having a problem with her powers going on and off. The suit can duplicate some of her powers, and is also quite fashion-forward.

Supergirl skulks around the house a bit, admonishing herself with various bits of good, if obvious, advice, and just generally narrating her own adventure, as many of us are wont to do.

Linda deals with being creeped out by continuing to address herself in her thoughts, probably for the sense of detachment that it provides.

Yes, Nasty is so nasty she even blames Supergirl for what are clearly her own decisions. She surrenders to the old man, who says he will call the police. Then he hears sounds of someone else, and that someone else is, of course, the Maid of Might.


Fortunately either her invulnerability holds up or else the suit does. Either way, she manages to apprehend the old man, only now the little girl is missing. Supergirl's frantic search for her reveals something interesting.

I personally don't see how superheroes would find anything "impossible to believe" after a couple years on the job. If we didn't know he was evil before, referring to the little girl as "brat" definitely puts him over the top. She seemed like a pretty well-behaved little ghost. For ghost she was, as Linda later revisits the house and-


So it's another story from the early seventies, again with a creepy house, an old man, and a dead child. It is interesting to note in both cases the child had actually died from a disease and was not murdered, probably a requirement of the Comics Code Authority, which is fine with me.

*(that's a ghostly WhooOOooO, in case that's unclear)

5 comments:

Steve Does Comics said...

The thing I love about this comic is that the "shock" ending, that the girl is a ghost, is bluntly stated on the front cover. Doh!

Aaron said...

It does have a nicely creepy cover, though it makes it seem as if the ghost will not be as benevolent as she ends up being - but I guess a scary ghost sells comics better than a nice little girl ghost.

Anonymous said...
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rob! said...

Mike Sekowsky was really underrated.

Aaron said...

Glad someone else feels that way! I think his layouts were quite dynamic and amazing - those original JLoA's are just nonstop excitement. I did read something once with Carmine Infantino praising Sekowsky for his work on JLoA because drawing all those characters would have been difficult, and I also seem to remember he thought Mike did the Kirby thing sometimes better than Kirby, which is pretty high praise.