December 1951: The Girl of Tomorrow
Superman encountered several super-females during his long career, including his own cousin and various amped-up versions of Lois Lane and Lana Lang. But Susan Semple was a variation on the theme. Unlike the others, this “Girl of Tomorrow” didn’t have powers that directly paralleled Superman’s. Introduced in Action Comics 163 (Dec. 1951), she appeared instead to be a female counterpart to Captain Comet, a DC character who’d been introduced in Strange Adventures seven months before. Captain Comet was, after all, himself a Superman updated from the 1930s to the 1950s, the era of the flying saucer and the atom bomb. His extraordinary abilities were more mental than physical. This new Man of Tomorrow’s powers included telepathy, telekinesis and ESP, and the Girl of Tomorrow shared them. Bespectacled Daily Planet receptionist Susan Semple mooned over Superman, and when she heard eccentric scientist Prof. Weirton’s claims that he could transform ordinary people into super beings, she was fi...