—was about the first meeting of the current version of Supergirl and the current version of Mary Marvel. Reading it made me curious about a previous story about the first meeting of a
I don't want to speak ill of the recently dead David, an unquestionably great writer who has produced an incredibly revered an influential body of work, including several series I quite enjoyed.
I don't want to quote and try to parse the dialogue.
I don't want to scan an image of the middle-aged police officer licking his lips as he pushes Mary into the car in her telling of events.
And I just plain don't want to spend an hour or two thinking about the subject matter, honestly.
Maybe I wouldn't have minded doing so as much in the late '90s, when it was originally published, or in the late '00s, when I launched my blog, but not now, when there is a man adjudicated of sexual assault and accused of at least 20 more sexual assaults in the Oval Office, when there is an apparently whole of government effort to cover up the Epstein files, full of stories of adult men preying on minors, which is being led by the current Attorney General of the United States, and not when the story of a horrific rape at Cornell University is in the news, a story that has provoked a grotesque, inhumane backlash against the alleged victim and a defense of the young men who raped her (and other young men who were told about the events in real time and yet did nothing to stop them).
Now, that 29-year-old comic book story is technically well-written. And it is quite well-drawn.
We, the readers, never find out what exactly happened, whether the man did attempt to sexually assault a child or whether Mary had misinterpreted the situation (The ending, showing the man alone in his car and bursting in to tears suggest he likely did assault her...although it's also possible to read it that he was so upset over the fact that he was accused at all that he broke down).
But the story presents us with one superhero who may have been mistaken about whether or not she was sexually assaulted in Mary Marvel. And another superhero, the one whose name is on the book, torn between whose word to take, and ultimately deciding that the legal process must play out to determine whose version of events is actually true (A technically, legally correct opinion, I guess, but why would the writer maneuver her into this position at all?).
That Supergirl learns that Mary Bromfield and Mary Marvel are one and the same by the end of the story, and that Mary is thus hamstrung from pursuing justice through the legal system because she also wants to preserve her and Billy Batson/Captain Marvel's secret identities, doesn't seem to factor into Supergirl's thinking at all.
I guess I said more than I meant to say about it, but there's a lot more I could say.
Let's leave it at this: What a weird fucking comic book story this is.
Instead of a full discussion and dissection of the Supergirl story I picked up this collection in order to read, let's instead focus on a few other points of interest in it, tie-ins to various DC Comics events of the time.
This volume collects the first 18 issues of the 1996-2003
Supergirl series, all written by Peter David, plus
Supergirl Annuals #1-2, the aforementioned
Supergirl Plus #1 and a short story from
Showcase '96 #8. Flipping through, I noticed that meant a tie-in issue to the 1996
Final Night crossover event and annuals from the "Legends of the Dead Earth" and "Pulp Heroes"
theme years.
I have at this point read almost none of this iteration of the Supergirl book; two issues for sure, maybe four at the most. (Scanning the cover gallery on The Grand Comics Database, I think I only read 1999's #38, a Zauriel team-up and a Day of Judgment tie-in, and 2001's #63, a Batgirl team-up and a Joker's Last Laugh tie-in, which was collected in last year's DC Finest: Batgirl: Nobody Dies Tonight. It's entirely possible I also read #36 and #37, which were part of a crossover with Young Justice, but, unlike the issues of Young Justice in which Supergirl appeared, I have no memory of them).
If I understand correctly, this Supergirl series started out being about the post-Crisis Matrix Supergirl, a being made of synthetic protoplasm with psychokinetic powers who took the shape of the dead, pre-Crisis Supergirl, a being who then somehow bonds with a dying human girl named Linda Danvers in the small town of Leesburg.
And that is about all I know, really.
************************
I liked the
Final Night crossover in general. The main, four-issue series was written by Karl Kesel and penciled by Stuart Immonen and the plot involved the threat of Earth's sun being extinguished by a Sun-Eater, something from a 1960's science fiction comic that had since become part of the DC Universe. Its name tells you what it does.
While the mini-series follows the superheroes' valiant efforts to save the sun, the day is ultimately saved by a bit of deus ex machina from Parallax Hal Jordan, who seems to expend all of the energy he has amassed in the previous years doing so...and gives his life, giving the character a noble (and ultimately rather temporary) death after his previous heel turn.
What was different about the storyline, and what made it of greater interest to me, was how hopeless things eventually got, with parts of the main series and many of the tie-in issues featuring not just the heroes trying to stop the Sun-Eater or deal with the threats of the sun going out and the Earth starting to freeze but also visiting their loved ones to say goodbye. For all the DC Comics stories about the world almost ending I've read, this was the rare one in which the actual end of the world seemed imminent enough for characters to react as if this was actually it (My favorite tie-in was Hitman #8, in which the only mildly super-powered Tommy Monghan and his hitman social circle barricade themselves in their favorite bar and tell one another stories as they wait for the world to either end or for the superheroes to sort things out as they usually do).
DC released a collection of the main series, a Parallax one-shot tie-in and the issue of Green Lantern dedicated to Hal's post-event funeral in 2021. I enjoyed Final Night every time I've read it. The tie-ins haven't all been collected together before, and you're most likely to find them in trade collections of the title they appeared in. The Supergirl one, for example, is in this volume DC Finest.
Now, it's actually not much of a tie-in. If this were a comic with the Crisis On Infinite Earths branding rather than the Final Night branding on the cover, we'd call this a red skies issue. Of course here, the sun has gone out, and so the skies are black...and snowy.
Given that this is only the third issue of a new ongoing series, however, I suppose we can forgive David for not completely committing to the crossover event, and instead doing the bare minimum to do so (Of course, if memory serves, David's Final Night issue of Aquaman was rather half-hearted in its connectivity to the crossover as well, with the cover depicting Aquaman's harpoon hand breaking through the ice of a frozen ocean, while the inside mostly had the characters going about the story David had presumably already written for them, likely altered to involve the sun temporarily going out and the ocean's surface freezing).
Supergirl is in Leesburg and trying to keep the populace calm while everyone is understandably pretty freaked out. There are riots in the streets and fires everywhere. In the opening scene, Supergirl is in a church, facing a crowd that soon turns violent and, when she realizes one of her old powers doesn't seem to be working and it's not as easy to escape as she thought, many of them attack and start beating her (Don't worry, she's fine; her invulnerability is working as always).
Soon, her/Linda's father appears with some other cops in riot gear and calms the mob down.
Meanwhile, Linda's mom is driving slowly around town in a car with a loudspeaker on top, encouraging people to meet at the church for prayer and counseling. She's soon attacked by rioters.
Before long, it's clear that the rioting isn't the natural result of panicked people facing the literal end of the world, but that they seem to be...devolving...?
They are. This is thanks to a talisman called The Heart of Darkness, according to recurring character Buzz, who tells Supergirl its spell only works when there's an eclipse of the sun. Or, as here, when the sun seems to be in the process of being eaten.
So that's the only real connection to Final Night. Were this not a crossover to the event, David might have only needed to change a line of dialogue here or there. Of course, as is, the sun going out provides a good fakeout for the rioting, with readers suspecting one rationale, before learning what's really behind it.
On the final pages of the issue, Supergirl discovers who it is that has the talisman and is thus behind the madness afflicting her town, endangering her parents and the death of a friend's brother: Gorilla Grodd.
While I obviously was in the dark about the ongoing Matrix-and-Linda-are-now-one plot and this Buzz character and the off-panel, seemingly demonic entity he converses with in one scene, everything else was easy enough to follow and is as well constructed as one might expect from a Peter David comics script.
One could complain about the "red skies" nature, but, again, this is only the third issue of a new series, and David understandably prioritized making it more of a Supergirl issue than a Final Night tie-in. It might have been interesting to see what he might have written if Final Night fell on, like, the twenty-third issue of the series, or if DC had given him a story in a special Supergirl tie-in or an anthology to deal with her reaction to the sun going out/the world ending.
I was quite surprised by how much I liked the art, as it was penciled by Gary Frank. When I think of his work, I tend to think of his many collaborations with Geoff Johns, on the likes of Superman various Superman books, and Batman: Earth One, the New 52 Shazam! and so on, where his work is very realistic, and quite full of fussy little lines that can lean toward what I personally perceive as a sort of ugliness.
I suppose it's possible his style evolved between his work on Supergirl and his work on Action Comics a decade or so later, but I have to assume some of the difference comes down to the inking. This Supergirl art has all of the virtues of Frank's work, including his solid characters and realistic style, but it looks far smoother and cleaner than his later Johns collaborations. This issue of Supergirl, he is inked by Cam Smith.
Of course, there's at least one point wherein that realism is something of a detriment. His Gorilla Grodd looks way too much like a real gorilla in this issue. In fact, it seems as if Frank used photos of real gorillas for reference, as this Grodd's face lacks the spark of intelligence, and he's missing his shaggy sideburns. He also doesn't have any attributes to suggest he's something more than the gorillas you might see in the zoo; he has no elongated skull, no big pot belly, no upright stance, no expressions. (I should note that Grodd looks more Grodd-y on the cover of the next issue, though.)
Oh, and he also looks really, really small, about the size of a real gorilla, I guess, rather than the towering brute he usually is (In all except one panel, where he seems to have suddenly grown about five times as big, and dwarfs a prone Supergirl, who was taller than him in previous panels).
Having done years in the blogosphere and online comics news sites, I suppose it's also worth addressing the subject of Supergirl's skirt and shorts here, huh? This Supergirl costume, as Frank draws it, has a really, really small skirt. In fact, it's so short that I realized early on that I think it's meant to be more of a decorative element than a garment. That is, it makes sense to think of Supergirl's costume as a blue bodysuit with a skirt wrapped around it for a splash of red color, rather than the skirt being something meant to conceal what's beneath it (There's a panel early on, for example, where Supergirl plunges straight down from the sky, and her skirt naturally flies straight up and one sees that she's basically wearing a long-sleeved one-piece bathing suit, rather than a top and skirt over a pair of underwear or shorts.)
Er, except on the cover of this issue. There it looks like Frank just drew her bare ass under the skirt, and the colorist later added tiny blue shorts under it (The blue color is there, but there's no black line designating where the artist would have drawn the shorts ending and her legs beginning).
Now, how exactly Supergirl manages to save Lessburg from Grodd isn't revealed until #4, which I did not read, but I did flip through it pretty thoroughly, looking at the drawings of Grodd and Supergirl, and interestingly/depressingly, once Supergirl falls under Grodd's mental thrall and thus temporarily becomes bad, she naturally starts dressing in sexier clothes.
As you can see on the cover for #4, she changes into a crop top and leather pants with cut-outs along the sides. (Also, her hair suddenly gets much curlier and seems to have much more body than when she's in her normal "good" frame of mind, for some reason.) I suppose this is another example of the men who make superhero comics designating that a heroine has gone bad by having her start dressing sexier or in fetish gear (Hellfire Club Jean Grey, Sue Storm's Malice personality, Supergirl on Apocalypse in Superman/Batman, Countdown's Mary Marvel, etc.).
Again, I didn't read that issue, just flipped through it, so I don't know if Supergirl explains why she decides to change clothes (and tease out her hair!) now that she's being psychically dominated by a telepathic super-ape...or if Grodd made her change clothes and, if so, why, as it would be weird for Grodd to be interested in women in leather, wouldn't it...?)
**********************
By 1994, DC had abandoned their summer annual events, in which each series' annual was part of a big crossover event storyline, and they had instead moved to doing standalone annuals all organized around a shared theme. The theme for 1996 was "Legends of the Dead Earth", explained thusly:
Earth is dead.
Those who once might have called it home are long scattered to the endless stars.
But in that scattering, on a thousand different worlds, by a thousand different ways...
Earth's greatest legends live on.
What, exactly, did this mean...? I'm not entirely sure, having only read a single one of these 25 annuals (That would be Doug Moench and Vince Giarranno's Batman #20, purchased because I so liked Giarranno's over-the-top art; it was no great shakes, but it did let Giarranno redesign Batman and his supporting cast, giving us a furry version of Catwoman and a Scarecrow with the head of a crow. I wouldn't mind reading more of these now though, should DC decide to collect them into some DC Finest collections...although I would hope they would do Armageddon 2001, Eclipso: The Darkness Within and Bloodlines first).
It seems to be that all of the annuals were sort of Elseworlds stories ("Elseworlds" was actually the theme for the 1994 annuals), with the scope narrowed so that they had to be set in the far-flung future, which seems to have translated into science-fiction legacy versions of the heroes of 1996.
The Supergirl annual contained three stories, and thus three different versions of Supergirl...or, I guess, two different Supergirls and a story of a third. That translates to a 22-page lead story and two eight-page back-ups. (That's 38 pages total, for just $2.95!)
The lead story is "The Surrogate" by writer Chuck Dixon, pencil artist Ron Wagner and inker Bill Reinhold, and it's the one that corresponds to the cover. It involves a sort of clever sci-fi mining operation, in which a scientist in the employ of a mining company straps unwilling human subjects into chairs and puts a special apparatus on their heads that allows them to control big, metal, shape-changing humanoid mining avatars in an incredibly hostile environment that no human being could possibly survive.
These are all big, squarish-looking entities that visually suggest more machine-like versions of Marvel's Mindless Ones, and the shape-changing is apparently limited from the wrist down, so they can turn their "hands" into whatever tools they might need. The scientist and mining people refer to them as "Tooljerks."
One such unwilling subject for the procedure is a young blonde woman named Cryssia, whose parents used to tell her stories of Supergirl when she was a little girl. Something goes wrong (or right, I suppose) with the procedure, however, and the machine that would allow her to control her Tooljerk loads too much of her into the avatar, and she is therefore able to control it more completely than she should be able to, and rebel against the safeguards put in place.
She immediately transforms it into the shape of Supergirl, drawing an S-shield over its breasts, and then attacks and destroys the whole mining operation before heading off into space (On the cover, this Supergirl is silver in color, while the one within the book is golden...and thus looks an awful lot like a prototype for Superman Kal-El as he appears in the 853rd Century in DC One Million).
It's a fine and direct, if simple, story, and one that probably didn't need all 22 pages to tell, but Wagner's art is fun, and he makes good use of the extra space to draw cool stuff.
The first back up is "The Legend Lives On", by writer Barbara and Karl Kesel, with pencils by Dick Giordano and inks by George Perez (That's quite an art team for a back-up in an annual!). Well, this is the first back up in this particular trade, anyway; on the table of contents for the annual, the back-ups are reversed.
This features four sexy space ladies in various skimpy costumes; two look human, one is clearly Tamaranean and another is orange with antennae, and thus appears to be the same species as that one guy from the Legion of Super-Heroes (She's referred to as half-Durlan at one point).
They find the fifth member of their crew dead in the cargo hold of their space ship, and she seems to have been in the process of drawing an S-sheild on the floor when she died, which they assume means she was trying to identify her killer.
This leads to a discussion of the Supergirl legend, which is interestingly and amusingly garbled, no doubt the result of a centuries-long game of telephone in the telling. (The most interesting bit is a panel that refers to her being active until "the time of the Legion of Titanic Heroes", in which we see this story's gloved version of Supergirl amid a group that seems to consist of Robin, Nightwing, Donna Troy, Red Star and Starfire (and someone I don't recognize) wearing what look like matching, Legion versions of their costumes. Legion Robin looks pretty cool, actually!)
Anyway, the women quite paranoidly accuse one another of being a murderous Supergirl in disguise, laser blasting each new suspect until the whole crew is dead from one cause or another, and the Kesels give us a twist, stinger-style ending that explains what exactly happened in the story.
Again, there's not much to it, but it's a solid bit of storytelling, with pretty much perfect art for a superhero comic.
Finally, there's "Shootout at Ice Flats," written by Joe Lansdale and Neal Barrett Jr., pencilled by Robert Teranishi and inked by Stan Woch.
This is basically a Western, even if set in a small town on a distant planet, it's familiar-looking society full of familiar objects from our time that the characters don't seem to completely understand...or even recognize. Young, blonde schoolmarm/sheriff Eileen Garrett gets her butt pinched in a bar by a literal cowboy, a humanoid bull*, and she slaps his wrist and knocks him down with her weapon, a ruler.
He says his sister will get her, and Eileen and the bull-man's cow sister do indeed have a showdown. Eileen gets an unexpected surge of power from a good luck talisman that her mother gifted her the night before, a star with an S on it that she says came from Sardine Girl, presumably another joke about how the Supergirl legend has gotten garbled over the centuries.
Again, nice art (I'm not familiar with Teranishi at all) and a light story. Probably the lightest of the bunch, actually, but it's not so bad as to cancel out the good that came before it. I didn't find any of the jokes particularly funny. The minotaurs in a western setting is probably the most inspired gag but, by this point, I had seen it before elsewhere.
**********************
After "Legends of the Dead Earth", the next year's annual theme was "Pulp Heroes", in which creators were apparently invited to put DC's heroes of 1997 into various "genre" stories from the pulps that preceded comics, like Westerns, romance, detective, action adventure and so on. They also all had painted covers.
Still a relatively poor college student, I didn't buy or read that many of these the year they came out that
weren't attached to ongoings I was
already reading (
JLA,
Hitman,
Aquaman, etc.), but, in the years since, I have found several in back issue bins, and I don't think I've read any that weren't at least pretty good. (Looking over the list of 23 annuals now, I think I've read 10 of them; again, this line of annuals would make for a great set of
DC Finest collection!)
("Pulp Heroes", by the way, was the last of the line-wide annual themes or crossover stories; 1998 and 1999 were limited to JLA and some of the ongoings starring members of the League, for the crossover stories Ghosts and JLApe. Then in 2000, there was "Planet DC", which introduced international heroes and characters, but there were only a handful of these annuals and, after that, DC seemed to have given up on the idea of annual events of any kind.)
Now, these stories weren't Elseworlds-like reimaginings of the title characters as pulp-style heroes, but rather in-continuity, DCU stories within a particular genre. For the most part, they tended to still be superhero stories, and the degree to which they embraced the assigned genre varied from book to book (Two of the "Weird Western Tales" books I recall, for example, were the Hitman and Robin annuals, in which writers Garth Ennis and Chuck Dixon sent Tommy Monaghan and Tim Drake West for adventures involving shootouts and other elements familiar to the genre).
Supergirl Annual #2 was a "Young Romance" title, but the men who made it—and yes, all of the writers and artists involved in the annual's two stories were men—basically just present us with superhero stories with elements of romance to them. Certainly the romance elements of the lead story, by Tom Peyer, Anthony Castrillo and Jordi Ensign, are more-or-less bolted-on, the nods to the genre coming on the cover, and a pair of splash pages of Supergirl and the time-lost Brainiac 5 kissing while melodramatic narration fills too many boxes with their thoughts.
The back-up, a 17-page story by Chuck Dixon, Greg Land and Prentis Rollins, is actually more romance than superhero, depicting as it does a pair of teenagers yearning after their respective crushes and ultimately becoming a couple, but it's still a superhero comic.
The Peyer-written lead story is entitled "Secret Hearts" (Although the cover calls it the more confessional sounding "I Lied For Love!"). In it, Linda Danvers finds that things in Leesburg are going crazy in a very Silver Age-y kind of way, the precise sort of wackiness that, when seen in a Super-book in the '90s, generally meant Mr. Mxyzptlk was responsible.
For example, her mom is about to prepare dinner, and water shoots out of the stove top. Her dad puts his key in the ignition to start his car, and his car immediately starts shrinking. At the hospital and police station, things are just as weird: An IV bag full of hummingbirds, a cop de-aged to a child and so on.
Linda eventually calls Clark Kent for advice (Having read so little of the book, I'm not clear on the pair's relationship, but Linda tells her she's "Mae" on the phone, which I guess was their name for Matrix when she wasn't Supergirl, "Mae" being short for "Matrix."). She needs someone smart to help her figure out what's going on, and after demurring that "most of the geniuses that I've met are pretty nasty characters," Superman directs her to "the smartest person on Earth" at the moment, the Legion of Super-Heroes' Brainiac 5 (As you guys know, I'm pretty ignorant of the LOSH and their goings-on, but this seems to be during the point in the 1990s when a group of teenage Legionnaires were temporarily stranded in the present day DC Universe).
Brainiac, who Peyer establishes is already smitten with Supergirl, as he apparently a thing for strong blondes, is happy to help her investigate, but taps out when he realizes the cause seems to be magical rather than scientific (And, for the record, it's not Mxyzptlk).
Here's where the lying for love comes in.
"I really hate to do this," SG narrates, before she lays her head on Brainiac's shoulder and says, "Oh, Brainy... ...what am I going to do?"
That seems to be enough seduction to get Brainiac to overcome his aversion to magic and continue to help her against his better judgement. The cause and solution to the madness is basically super-science gobbledygook with perhaps a shade of meta-commentary to it, but the pair ultimately save Leesburg, come clean with their feelings for one another and how they were both dishonest in an attempt to get what they want. And then they share a kiss.
Again, not reading this volume of
Supergirl, I'm not sure if anything ever comes of their apparent mutual attraction and the potential of a romance promised by sharing a kiss, or if this is more like the Batgirl/Superboy kiss in
Batgirl #41 that seems to have never been referred to again. Scanning the cover gallery on The Grand Comics Book Database again though, it doesn't look like Brainiac or the Legion reappear in
Supergirl for the rest of the run.
The back-up, "Object of Desire," follows a pair of teenagers at a pizza place in Leesburg. The boy is a Supergirl-obsessed delivery driver with a terrible haircut reminiscent of that of Damage's (The story opens in medias res, within a daydream of his in which he's a dumb-looking, '90s Image Comics-esque superhero saving his girlfriend Supergirl from a giant robot). And the girl is a waitress who has a crush on him, despite the terrible haircut.
He happens to see Supergirl fly over on her way to deal with a dangerous emergency, and he follows...only to end up in deadly peril. In fact, he would have died...were it not for the fact that the waitress with a crush on him had also followed and was able to bring emergency workers to him in time to save his life.
Having thus been saved by a girl he knows in real life, he henceforth only has eyes for her. A fact attested to when Supergirl again flies above him in the last panel, and he doesn't even notice.
Supergirl is in this, but it's not really a Supergirl story, so much as the story of the two pizza shop kids.
It's actually kind of cute, and not the sort of story I would have associated with Dixon. Also, this still being the '90s, Land's art still looks like something human hands might have drawn (although his style is growing increasingly more realistic, making this story look somewhat of a piece with that of Frank's art on the ongoing), rather than random photos found online and manipulated in Photoshop.
**********************
By the way, the very
next issue in this
DC Finest collection following the second annual is Supergirl #14, the cover of which brands it as part of DC's
Genesis crossover event series. Like
Final Night,
Genesis was composed of a mini-series, with issues of the publisher's various ongoings devoting tie-in issues to the storyline.
Shouldn't I also read and write about this issue too, then...?
Ha ha ha! No, of course not! There is a key difference between
Final Night and
Genesis, and that is that
Genesis is not good.
Written by John Byrne, this 1997 mini-series revolved around a "Godwave", a Source-spawned wave of energy that created gods as it passed over the universe and then, on a second pass, created superheroes...in a somewhat nebulous, ill-defined way, given that DC's scores of superheroes all have vastly different origin stories that an hardly share a retroactive root cause.
I read the main series and some of the tie-ins, but I was never really sold on this core premise, and some of the tie-ins with the
Genesis-branding on top didn't really tie too directly into the events of the mini. For example,
the Batman issue just had the hero dealing with a feeling of unease, as the Godwave not only bestowed particular super-powers, but also feelings of confidence and inspiration and faith that lead guys like Bruce Wayne to dress up in costumes and fight for justice, I guess...?
So yeah, I'm not reading an issue of Supergirl that ties in to Genesis, but if that sounds like something you're into, feel free to do so and let me know what you think.
*If you're wondering, as I did when I saw this, the Ryan Browne-created cartoon Wild West C.O.W.-Boys of Moo Mesa debuted in 1992 and thus predates this.
