Robert Kanigher’s first story in Adventure Comics #395 (cover by Curt Swam) is a product of its time — not so much the story itself but a couple of images.
The story, “The Rejected Supergirl” (Kanigher, J. Winslow Mortimer), has a computer tabulate male Stanhope College students’ votes of the nine men they’d most like to be. Superman, unsurprisingly, comes in at number one; Supergirl then distributes plaques throughout the Solar System, assigning one world to each of the winners.
Next, of course, the female students vote on their choices among famous women. Linda assumes Supergirl will rock the vote; instead, she comes in bottom of the ninth. Linda is put out by this, then baffled as students repeatedly tell Supergirl “I voted for you! You are the awesome!” (phrased somewhat differently, of course). If they all voted for her, why is she last?
The answer, it turns out, is that some metal dust she picked up in space made the computer go nuts and reverse the list. Once the professor in charge straightens the programming out, Supergirl is on top as she should be.
What makes it interesting is the lists
Obviously I’m not claiming these are scientific polls but it’s interesting to see who Kanigher thought would plausibly be on those lists. Some of them are just meshuggah (I rather doubt Greta Garbo fandom was that high in 1970), some of them are — well, Bill Cosby, need I say more? And I had to look up Bill Russell, whom I discovered was a basketball superstar. Of course, I’m not a sports fan so I doubt I’d have known the name at the time.
Interesting, yes. But man, I could do without Linda crying herself to sleep over the possibility more students would want to be Sophia Loren or Garbo.
