This is "Turns Back the Page," which is a look at interesting back-up stories from comic books. If you have suggestions for back-ups that you'd like to see me write about, drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com!

Today we look at an adorable story by Mindy Newell, Howard Bender and Bob Oksner that has an unusual origin. Before I get into that, though, as I noted in an article last year, I think that you could make the argument that this is the first Superman story written by a woman (Carla Conway co-wrote an issue of Superman one month after this story came out and then Randy Lofficier wrote a full issue of Action Comics by herself a year later). So before I even get into the content of the story, this is already a notable back-up story!

The story was titled "With Love from Superman!" and it opens with a little girl named Molly who is a bit of an outcast at school. She tries to ingratiate herself with a group of kids at school who have an autograph club. She tries to become a member of their group and they agree to let her, provided that she gets SUPERMAN'S autograph! As you might imagine, that's a pretty heavy thing to ask of anyone, let alone a little kid who normally would never interact with Superman.

So she writes a letter to Superman asking for his autograph and then she goes to bed and dreams of becoming SUPERGIRL!!

Times passes and she also has a dream that she is Lois Lane.

Then we see Superman reading her letter and, well, let's just say that her life experiences hit Superman directly in his feels.

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The letter naturally matches Superman's history well...

Wow, what an awesome story.

Now, the Supergirl aspect of the story is very interesting. You see, Mindy has spoken about how important the idea of Supergirl was to her as a kid. She told Geek.com recently:

Anyway…they were all so full of wonder—“strange new worlds, new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before,” to appropriate a well-known phrase—I can still clearly see in my mind’s eye Wayne Boring’s (though of course I had no idea who the artists were back then) Lori Lemaris; the worlds of Ranagar and Krypton; the “time-bubble” of the Legionnaires, Superboy and Supergirl’s robots…so much more…but of all of them, my heart belonged to the orphaned Linda Lee, aka Linda Lee Danvers, aka Kara Zor-el, aka Supergirl.

Of course it was the idea of a girl not really that much older than myself—Kara was about 12 or 13 when she first popped out of her rocket ship—though of course when you’re 5,6,7 years old you think that those ages are “really grown-up,” and you can’t wait to get there—with the same powers as the awesome Superman when she first enchanted and entranced me; but later on, when I did grow up and thought more seriously about the implications of my love for the character, I realized that she was an incredibly powerful symbol for little girls back then. Think about it…this wee thing, barely pubescent, was Superman’s “secret weapon”; he depended on Kara to pull his super-ass out of the super-fire in emergencies, he depended on Kara to protect the Earth when he was off-planet—Supergirl literally told little girls that they were capable of doing anything we wanted to. (Hmm…I wonder how many of my generation, who grew up to march in the streets and demand women’s rights, were influenced by this four-color “proto-feminist?”)

However, when she was a little girl, Mindy also specifically had a dream that she put on a Supergirl costume and, well, BECAME Supergirl, just like in the story! She told Action Comics editor Julius Schwartz about the story idea and he helped her work it into this awesome story.

How cool is that?

Okay, that's it for this installment! If you have a suggestion for a future edition of Turns Back the Page, drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com!