With her red hair and green-and-orange costume, Supergirl had arrived!
But not really. Not so fast.
In The Girl of Steel (Superman 123, Aug. 1958), writer Otto Binder and artist Dick Sprang offered us a distaff version of the Man of Steel that ended up being a trial run for the more familiar Supergirl, a survivor of Krypton’s Argo City, who arrived a year later in Action Comics.
The first version looked just like the later Supergirl — with blonde hair, sporting Superman’s red-and-blue costume — even if she didn’t act like her.
“However, Super-Girl is not a native of Krypton, being created instead through a magic wish,” noted comics historian Michael E. Grost. “And her personality is very different from the later Supergirl’s. She has none of Supergirl’s pluck, intelligence and resourcefulness. Instead, she is pretty inept, and keeps lousing things up for Superman through her clumsiness with her powers. The Superman family published a number of tales about ‘new’ super-beings, people who have just received their super-powers, and who use them ineptly, creating messes that Superman must clean up. I never thought this was a very interesting subject for a story, here or elsewhere.
“In general, The Girl of Steel is notable only for being a half-way stop on Binder’s road to the creation of Supergirl. He had some good ideas here, but he utilized them much better in The Supergirl From Krypton.”
I’m more kindly disposed to this poignant story than Grost is. Disheartened by her failures, Super-Girl cheerfully and bravely pretends to be immune to kryptonite as she rescues Superman from the deadly rock. But she’s lying. She has fatally poisoned herself in order to save him.
In a touching scene, the dying heroine crawls back to Jimmy Olsen, whose wish had created her.
Her last words are, “Farewell, Jimmy! Give my … my love to Superman… (Sob!)”
This popular story was reprinted a half-dozen times after the other Supergirl debuted, and that created a problem for Superman editor Mort Weisinger. He didn’t want young readers to confuse the first, tragic character with the later, sunnier one. So he changed the original Super-Girl, giving her red hair, a green cape, skirt and boots and an orange shirt emblazoned with the familiar S insignia — a retcon through recoloring.
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