ACTION COMICS #253 (1959)
by Otto Binder & Jim Mooney
Let’s go all the way back to the second Supergirl story ever published.
If you’re not familiar with Supergirl’s origin: after surviving the death of her entire civilization, Supergirl was dumped by her cousin Superman (a.k.a. The Worst) into an orphanage.
The worst orphanage available, of course. Because they repeatedly stress the fact that you must have a special talent in order to be adopted!
While the other orphans can’t wait to be adopted, Supergirl isn’t ready for that.
And not because she JUST started adapting to living in a strange alien world, but because Superman made her promise to keen her identity a secret.
Although I think she made the right call about these specific potential foster parents.
It helps that next to her cousin Supergirl is practically a saint: the orphanage pushes so much on the point that you MUST have an unusual talent to get adopted, so she intervenes to help a couple of farmers to adopt one of the kids.
Aaaand things immediately get sad.
Supergirl has a solution: she’ll make the couple rich by finding oil or precious minerals beneath the couple’s farm!
In her defense, she’s like fourteen.
No worries! She can just throw a rock at the farm so hard that IT CUTS THROUGH HALF THE PLANET.
Why? To create a peeping hole where people can look at the Leaning Tower of Pisa through a telescope pointed at the ground!!!
In her defense, this doesn’t even make it to the top 1,000,000 stupid things of the Silver Age.
Story over, right? Well no, because in a bit of clever writing this makes the couple so rich that they can afford to move out of the farm… and the only thing that interested the orphan was living in a farm, so…
Now if this was a Superman story, he would then come up with a scheme to make the couple poor again. But since this is Supergirl, she decides to turn the orphan into a magician!
I did mention that she’s like fourteen, right?
Obviously things turn out fine, with the kid being adopted and Supergirl managing to be a good person without ruining anyone’s time and without even taking the credit for it.
Why exactly is Superman considered the greatest hero ever in this period when a completely inexperienced fourteen year old can do a better job?
Historical significance: 0/10
Obviously we’ll never see Timmy again.
Silver Age-ness: 6/10
Let’s not go over how many ways the telescope-through-the-ground makes no sense whatsoever.
Does it stand the test of time? 8/10
It’s not groundbreaking or anything, and the orphanage’s attitude rubs me the wrong way, but this is just concentrated wholesomeness.