Despite the title on the Curt Swan cover, Adventure Comics #380 (cover dated May 1969) wasn’t that amazing. It was, however, a landmark.
(In case you’re wondering, this site is still refusing to let me load anything bigger than this image so something’s wrong. Until we fix it, I’m rearranging my posting plans to fit).
In the opening of the Jim Shooter/J. Winslow Mortimer story, Dream Girl has a private talk with Superboy, then the Teen of Steel and a handful of other Legionnaires are hurled mysteriously across space. Struggling to return home (the template is Homer’s Odyssey) they see Superboy die and face multiple perils themselves before discovering it’s all an elaborate ruse. Dream Girl foresaw their deaths; with them out the way, the Legion used dummies to fool the assassins (this reworks the twist of Dream Girl’s debut several years earlier).
If I’d read this when it came out, I suspect even my 11-year-old self might have suspected the twist. But the story isn’t what makes it the landmark, nor is the first hints of Bouncing Boy/Duo Damsel — the Adult Legion story had established they’d marry but there was no previous hint of it in the present. It’s that after seven years appearing in Adventure Comics the Legion of Superheroes was moving to the backup slot in Action Comics. Supergirl, Action‘s former backup, would get the Legion’s role, as shown on the next issue’s cover.
I’ve no idea what the reason for the switch was — comparative sales? Hope of better sales? Whatever the reason, it seems to have worked. The Legion spent a year as a backup, moved to Superboy in 1971, then eventually took over that book for their own. Supergirl spent three years headlining in Adventure, moved to her own series, then had a long run sharing space in Superman Family.
(Minor trivia note: for years some fans of Superman’s Girlfriend, Lois Lane had called for Lana Lang to get her own book. The standard response was “right after Supergirl.” They were disappointed).
It doesn’t work out so well for me. For whatever arcane reason, the DC app stops its Action Comics run with Supergirl’s last issue (with an unrelated Curt Swan cover)—
— and then skips ahead several years. I have scattered issues and reprints from the remaining three years of this Silver Age reread but I’d like more. The app has a good run of the Supergirl issues, which I’m happy about but puzzled: is this era more popular for her than for her cousin? Still, I’ll take what I can get.
#SFWApro.
I cannot remember the source of the account I’m about to give. I wish I’d saved it for purposes of authorisation, but the story has the ring of truth.
In 1969, Mort Weisinger was looking at retirement in a year—for real, instead of his typical threat to retire to coax a raise out of publisher Jack Liebowitz. For his final year, Mr. Weisinger planned on the ROAD programme: Retired On Active Duty. In other words, just coasting until his retirement date.
Early in 1969, Jack Liebowitz decided that Supergirl had a strong enough following to warrant her own title, and he instructed Mort to make it so. Mort did not want the headache of creating a new title out of whole cloth, things like hiring talent to write and draw it, finding time in the printing schedule, negotiating with distributors, and so forth.
So, instead, he simply swapped the slots of Supergirl and the Legion. The Girl of Steel became the headliner of Adventure Comics, thereby giving the super-heroine her own magazine, as Mr. Liebowitz had directed. And the Legion became the back-up strip in Action Comics.
That way, Mr. Weisinger didn’t have to increase his workload.
As I said, I cannot validate it, but it sounds like Mort.
It does. And it makes better sense than any of my guesses over the years. Thanks.
This is why we pay the Commander the big bucks.