Item - Supergirl: The Girl of Steel

There's a Wizard of Oz plotline in here which seems kind of strange, but otherwise this is a pretty unexceptional gamebook.

More reviews by Demian

As Demian says, this is a bit of a random series of adventures for Kara, though it was cool that Which Way was willing to create a book with a decent female protagonist (even if you would think that they would have done Wonder Woman first).

This was one of two books in the series I owned as a kid (Justice League was the other one). The initial setup after an introduction to Supergirl's situation as an alien heroine posing as a student is that Kara picks up a weird noise with her super hearing and her initial choice leads to four possible adventures. There's only one serious storyline with a mission to rescue her cousin from the evil Brainiac (probably my favourite Supes villain). The remaining three are more kooky stories that seem right at home in the Silver Age Of Comics - there's a trip to the Fifth Dimension with Mister Mxyzptlk, a trip back in time to King Arthur's court in order to amusingly help Kara finish a history report (sorry Kara, Iron Man was there first) and definitely the craziest one has to be the story where a loony teacher traps Supergirl in The Wizard Of Oz via a book visualiser machine.

Still, the various storylines and choices are all fun and the characterisation of Supergirl is done differently enough from her cousin so it feels like a Supergirl story. The reason the author likely went with stranger stories for Kara is probably because she didn't have much of her own rogues' gallery at the time, hence why two Superman villains appear instead. I enjoyed it as a kid, indeed it was kind of an introduction to Supergirl for me. Nowadays the stories are definitely on the weird side but if you view them as less 80's Bronze Age and more 50's Silver Age you can let it slide, but I am less sure what modern Supergirl fans would think of this!

More reviews by DerekMetaltron