Profile: Shrinking Violet

Salu Digby, Shrinking Violet
First appearance: Action Comics #276, 1961. She was one of the first members introduced of the Legion of Super-Heroes in the 30th century, a native of the planet Imsk, and was co-created by Jerry Siegel and Jim Mooney.

Current status: she sometimes goes by the name of Atom Girl today.

Was subjected to the following acts of discrimination: she was once kidnapped by radicals from her home planet, and suffered a trauma from that. But she was also betrayed by Duplicate Boy, who hadn’t even tried to rescue her. In a story called “Battle of Venado Bay” in which she and her fellow Imskians were battling the home planet of Cosmic Boy, she had to save her fellow Legionnaire, who was badly injured, from her own fellow fighters. He was so crazy with pain that he didn’t recognize her and smashed her in the head, destroying her right eye and leaving a scar on her face. Shrinking Violet and Cosmic Boy reconciled later and she had her eye repaired, but left the scar intact. Prior to one of the relaunches of the Legion, she had one of her legs blown off and replaced with an artificial one.

What’s wrong with how this was done? I’d say the injury Salu sustained to her face was the most grisly thing she ever went through in her career as a superheroine. But as you can also see, she certainly did go through quite a lot of alarming injuries for a girl during the Bronze Age period.

An oddity: she’s got a fierce loyalty to Brainiac 5, so much that once, when Invisible Kid was spying wrongly on Brainiac, she beat him up but later forgave him. She seems to be quite comfortable with being taken for crazy.