A couple of years ago my wonderful wife qcait bought me three old issues of Action Comics featuring Streaky the Supercat for my birthday. So I decided to write about them in here! This will be the first of my three part series going through each of these comics. The first issue we will look at is Action Comics 261 which is the first appearance, and origin of Streaky the Supercat. If you are wondering why Streaky doesn’t have top billing on the cover, this comic is old enough that they used to have multiple non-Superman stores in each issue of Action Comics. “Supergirl’s Super Pet!” is actually the third story in this comic along with “Superman’s Fortresses of Solitude!” and “Congorilla’s Last Stand!”. I actually didn’t read the other two stories as this comic is pretty old and I didn’t want to be handling it too much.
Streaky’s origin begins with Linda Lee aka Kara Zor-El aka Supergirl hanging out at her home, an orphanage. Her super vision spots a small piece of kryptonite falling from the sky. She quickly changes into Supergirl to go retrieve the small rock. Kara takes it back to her orphanage chemistry lab and begins experimenting with it to try find a way to reverse its effects. After believing her attempts have failed she tosses the Kryptonite out a window. Just then her new pet kitten happens to find the rock which, through her experiments, has become the new element x-kryptonite. The x-kryptonite gives Streaky superpowers which he immediately goes out on the town to show off. Supergirl hears Streaky’s distinct meow magnified over 50x so she goes to investigate and finds her new pet has super powers. The two go into space to play when suddenly Streaky’s powers are lost and he starts dropping back to earth. Kara quickly swoops him up and takes him safely back to the orphanage.
Here are my stray thoughts and observations. I was surprised to find out that Streaky was not actually from Krypton. I had always assumed with his stripe that he had somehow gotten to earth similar to Krypto the Superdog. I also did not know that Supergirl had an alter ego named Linda Lee. I’ve seen the Supergirl movie in which she uses that name, but like most people I immediately blocked the film out of my memory. I was also surprised that Supergirl wears a brown wig when she is her alter ego Linda Lee. I mean it makes sense, Superman’s glasses have to be the worse disguise of all time. I did laugh out loud when it said, “Next day, in a small chemical laboratory in the orphanage”. You know the small chemical labs that orphanages are all famous for having.
Overall I really liked the story. It was short (only 8 pages) but tells a nice little complete story. It also was corny (as the golden / silver age tend to be) but not so corny that it was unreadable. The art was fantastic, very detailed and able to emote a lot of action.
I don’t really collect a lot of high dollar comics so this is by far the oldest and most valuable comic I own. So I was a little afraid to handle it and in order to read it winded up scanning the complete Streaky story. Since I already went to the trouble of scanning the whole thing I figured I mine as well share the whole thing with you guys, so here it is the complete origin of Streaky the Supercat!
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