Supergirl gets the magazine format anthology treatment

We've seen these for Batman, Superman and the Justice League before (I posted about the latter here), and now, in this so-called "Summer of Supergirl", Superman's cousin from Krypton has got her own over-priced, magazine format collection of four comics stories available outside of comic shops, just in time for her new movie. 

I heard about the magazine online, and so when I found myself in a Walmart, a place I avoid ever being as much as possible, I figured I might as well see if they carried it. After finally finding their small magazine section, I saw that they did indeed have a copy, displayed just as you see it in the image above. 

The cover is by Dan Mora and taken from the variant cover he drew for last year's Supergirl #5; as you can see, it puts the star in the exact same pose that her cousin struck on the cover of his magazine, which is right next to hers.

You can't see it because the football magazines are blocking that part of the cover, but the cover copy reads "Four Acclaimed Comic Book Stories By All-Star Writers and Artists!" Curious what those four stories might be? Let's take a look, shall we...?

But first, there's a prose introduction by Jim McLauchlin, under the headline "The Maiden of Might" and the subhead "More than just Superman's cousin, Supergirl has carved her own path." Now, I just saw that nickname used on the back cover of Supergirl: The World last week and noted that it was well past time to retire it.

The word "maiden", as you know, has two meanings: A virgin or a young, unmarried woman. Maybe it made sense to the old men running the publisher in the late 1950s to refer to Supergirl as such back then, but it's 2026, and we really shouldn't be defining a young woman by whether or not she's had sex or is married. 

I mean, Carol Danvers became Ms. Marvel in 1977—Ms., not Miss—I would hope that DC in 2026 could be at least as progressive as Marvel was during the Carter administration. Instead, might I suggest we stick with The Girl of Steel (or Woman of Steel) or Woman of Tomorrow...? The latter is how she is referred to on the cover of a recent issue of Lobo. 

The introduction is fine, a rather basic, even generic introduction to the character that alludes to her many names and the many places she's been a hero, without actually getting too deep into her kind of crazy history. 

The current status quo of the current Supergirl is that she's the original, pre-Crisis Supergirl who died in Crisis on Infinite Earths and was then resurrected in a 2004 Superman/Batman arc (actually, that was a reboot of the character at the time, but it's been retconned into some kind of resurrection), which McLauchlin puts thusly: "Years later, Supergirl got a reset and returned to her former heroic glory." 

I assume the stories chosen were ones that someone at DC thought would be among the best introductions/jumping-on points, a sort of comic book equivalent of a sampler platter or a beer flight. You can try part of a bigger story arc here and then, when you reach the end, there's a kinda sorta ad telling you which collection you can find the rest of the story in. (In that regard, then, I suppose any story chosen had to be part of a collection currently in print).

They also, wisely, ignored the post-Crisis, pre-2004 Supergirl, the Matrix version, so that even if elements of the continuities might feel a bit wonky here and there, all four comics star the same basic Supergirl, the Kara Zor-El, cousin-from-Krypton version.

I've read two of these, but not the other two. I am, of course, a terrible person to ask what the best four Supergirl issues might be to stick in an anthology like this, due to my lack of familiarity with the character.

I think half of these make perfect sense, the other two much less so; I probably would have put her first appearance in there if for nothing other than historic context, as DC Finest: Supergirl: The Girl of Steel means there's a trade to connect to that, but, if the target audience here is kids, I can see why they might not want to use a comic book from when those kids' grandparents were the target audience. 

Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow #1 (2021) by Tom King and Bilquis Evely I've never read this, despite how much I love the work of Bilquis Evely (which I first encountered in the pages of DC Comics: Bombshells, which was full of great art), and now likely never will, as I have long since lost patience with King's work, and my apathy has curdled into distaste. 

What I do know about it is that it was apparently the major inspiration for the upcoming Supergirl film, so yes, putting it in here probably makes a strong degree of sense. I see Krypto on the cover of the first issue, but, scanning the others, I don't see Lobo. Is he an addition to the story made for the film, I wonder...? 

Supergirl #1 (2025) by Sophie Campbell This one I have read, and I think it makes perfect sense for an anthology targeted at potential new readers like this. Not only is it, and the trade paperback collection in which it is included, seemingly addressed squarely at new reader and all-ages appropriate, but it's also the current, ongoing Supergirl book, so if one happened to read it in the magazine, it would be fairly easy to either pick up the back issues and/or the first trade (Supergirl Vol. 1: Misadventures in Midvale) and a handful of back issues to get caught up and then start following it monthly (or, like me, following it in trade). I reviewed Misadventures in Midvale in this A Month of Wednesdays column and then talked further about it here.

Supergirl: Rebirth #1 (2016) by Steve Orlando, Emanuela Lupacchino and Ray McCarthy I have no idea what this is. I see it is written by Orlando and came out in 2016 though, so I would guess it was a one-shot special lead-in to that year's new Supergirl series that Orlando was writing, part of the publisher's "Rebirth" branding effort. 

I think this was still part of the New 52 continuity, which got shakier and shakier as time went on; at the very least, at this point, DC had not officially decided that the New 52 continuity reset was itself to be reset. 

Is this a good one for a collection like this? I wouldn't think so, but I suppose it's better than 2011's Supergirl #1, debuting the New 52 Supergirl and maybe her worst costume ever, a one-piece that inexplicably had a red triangle pointing to her crotch. 

Superman/Batman #8 (2004) by Jeph Loeb and Michael Turner The final inclusion strikes me as an odd one, and makes me imagine whichever editors who were assigned to putting this book together were casting about for what to put in the book after Woman of Tomorrow #1 and the first issue of Campbell's run. 

This kicks off the six-part "The Supergirl from Krypton" story arc, which was a complete reboot of the Supergirl character, a story that pretends that the pre-Crisis and post-Crisis versions just never existed, and that Kara Zor-El had just arrived on Earth for the very first time and would become the very first Supergirl. I hate stories that attempt reboots like this in-universe (like John Byrne's 2004 Doom Patrol reboot, or Marvel's 2007 "One More Day"/"Brand New Day" Spider-Man reboot), as they retroactively render so many past stories into a weird limbo; if reboots follow events that alter the very fabric of time and space like Crisis, Zero Hour or Flashpoint well, they might still be lame stories, but at least they have a degree of in-story logic to them. 

Anyway, Supergirl lacks a great degree of agency here, and is something of a pawn as Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman and Darkseid all have different ideas of what is best for the powerful new player in the DC Universe...and not only Darkseid but also Wonder Woman resort to violence to effectuate their plans.

 It's been a while since I read this first chapter, but, if memory serves, Supergirl isn't in it much, and not only never dons her costume, but is also in various states of undress throughout.

Jeph Loeb is, of course, Jeph Loeb, and here he pens another jukebox musical of a comic book story, giving his artist the opportunity to draw a large swathe of characters. In addition to those mentioned already, Barda is in this—wearing a towel, having just come out of the shower—as are the Female Furies and, in the last chapter, a whole bunch of heroes, as the JLA, JSA, Titans and Outsiders all gather meet Supergirl for the "first" time. 

The late Turner has a very distinct and appealing style, although I remember reading this and thinking him a better cover artist than interior artist at the time, especially when it came to character design (Barda, for example, looks exactly like Wonder Woman and Kara, and is only distinguished by being a bit taller). 

I think the major criticism of his work as it applied to this Supergirl was how sexualized he drew her. In an attempt to marry her Superman: The Animated Series costume and her classic one, she ends up in a crop top and micro skirt, a costume she would continue to wear into her own 2005-2011 series. (And which, glancing at some of the earlier covers, I see initial series artist Ian Chuchill and cover artistTurner seemed to draw even skimpier there). 

While "The Supergirl From Krypton" might not be a great Supergirl story, there are two strong selling points, one of which is no longer relevant. 

First, it reintroduced a new version of the character and immediately deeply embedded her in the DC Universe at the time (although as this was prior to Infinite Crisis and Flashpoint, and thus some half-dozen continuity-altering events, that universe has been rebooted out of existence over and over again). 

Second, the entire arc and the guest-starred filled Superman/Batman #1-6, by Loeb and artist Ed McGuinness, is now available in Superman/Batman: DC Compact Comics Edition for $9.99, an extraordinary value (This magazine is $16.99, by the way, which means you're paying about $4.25 per comics that originally sold for $4.99, $3.99, $2.99 and $2.99, respectively. Is that a value? For reprints? I don't think so, but then I am very, very cheap...)

Anyway, do you, dear reader, have suggestions for Supergirl comics that might have been better choices for this magazine anthology than those that ended up within it...? 

Bookshelf #34

This week's bookshelf is pretty straightforward, like last week's, and for the same reason. To the left, you have the rest of my Showcase Presents volumes. To the right, most of my Essential volumes. I loved both series for the same reasons and, now that they have been discontinued, I wish I would have bought more of them when they were still available (Of DC's Showcase Presents, I kind of wish I had bought almost all of them; with Marvel's Essentials, I wish I would have at least stuck with Defenders and the various 1970s horror hero series, which, as you can see here, appealed to me).

From DC, we have some superhero team books in Teen Titans Vol. 1, Doom Patrol Vol. 1, Batman and the Outsiders Vol. 1, and then DC's great Hollow Earth barbarian hero comic, Warlord (Like All-Star Squadron, I do wish DC would have published more volumes of this series, as I would have happily snapped them up). 

Those are followed by DC's war comics, and these volumes represented my first real exposure to that once robust genre of comics; prior to these volumes, the only real war comics I had probably ever read were the handful of Garth Ennis-written ones. What I liked about these ones in particular is just how...colorful they were. Like, each had a high concept of one sort or another. Enemy Ace starred a brilliant, brooding and noble faux Red Baron. The War That Time Forgot put G.I.'s on an island populated with dinosaurs, giant monsters and occasionally even weirder stuff. The Haunted Tank followed the adventures of a World War II tank crew, which was often slyly aided by the ghost of a Civil War general...or was it? The Unknown Soldier literalized the term, and presented a mysterious agent whose face was completely wrapped in bandages who was a master of disguise.

And then there's House of Mystery, which was of course fine, but I don't think I took as great delight in it as I did Warlord, the war comics or the super-team books on the shelf. 

As for the Essentials, I guess you can guess which decade of Marvel comics most appealed to me, and that I was a little less interested in the publisher' superheroes than their attempts to Marvel-ize other genres. So here we have The Savage She-Hulk Vol. 1 (Especially interesting as, at the start, She-Hulk was very much a distaff Hulk, and hadn't yet transitioned into the comedic character she would later become), Supervillain Team-Up Vol. 1 (purchased because it had Namor on the cover), Defenders Vol. 1 (They actually published seven volumes of this, and I sorely regret not keeping up with it; Kurt Busiek and Erik Larsen's short-lived 2001 revival initially interested me in the team, and I was quite enamored of the book's apparent original conception as a misfit, B-list answer to The Avengers*) and then we get into the monsters and horror books.

The crown jewel here is, of course, the complete collection of Marvel's Godzilla series, a very weird comic that plopped a redesigned King of the Monsters into the Marvel Universe, and which, due to licensing agreements, wasn't available in trade until this book came out in 2006 (It's much more recently been re-released as the Godzilla: The Original Marvel Years Omnibus, in full color, although, as I mentioned last week, I actually prefer the black-and-white presentation of these old comics). 

Then we have both volumes of Man-Thing, Tomb of Dracula Vol. 2 (No, I don't have volume 1, nor volumes 3 and 4; I believe I bought volume 2 during a sale, and assumed I would pick up the rest of them at some later point and then read them, but, alas...) and, finally, Werewolf By Night.  

Perusing this list of Essential volumes, the ones I most regret missing out on were the future Defenders volumes, Howard the Duck, Ghost Rider (the first volume of which I found from the library and then wrote about relatively recently), Marvel Horror Vol. 2 (I'm particularly interested in The Scarecrow character, which I believe Marvel has since renamed The Straw Man, so as not to confuse him with their other Scarecrow), Monster of Frankenstein and the rest of Tomb of Dracula. I suppose copies of those books are probably out there somewhere though, so I suppose I'll be able to find them at some point...

*You know what? Given that we've already had a JLA/Avengers crossover, and it was very much the ultimate such book, and un-toppable epic, if DC and Marvel continue producing crossovers, maybe they should forego another JLA/Avengers team-up and instead do a Justice League/Defenders one...

¡Vamos! Let's go read Raúl The Third's El Toro & Friends series!

Do you like art? Comics? Wrestling? Superheroes and villains? Monsters? Then you're probably going to like writer/artist Raúl The Third's early reader books from his "El Toro & Friends" series, which, if you're a comics reader, will look like something of a hybrid of a picture book and a comic in terms of format.

Short bursts of prose appear over an image on each page, which, like those of most picture books, can be read like "splash" pages in a comic, while some pages are broken into two panels. Additionally, while the narration is in prose, dialogue usually appears in comics-like dialogue balloons. In fact, if Raúl drew boxes around that narration, each entry in the series would read exactly like a comic book, albeit one for kids.

In 2019, Raúl The Third published ¡Vamos! Let's Go to Market, a picture book that was similarly comic book-y. In it, anthropomorphic wolf Little Lobo and his normal dog Bernabe make deliveries to the market in a bustling, Richard Scarry-like world of similarly anthropomorphic animals*. Various things are labeled throughout in Spanish, which appears in red cursive, and the signs and characters' dialogue feature Spanish as well. The setting of the book would eventually be referred to and branded as "The World of ¡Vamos!"

¡Vamos! was successful enough of a book that it led to a whole series, the title of each of which begins with the words ¡Vamos! Let's Go.... These include Let's Go Eat, Let's Cross the Bridge, Let's Go Read and Let's Celebrate Halloween and Día de los Muertos.

Meanwhile, El Toro, a bull man luchadore who appears in ¡Vamos!, got his own spin-off series, "El Toro & Friends," also from "The World of ¡Vamos!". While both of Raúl The Third's series are charming, and both are set in border towns where Mexican and American cultures blend (and both sprinkle Spanish into their stories), it is the El Toro books that I think will be most appealing to comics readers, especially fans of superhero comics, as there is, obviously, more than a touch of the superhero comic book to professional wrestling in general, and especially to luchadores, who occasionally starred in movies as heroes and crimefighters. 

I'd definite recommend looking for them during your next trip to the library. 

In the meantime, here's what's in the series so far...

Training Day (2021) El Toro, the humanoid bull and luchador hero of the "El Toro & Friends" series, wants to become Champion of the World ("¡El Campeón del Mundo!") and number one ("¡Numero uno!"). But to do so, he has to break through the wall in his career. 

And by "the wall" I mean "The Wall", the undefeated champion of the world who, like so many of the wrestling characters in the colorful world of Raúl the Third's hybrid picture book/comics, looks like he could have stepped out of a superhero comic: He is a huge, anthropomorphic brick wall.

(Are you thinking about The Fantstic Four's Thing right now...? Maybe the villain Brick from Judd Winick's Green Arrow comics...?) 

El Toro will have to train hard to do it, and that's where El Toro's trainer, a humanoid rooster named Kooky Dooky comes in. (Like El Toro, Kooky Dooky first appeared in the first ¡Vamos! book).

We see Kooky Dooky approach El Toro's house—a perfectly square building that says "Casa Toro" on it, with a "Beware of Luchador" sign on the fence and a wrestling ring with three ropes the colors of the Mexican flag on the roof.

El Toro is feeling lazy and doesn't want to get out of bed, but Kooky expresses the necessity of training—"This guy is made out of bricks!"—and he has a whole long list of, well, kooky forms of training, ranging from swinging at pinatas to train his senses, to crushing cars over his head to make his arms strong to helping abuelas cross the teach him patience. 

El Toro has objections to each, which Raul draws in big, two-page spreads that appear within thought clouds emanating from the prone wrestler's head, but eventually he is prevailed upon to start training, and once he's out, jogging in the streets, and sees his many adoring fans cheering for him, he feels inspired to train harder and harder.

The book ends with El Toro facing The Wall in the ring, and while it's not clear who wins the match, the advantage seems to be El Toro's, as the book ends with a two-page spread of him drop-kicking The Wall, sending bricks flying in every direction as he drives his opponent into the turnbuckle with a "POW!" 

On the last page of the book, where the small print that you usually see on the first page appears, there's a little image of El Toro holding a frightened looking Wall aloft in one hand and winding up the fist of his other hand, while bricks continue to drop from the (former?) champion's body.  

Tag Team (2021) The wrestling action in the second book is only a prelude to the real conflict facing El Toro and La Oink Oink, a humanoid pig woman.

In the first pages, the pair took on Donny Dollars and Bald Aguila at El Coliseo, a big building shaped a bit like a sombrero. Bald Aguila looks more vulture than eagle, and the bald top of his head, the long blonde hair on the sides and back and the headband suggested Hulk Hogan to me.

Meanwhile, Donny Dollars is a little guy with green suit, diamond-tipped cane and a money bag for a head. His "rich guy" theme reminded me of Ted DiBiase, The Million Dollar Man, from back when I was a little kid with some interest in professional wrestling. Is "rich guy" a common theme for a heel...?

"The match lasted for hours," the narration tells us, over a spectacular image of La Oink Oink airplane-spinning The Bald Aquila above her head, one of his long, curving limbs stretching out to tag his partner outside the ropes.

The next day, we see El Toro on his knees in the middle of a busted-up looking ring, crying to the heavens, "I cannot believe my eyes! ¡No puedo creer mis ojos!". El Coliseo is a mess, and some eight pages are devoted to detailing the mess. 

El Toro calls Mal Burro and Peeky Pequeno, who are apparently responsible for cleaning up, but the latter speaks into the receiver of a red phone marked "Beach Phone," saying, "We are not feeling well." This despite the fact that they are at the beach. El Toro, speaking into "El Toro Telefono Watch-o" on his wrist, is dismayed by the news, and calls his partner, La Oink Oink.

She speeds to the coliseum in big fancy car decorated by a smiling pig head on the bumper and which seems to go "oink oink oink" as she drives, while El Toro details the nature of the mess to the readers.

"And to top it all off, the training chickens got loose," the narration says. Training chickens, you ask? Well, these seem to be chicken-sized chicken men, far smaller than Kooky Dooky (who we see surfing at the beach on one page). They have the heads of chickens, bare featherless human-looking torsos and arms and wear pants. They were introduced in the first book, when Kooky Dooky told El Toro that, "To keep you quick on your feet, you will chase the chickens." 

Once she arrives, La Oink Oink is able to cheer El Toro up. She points out their teamwork from the night before, and they apply the same principle to cleaning up. Together, the pair manage to get the coliseum back in shape. (The hardest part, which takes four pages, a cartoon fight cloud and a "2 hours later!" tag, is catching the training chickens.)

The lesson is, of course, that even the most daunting tasks are doable when you have help and practice good teamwork. 

That, and that listening to music helps make cleaning less tedious. 

Team Up (2022) This is the first of the El Toro & Friends books set in the past, when El Toro and La Oink Oink were still little kids, just training to be luchadores. As you can see, they look pretty much the same, but smaller; El Toro's head is very round and he hasn't yet developed a bull-like snout, and he had floppy little ears below his horns, while La Oink Oink similarly has a rounder head and...well, that's about the only difference between aside from her size, really.

The story begins and ends in the present, where the kids are all "¡Un equipo fabuloso!", but flashes back to show how they got that way. As ninos, they all trained at Ricky Raton's School of Lucha, chasing chickens, training to be strong and patient and acquire various other virtues.

Each of the half-dozen little wrestlers develops a signature move, from Lizarda's whip-like tongue attack to Jack A. Lopze's super-speed. La Oink Oink and El Toro, who seem to be the least "super" of the group, have "over the top kicks" that "never missed their mark" and a "Super Charge!" attack, respectively.

When it comes time for their final test, it would seem that the kids are faced with the impossible: To defeat Ricky Raton himself!

The great wrestler, who were previously told was "THE BEST!" and "THE BIG CHEESE!" is able to defeat all six of them one-on-one, countering each of their special moves. 

Does that mean the young heroes will never graduate to become professional luchadores? Obviously not. But how can they defeat Ricky Raton? Well, it's right there in the title, isn't it? Joining forces, they layer one attack upon another and manage to counter his counters, ultimately knocking him out of the ring, into a tree with a big, yellow, block-lettered "BONK" and forcing him to wave a white flag. 

As in Tag Team, Team Up champions the efficacy of teamwork, and demonstrates that what may be impossible to do alone becomes possible when everyone works together.

A valuable lesson, taught in the most entertaining fashion: Battles full of super wrestling attacks.

Tacos Today (2023)  Another story set when El Toro and La Oink Oink were little kids studying at Ricky Raton's School of Lucha, among a student body that are so colorful and diverse looking that they looks as much like a kid superhero team as a bunch of wrestlers in training (Not least of all because most of them seem to have some sort of power or super ability).

(I get a real Captain Carrot vibe from this panel, personally.)

We met all of these guys, and learned their various abilities, in the last book, and they are here gradually reintroduced. In addition to El Toro and La Oink Oink, they are Armor Dillo, Jack A. Lopez, Lizarda and Croak (And there's a training chicken in the background of the image above).

When they get let out of school for lunch, they quickly decide what they want: Tacos, as there is a variety for each taste, including tongue tacos ("That's a food that can taste you back!" Croak tells El Toro). (As a vegetarian who leans vegan, all of those mentioned here sound awful to me...also, is it...right for anthropomorphic bull El Toro to eat a tacos made with cow tongues...?)

Unfortunately, the kids realize that they don't actually have enough money for tacos. But fortunately, they are picked up by The Party Bus, where all of the passengers dance in their seats. Their fellow pasajeros are so impressed by Armor Dillo and La Oink Oink's dance moves that they throw coins at them.

This gives La Oink Oink an idea and, once they all arrive at Taco Square, the kids demonstrate the wrestling skills they have learned from Ricky Raton. The crowd goes wild and tosses money at them...paper money, this time. They would now easily have enough to buy all the tacos they wanted...if they had to. But, because the taco vendors are so happy that the impromptu wrestling demo brought so many customers, they give the kids free tacos!

As with the previous books, there's a little, last-page "stinger" cartoon. In this one, Ricky Raton looks at his watch and remarks to a training chicken, which I see here has nipples, "Those ninos sure are taking a long lunch!"

The last page of each book also contains a little dedication from Raúl and Elaine Bay, who colors the books. Here, Raul's dedication is, "To J. Wellington Wimpy," who the late, great Tom Spurgeon has eloquently argued is "The Greatest Comics Character of All Time."

Tough Times (2026) Finally, there's Tough Times, the latest entry in the series (At least for now). I recently reviewed this one for Good Comics for Kids (you can read my review here), and this is the one that made me think I should probably write about the series here, as the gauntlet of colorful opponents that El Toro faces in this book all seem like crosses between monsters and supervillains as much as wrestlers. 

If one likes superhero comics, I realized while reading Tough Times, one is going to like this series. 

This is another one that starts in the present with the adult El Toro and then flashes back to his childhood. Still a rookie, he keeps losing his matches, against opponents Al "The Crane" Scorpio, Thunderbird Mountain, Burrobot, El Desierto and Huevo Ranchero. Honestly, the book is worth picking up just to check out the designs of these characters. Some are pretty silly, and some of them are very cool; it's not hard to imagine some of these guys chasing Scooby and Shaggy around or fighting Spider-Man in New York City. I had to resist the temptation to just scan an image of each and point at the image and say, "Look! Look how cool this is!"

Down in the dumps at always losing, Kid Toro gets a pep talk from Ricky Raton, and after a training montage, he has a rematch with The Crane, and this time he wins.

If you pick up only one of these books at my recommendation, I would make it this one.

Now, vamos! Let's go read Raúl The Third books...!

*I especially like the snakes. There's one in the El Toro & Friends book Tag Team wearing a shirt and jeans, both of which are just tubes of fabric, with turquoise jewelry and belt-buckle, a cowboy hat on his head and a single cowboy boot on the tip of his tail. 

Review: Blue Flag Vol. 1

You know what they say about judging books by their covers, right? Well, it holds true here. The painted image on the cover of the first volume of one-name manga-ka Kaito is a lovely image. The composition is nice, the tree blossoms and the sky are beautiful, and they play off of one another nicely. But the characters here lack the dynamism and life of those within the book. So, if that cover doesn't seem all that appealing, don't let that scare you away.

I also had some concerns about the back cover...specifically the text. That's because the first of the four sentences lays out the premise of the series, but a little too thoroughly, as it contains information that is presented within as a dramatic, climactic reveal. In other words, the back cover copy contains a major spoiler of the story within.

(On the other hand, this volume came out in 2020, and the series wrapped up seven volumes later, so I suppose there's a good chance that pretty much everyone interested in it have already ready it. Why am I coming to it six years late? Well, I only just heard of it. I was ordering a volume of Skip and Loafer through my library's online catalog, and it has this feature that, when you place a hold, it suggests three other supposedly similar items to check out "while you're waiting." As I'm so enamored of Skip and Loafer, I thought I'd give this a chance.)

The book, at least for most of this volume, looks like a rather classic love triangle involving three classmates in their third and final year of high school. 

Our protagonist is Taichi Ichinose, a short kid with messy, black, very manga-looking hair. When he was in grade school, he was friends with Toma Mita...or, as one of his current friends call him, "The Toma Mita." Here's how that same friend describes Mita, for the benefit of readers:

Starter on the baseball team. Athletically gifted. Surprisingly intelligent. 

Talented and above average at anything he does.

Add to that the fact that he's 6'2", conventionally attractive...

...well-built, friendly, popular and funny—it's no surprise all the girls in school are obsessed with him.

He's effectively school royalty. The king of our class. 

No one here has a better life than him. 

Taichi and his three best friends, Mon-chan, Yokki and Omega, are...not that. In fact, Yokki, the friend who gave the above little monologue about Mita, says that "he's like a different species than us," and while that seems pretty melodramatic, the way Kaito draws Taichi's three friends, they do seem to be a different species than Mita...and the rest of the school. They seem to belong to an entirely different manga and, visually at least, Taichi seems to have more in common with Mita than them.

Despite their vastly different social standings, Mita continues to be super-friendly with Taichi, calling him "Tai-chan," and always taking an interest in him. This new school year is the first time they have been in the same class for years though.

The third point of the love triangle is Futaba Kuze, a short, cute, painfully shy and clumsy girl. One of Ichinose's friends compares her to a hamster, and Ichinose himself narrates that he tries not to look at her, suggesting that she reminds him too much of himself. 

A chance encounter in a bookstore between Ichinose and Kuze gradually leads to the latter sharing a secret with the former: She has a crush on Mita and wants to pursue him. Since Ichinose was his childhood friend, perhaps he could help her...?

Quite reluctantly at first—Ichinose feels uncomfortable around both Mita and Kuze—he finds himself helping Kuze, and then coaching her and then, ultimately, hatching an elaborate plan to set them up on a kinda sorta date, in which he asks Mita to go to the movies with him, and then they will "accidentally" run into Kuze, and then he will make an excuse to leave the two of them alone.

Now, if you've watched TV or movies before, or read any romance books or manga, you can probably see where this is going, with Ichinose starting to develop feelings for Kuze, and Kuze soon regarding him as much more than just a guy trying to help her win her unattainable crush. 

But there's a twist. Actually, two or three. 

First, the date plan is spoiled when Kuze brings her heretofore never mentioned best friend, Masumi Itachi with her, as she was too scared to go alone. Interestingly, Itachi meets the exact description of Mita's dream girl that Ichinose had related to Kuze, and is very much not on board with the fake date plan...and gets extremely pissed off about Ichinose trying to set Kuze up with Mita, as she knows the two are incompatible.

After plenty of comedy and drama, we get to the big reveal at the end, which I will now spoil, just like the back cover copy did. After what turned into a group date, in which the four all went to the movies together as friends, Itachi confronts Mita, telling her that she knows that Mita is really in love with Ichinose, which freaks him out, and he demands to know if she told him.

"I haven't told him, no," she replies. "But I figured as much. You and I... ...are the same."

She, apparently, is also secretly in love with her same-sex best friend, Kuze. 

So, what began as a love triangle of sorts is complicated further, becoming a love...square, I guess. Kuzu likes Mita, Mita like Ichinose, Ichinose is starting to develop feelings for Kuzu...who Itachi also likes. And not everybody knows who everyone else likes. Just us, the readers, really.

As a realistic—"slice-of-life", I guess they call these—teenage romance/comedy, Blue Flag is a lot of fun, and Kaito's last-scene reveal is such a curveball that it scrambles what began as a perfectly predictable story, so that I can't imagine what might come next, and am eager to see. Especially since, unlike, say, Skip and Loafer, I can't imagine a happy ending for all of the players, and yet, because they are all so likable, I want them all to get a happily ever after. 

My one real quibble with the first volume was the rather awkward way in which Itachi enters the story. Looking back at the first scenes, I see that she does appear in one panel and gets a single line of dialogue—asking Kuze if she's okay when she drops her lunch—but she could have been rather easily better introduced then.

Because Kuzue decides to confide in Ichinose, it's sort of implied that she doesn't have any other friends and, oddly, when Ichinose tells Kuzue that Mita had previously described his ideal girl as tall and slim with long black hair and a big chest, she didn't remark that her apparent best friend looks exactly like that. 

Anyway, I liked this one a lot and am glad I found it when I did. It will indeed give me another high school slice-of-life romantic comedy manga to read while I wait for the next volume of Skip and Loafer (which actually comes out next month). 

Oh, and like Skip and Loafer, I have no idea why it is entitled as it is...

Bookshelf #33

This week's bookshelf doesn't lend itself to much in the way in discussion (nor will next week's), given the fact that it consists entirely of volumes of a particular series from a particular publisher. And, as big as those volumes are, there isn't room for anything else on the shelf. 

They are, obviously, all volumes of DC's Showcase Presents series, which seemed devoted to collecting various Silver and Bronze Age books into massive, phone book-like 500-page black-and-white books for the relatively cheap price of $16.99. They were basically DC's answer to Marvel's Essentials line. 

I loved these books. Not just because they collected comics that I otherwise wouldn't have had access to—although some of this material, like the Brave and the Bold and the Justice League of America comics, has been made available in other formats since, like omnibuses and DC Finest collection. They were also an unbeatable value, and the main drawbacks, that they weren't in color, and had a pulpier paper stock, actually seemed like virtues to me. Given the coloring technology of the time, I actually preferred the black and white versions, which allowed one to better appreciate the line art. 

Now, I could easily have bought and enjoyed pretty much every volume in the series—and now that they are no longer available, I regret not buying them all*, even if I didn't have time to read them all as they came out—and here you see some of DC's bigger heroes mixed with the B- or C-listers. 

Obviously, I was most interested in these old Justice League of America comics, Grant Morrison and company's JLA having made me a fan of the Justice League in general (I have the sixth volume elsewhere in my house, in a to-be-read pile), the Brave and the Bold team-ups were also of great interest, and that Superman Family book, collecting Superman's Girlfriend Lois Lane and Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen, was a blast. 

I also particularly enjoyed the Elongated Man collection and the Metamorpho collection. The former contained 1960s back-ups from The Flash and Detective Comics in which Ralph Dibny and his wife Sue went around solving mysteries. These featured my favorite of his costumes, a light tone, and gorgeous artwork from Carmine Infantino. The latter featured one of DC's wilder, weirder characters, created by Boy Haney and Romana Fradon, and while, like Elongated Man, he has been around in various team books and events ever since, none of his later appearances were ever as great at these original ones. 

The one downside of the Showcase Presents collections? (Aside from how fast DC released them?) Because of the thickness of the books, they were all but impossible to scan images from, which often made blogging about them difficult.  

*Well, reviewing the list of what was published in the series, I'm not interested in the Green Lantern or Legion of Super-Heroes material, although the latter is probably the LOSH comics I would be most interested in reading....

On Supergirl: The World

I honestly didn't much care for this anthology, a collection of 14 short stories set in different countries and featuring work from creative teams from each of those countries. I picked it up thinking that, given the character, it might be a decent candidate for a Good Comics for Kids review, but, well, as I proceeded, I realized that it wasn't actually that good a comic. 

In fact, one story seemed so poor—the Serbia-set "Foreign Skies' Sun", by Uroš Dimitrijević and Stevan Subic—that I literally had no idea what was happening in it during a pivotal moment (the first four panels of page seven) and reading it over and over a few times was no help. The dialogue on the next page is enough to explain what happened in the art after the fact, but I am quite shocked the passage made it past an editor and saw print. 

I quit reading for a few days at that point, as I'm at a point in my writing-about-comics "career"/habit that I don't really want to spend my time either reading or writing about comics I don't at least expect to like (or that I don't at least find interesting for one reason or another), but, well, I didn't really have anything else for this week's Thursday post, so I decided to go ahead and finish the anthology strictly for post-generating purposes (I've mostly been reading manga these last two weeks, though wasn't quite ready to write about any of them, and those G.I. Joe posts I've been doing are labor-intensive enough that I didn't have one ready to go this week). 

In the end, Supergirl: The World is like too many anthologies, a mixed bag. There's some interesting stuff in here, there's some less interesting stuff, and the visual styles are diverse enough that some will be to most readers' liking, while others will not. I don't think there's a truly great story in here, but I definitely enjoyed a handful of them.

In the end, I think perhaps the most interesting thing about the book is that it exists at all. DC doesn't do these The World books too terribly often, after all, and the previous ones featured Batman (2021), The Joker (2024) and Superman (2025). That's interesting company for Supergirl to be in, as it not only includes her among some of the publisher's most popular and iconic characters, but it also gives her such a spotlight before the likes of Wonder Woman, Robin or Lois Lane. (I imagine her upcoming movie has something to do with that, of course). 

The Batman one was actually the only one I've ever read before; at this point, I'm not sure exactly what I thought of it, but I must not have loved it enough to read the next two The World anthologies (I did try to Google everydayislikewednesday + "Batman: The World" and was, quite unhelpfully, told by AI that "'Everyday is like Wednesday' perfectly captures the gritty, nontstop vigilance of Gothams protector" and that "For Batman, rest is fleeting, and the relentless fight against crime never stops" which a) Isn't what I asked, and b) Isn't true, is it? I mean "perfectly", AI...? Really? And blogger.com is flagging "Everyday", "nonstop" and "Gothams" as misspelled and/or grammatically incorrect.*)  

One thing I noted overall is that the Supergirl character seems less...settled than Batman was, with different stories giving her rather wildly different looks and costumes, suggesting difference appearances and ages for her (which is a fun thing about seeing 14 different artists tackle her, of course), but also suggesting different status quos for her. Like, this is mostly the fault of how DC has treated her since at least Crisis on Infinite Earths, but I don't really have any idea of fairly simple things like what Supergirl's secret identity is, what city she lives in, what her day job is if she has one, what her superhero "beat" is and so on. (On the other hand, at least the book seems consistent with which Supergirl is used; it seems like these are all Kara Zor-El, Superman's cousin from Krypton.)

Another thing I noted here is that she's portrayed as very much part of the Superman franchise, with Krypto appearing in several stories (four total), presumably due to their connection in the last Superman film and the upcoming Supergirl one, and the villains are mostly Superman's (Lex Luthor, Toyman, Rampage) and, unexpectedly, in one case, The Joker. Batman guest-stars (twice!) and, randomly, John Constantine appears in a panel or two of one story. Meanwhile, Superman himself only appears on panel in a single story.

Anyway, let's take these stories one at a time...

•"The Chicken" by Mariko Tamaki and Skylar Patridge This is the American story in the anthology, and you may wonder, as I did, why there even is an American entry—I mean, we've had hundreds of American comics featuring Supergirl over the years already, right? Well, I guess the other The Worlds must have had them too. 

Still, writer Maiko Tamaki doesn't do anything all that "American" in the story. That is, many of the other stories in the book highlight some aspect of the country's geography, history, folklore or culture, whereas this one does not. In that regard, it feels like a sort of generic story, the sort of inventory story that could be slotted into any anthology whose theme it happened to fit. 

I mean, I guess someone mentions pie at one point. Does that count as American cuisine...?

•"Supergirl y La Maliciosa" by Aneke Supergirl flies to Spain with a short jacket over her regular costume rather than a cape and, after soaring over the mountains, changes into plainclothes to take in a museum in the capital, where Aneke shows us the various famous paintings she looks at. 

While there, she overhears a couple talking about the legend of a particular mountain involving "La Malicosa", some kind of witch. Supergirl investigates and, unknowingly, meets the subject of the legend, helping her escape her fate. 

The art is nice, particularly the colors, and while there's not much to the story—all of the stories are so short there's never much room to accomplish all that much—Aneke goes bring Supergirl to the country meant to be the focus of the story, and enmesh her in both particularly Spanish tourism and a folkloric encounter. 

•"Dark Reflections" by Francesca Michielin, Irene Marchesini and Federica Croci This is the first of two stories in which I honestly couldn't tell you what was meant to be happening in a scene. Here, it's the first scene, where I think Supergirl is maybe listening to a recorded lecture, and then it cuts to an arguing couple who we only see the hands of, and there are words in a box that just looks like those of the lecture, but now they are emanating from a television...and later the television explodes...? I don't know. What do you make of this...? 

The first time I read it, I struggled with it a bit, and then just moved on, assuming it would make sense later, but it never does. 

Here Supergirl, Supergirl's narration that she ended up "here...for the sun...I was sent here to study, work, do my research." I assumed she meant Italy...but later I wondered if maybe she meant Earth...? Also, what does Supergirl study, what is her work and what is her research...? 

Most of the story deals with her reflecting on herself and her place in the world/universe, with a fancy handheld mirror as a plot point and central metaphor.

Aside from being confusingly told, I didn't find it very interesting, although Croci's art is obviously lovely, as you can see above. 

•"Foreign Skies' Sun" by Uroš Dimitrijević and Stevan Subic I know I already mentioned this one, the book's Serbian entry. Lex Luthor finds evidence of white kryptonite in a mine in Serbia, which he reopens to extract the valuable mineral (I confess I just had to Google it to see what that one does, and I guess it is lethal to all plant life).

The locals protest, and Luthor has security forces in riot girl violently put them down. This draws the attention of Supergirl, who intervenes. She goes into the mine after Luthor who, in his suit, gets in a pretty good dig that also alludes to the pocket universe a Supergirl came from...

...and then blasts her with something, which seems to start to remove her powers. But that can't be the white K, despite the fact that the blast looks white in color, can it...? Then she flies to what I assume is the Fortress of Solitude, Lex on her heels. Then this happens. Can you make sense of it...? 

I couldn't, but it will become clear as one reads on. Apparently a third character, appearing in the narrative for the first time, is shown panels three and panel four, although we just see the back of their head, I guess, and then them fleeing in the distance. As to what happens in panel two, I guess maybe this new character blasts Lex with something...somehow...? And it breaks his glove, containing the white kryptonite...?

I'm not a fan of this kind of...let's say photo-referenced art, although I guess Alex Maleev and Michael Gaydos have been successful with it. I think it looks ugly, and sort of defeats the purpose of reading a comic book, which I personally do to see cool drawings of stuff, but that's just aesthetic preference. 

As for the storytelling, well, that's not the way to introduce a new character into your narrative. 

As for that character, it is one of the protestors, using some sort of prototype battle suit her father made. We get a slightly better look at it in longshot on the final page. 

•"Touch Ground" by Tomás Wortley and Rocío Zucchi The Argentinian story features the most distinct art so far, which looks like a particularly cartoony kind of anime style, and the most personalized version of the character. Artist Zucchi has redesigned Supergirl's costume and given her a dramatic new hairstyle. 

The Toyman similarly gets redesigned. Here he's a hulking brute in gloves and overalls, his face hidden behind a smiling baby-faced mask. He looks like something out of a particularly unsettling slasher movie, and his plot here is similarly gruesome: He's been attempting to abduct young women and surgically transform them into living dolls. 

When Supergirl tracks him down to Buenos Ares and their battle spills out into public, the crowds of women lend Supergirl a hand, pelting Toyman's battle suit with rocks. 

This is one of the most straightforward superhero stories in the collection, but, thanks to the art, I think it's also one of the coolest looking. 

•"Children of Ngonnso" by Njoka Suyru, Coeurtys Ulrich Minko and Ejob Nathanael Ejob This story from Cameroon is the first of two in which Supergirl is on a mission for the Justice League, with the voice of Batman in her ear. At least, I think it's Batman; the boxes devoted to his dialogue are gray, he refers to "your cousin" at one point and, when she dismisses him, she says, "Yes, Bruce Kent. Or is it Clark Wayne?" (This is confirmed in the last panel, where we see Batman reacting to Supergirl silently, with two little dots over his head.)

She ignores the warning not to rush headlong in, and pays the price, as her opponents are armed with kryptonite bullets (here, the proper color to hurt a Kryptonian: Green). Luckily, Supergirl gets some supernatural help, and allows her body to temporarily be possessed by Ngonnso, "founding mother of the Nso", whose statue Supergirl was sent to protect from mercenaries paid and armed by Luthor. 

The art is somewhat abstracted and flat, but clear and easy to read. Like that in several of these stories, it also seems refreshingly outside of what one expects to see in a DC superhero comic. 

•"Strong Girls Can Make History" by Johanna Sinisalo and Rosi Kämpe I thought this perhaps the oddest overall story in the collection. In this first panels of the story, Supergirl intercepts a strange meteor streaking towards Earth, one that seems to be altering the fabric of time and space as it goes and, unfortunately for her, contains green kryptonite, so that it weakens her as she struggles to divert it. She succeeds but finds herself transported to 1908 Finland.

Found by servants at a manor house, Supergirl pretends to be an amnesiac circus performer while she waits for her powers to return, wearing her cape as a skirt of a more proper length for the time than the short one she usually wears. 

While there, she learns about and grates against the class system and women's place in society and personally encounters how the issue of Russification is playing out. It's all pretty talky, and thus seems to be much more slowly paced than all the other stories herein, but it does have one great indelible image: When the early automobile she and her hosts were riding in breaks down on a railroad track, and their tangled skirts make it impossible for them to escape as a train barrels down on them, Kara takes a split second to reattach her cape and then lifts the entire car over her head and leaps with it out of the way of the oncoming train: 

Her powers came back just in time. That show of strength, and earlier bravery, helped to inspire some women, and there's a last-page reveal about the time-travelling meteor she had deflected: Apparently, that was the cause of the mysterious Tunguska event. 

•"Home Sick Home" by Mahmud Asrar In a scene that seems rather movie-inspired, Supergirl and Krypto are taking up stools at a space bar, even though she rather rudely refuses to buy a space drink, not even a space soft drink ("Isn't this where people come when they're miserable?" she asks Krypto, "Well, I'm miserable". Krypto drags her to Ankara, Turkey, where a shaggy, green, horned giant is laughing constantly as it makes its way through the city, doing something not clear from the art, but Supergirl says it is absorbing everything in its path.

She too gets absorbed, and, in the darkness within the creature, she meets The Joker, who says the creature is called Arcura. Apparently, he has somehow corrupted it. While Supergirl confronts shame over the loss of her parents and Argo City and worries that she has disappointed them, Krypto rallies nearby animals to all make noise at the Joker/Arcura and the sun rises; these things seem to have some effect on it and/or Supergirl, and ultimately, it blows ups and she glows with light (Does she have Superman's "new" solar flare power); this seems to have separated Joker and Arcura and saved the day. Then Batman appears, and we learn that it was all John Constantine's fault, as he tried to "banish" The Joker.

Nice art, but the storytelling was a bit muddy. 

•"Breathless" by Kid Toussaint and Joël Jurion This is a gag story, with pretty fun art by Jurion, whose characters have a touch of cartooniness to them, particularly in their big eyes. The opening page shows Supergirl transforming from a brunette in a tight-fitting business suit with a skirt with glasses into Supergirl, mostly by tearing open her jacket, Superman style. She's in Paris, and rushes into a restaurant to order something, only to find old Superman villain Rampage is there working as a server and, of course, a brawl breaks out. Supergirl continually mentions being in a hurry, and someone closing in on her, that "someone" not revealed until the end, at which point we find out why she's in France, and why she keeps stopping to scarf down random foods. There's obviously not much to it, but I liked this one quite a bit. 

•"Down in the Mine" by Anna Krztoń and Kasia Nie Skarbek This is the collection's second story involving mines, and another story in which Supergirl finds herself invited to a local festival after her adventures. Though all of the stories are short, this one feels even shorter than the others, thanks, perhaps to the fact that there's no dialogue. Instead, Skarbek's art does most of the storytelling, while Krztoń's script is all narration, and this in the form of a news article about the events. There's a mine accident in the Polish city of Katowice, and Supergirl flies in to help with the rescue efforts. Underground, she meets a supernatural entity, "Skarbek, the fabled guardian spirit of the mines." The art is quite nice, and while there's nothing wrong with the story, it seems noteworthy that this could have literally featured any superhero character at all, and there's nothing that makes this a Supergirl story, other than that it happens to have Supergirl in it. 

•"The Sentinels of Chichen Itza" by Mariana Moreno I thought this was a fairly strong entry. The artist has a very distinct style, distinct enough that this doesn't look at all like your typical DC Universe story, and it incorporates aspects of the home country's history and culture into a superhero story. Supergirl, here in civilian clothes but sans the glasses and dark hair of her "secret identity" from the French comic, is chilling in the sun by a Mayan pyramid in "Chichen Itza," which her narration tells us "Is one of the few places I can relax and enjoy my Spring Break." Is Supergirl in school? In college?

A tour guide is explaining a phenomenon the pyramid, astronomy and mythology, and, no sooner is he done than a portal opens, out of which steps a huge, brightly colored dragon. Supergirl pulls open her button-down, Superman-style and flies into action. The dragon is soon followed by a stampeded of similarly brightly colored, but much less dangerous-looking, magical creatures, which the guide tells Supergirl are "Alebrijes....magical creatures, spirit guides." Ultimately, the cause of the disturbance has a Luthorcorp logo on it, and a simple act of smashing is all that's needed to save the day. 

•"The Extraction" by Yann Krehl and Marie Sann This German story could fit rather neatly into current DCU continuity, as it features Supergirl as an agent of the Justice League. They have apparently just freed a bunch of aliens from a lab, but, when they did so, they found an empty cage and suspect one had escaped and is currently on the run and in need of help, being pursued by the bad guys he/she/they/it had escaped from.

Kara goes in undercover, wearing a hoodie, jeans and a fanny pack, and spends a surprising number of pages sleuthing around Berlin, investigating the local alien underground, before a climactic, in-costume confrontation with the bad guy. 

Sann's art has a storybook quality to it, while also suggesting the character design sensibilities of DC Superhero Girls. This Supergirl has a shot haircut and wears small red shorts instead of a skirt. Perhaps thanks to the hairstyle and the darker eyebrows, I got kind of 1980s Madonna vibe from this Supergirl. 

Superman is actually in this story...sort of. He basically phones in an appearance, as Supergirl hears his voice over some sort of League communication device and refers to him simply as "Cousin" when replying. In an early panel, there's a TV news report about the League having freed the aliens, and there's an image of Superman in flight on TV monitors in the background. 

•"Song of the Humpbacks" by Sara Rodríguez This Colombian chapter has perhaps the most distinct art of any of the stories in the collection, with Rodríguez working in a very intimate style that looks particularly hand-drawn, as if set directly down on the page in front of you, rather than having gone through a publishing process of any kind. I suppose you could say it looks somewhat amateurish, but I know that word had negative connotations; I simply mean that it doesn't look quite as fussed over or polished as a lot of comics art, and it looks like she came by her own style naturally, rather than copying prior generations of superhero comics artists.

That said, the flow between panels isn't always as intuitive as it should be—this is the rare modern comic book that could have benefited from a few little arrows here and there indicating which order to read which panels in—and I didn't care for Rodríguez's lettering which, perhaps ironically since she also lettered the comic—didn't seem to match the art. 

The plot here revolves around a very real problem, that of ship sonar messing with and harming whales. In order to present that problem as something that Supergirl could get involved with and solve, the particular type of sonar here comes from an alien machine. Still, it does highlight a problem and shines a bit of a spotlight on the real, cape-less people trying to help the whales suffering from it.

•"Superman & Supergirl vs. Chateraese's Cheap & Tasty Sweets" by Satoshi Miyagawa and Kai Kitago Okay, had I known that the book's entry from Japan was by the creators of the Superman vs. Meshi series and was, in fact, basically a new, standalone chapter from that manga, I wouldn't have been so reluctant to tackle this book.

Superman vs. Meshi is, in my opinion, awesome and, a few weeks ago, I might have said it was my favorite Superman comic in recent memory. (Since then, however, I read Supergirl's Family Vacation, which is probably now my current favorite.) The only thing that really differentiates this story from those in the manga volumes, which occasionally feature Batman and Superman's Justice League allies, is that here Supergirl is the main character, and Superman something a guest-star. 

Here, we're told Kara, again with shorter hair, is a high school student in National City, and she has a sweet tooth. After noting a few cliches of superheroes and teen dramas, she flies off to an important mission in Japan: To secure some kind of sweet or candy that is available for only a limited time. Unfortunately, they are sold out when she lands (in the now generic superhero-landing pose, the sort of crouch with one hand on the ground). 

In disappointment, she falls to her knees and rests her face on the ground, recalling her origins for a page, only to eventually look over and notice that she's not alone: 

Together, they check out the sweets shop of the story title, which has amazingly cheap prices, splurge on a spread, and then huddle against a building wall with the sweets before them like two kids who just got done trick or treating. 

Although, it is perhaps worth noting that before they do, they have a bit of a physical confrontation. Supergirl tries to walk away, Superman grabs her shoulder, she does a jiujitsu move on him and they wrestle a bit, before Superman concludes "I think our shared sugar craving is making us both cranky..." Here then, they complete the traditional superhero team-up ritual, first fighting one another before joining forces to tackle the common enemy which, in the world of Superman vs. Meshi, means a particular type of Japanese food. 

While the story is obviously far from the norm of Superman and/or Supergirl stories, I thought it did something I'm not used to seeing anywhere else. That is, the pair acting like actual cousins, rather than making Superman seem the adult and Kara the child, so that he usually comes off more as her uncle than her cousin.

While it was fun to see a Supergirl-centric version of a Superman vs. Meshi story, this is actually a fairly weak one, and if you're interested in Superman wandering through the world of Japanese cuisine, I'd definitely suggest you check out the first volume of that series. 

*It's not just me, right? I've been using Google for about 25 years or so, and it's gotten far worse since they started using AI, right? Not only is the first result always spectacularly wrong, but it seems like I find what I want less and less often. So, as far as I understand it, AI is world-endingly dangerous when tasked with military operations, it imperils the jobs of human beings and it is devastating for the environment, but the upside is...it works poorly...?