John's Look-out - The Blog of Look-in the Junior Tv Times: The Whole Story - The Bionic Woman

Wednesday 19 February 2020

The Whole Story - The Bionic Woman - Stories 1 and 2.

The success of The Six Million Dollar Man and it's merchandise was unprecedented in it's day, so it was natural that Universal would try to corner the female market too. The Bionic Woman was the female counterpart to Steve Austin, starting as a character in a SMDM story called, as it happens 'The Bionic Woman', Jaime Sommers (Played by Lindsay Wagner) is introduced as an old flame of Steve's, and as the two get to know each other they start doing things as a couple, one of the things being skydiving. Jaime's parachute gets tangled up on a jump and she crashes to the ground. Barely alive, Steve begs Oscar to give Jaime the same treatment as him to save her, Oscar agrees, but tells Steve she will have to become an OSI agent to try to compensate for the cost of the operation. Jaime gets two arms and a leg, but this time she gets an ear instead of an eye, her ear can hear the minutest of sounds at distance and is a useful tool. In the story Jaime's Bionics are rejected by her body and she dies, but there was a furore in the fan base and so much of a furore, a decision was made to bring Jaime back in her own series. In the series she works as a teacher at Ventura Airbase as a cover, but is called on for missions of national importance, just like Steve. The strip Started in Look-in on 7th August 1976 and ran until 19th May 1979 when she joined forces with Steve for a new strip called BIonic Action, it was drawn firstly by John M. Burns and Later on John Bolton took up the pencil. You can start reading the whole story here now...