A Month of Wednesdays: June 2026

BOUGHT:

Nancy For All Seasons (Fantagraphics Books) So look, I spent some time off-and-on over the course of the last few weeks wondering if there was anything that I personally have to say about Ernie Bushmiller's Nancy, history's most perfect daily gag comic strip, that hasn't been said better dozens of times before by more insightful critics with more impressive resumes. 

Now that my self-imposed deadline for this post about all the new-ish comics I read in June has arrived, I still can't think of anything.

So, suffice it to say that Nancy For All Seasons, Fantagraphics's second recent collection of Bushmiller's Nancy (following last year's Nancy Wears Hats) is filled with 300 strips from 1953 to 1954. 

If you're already a fan of Bushmiller's and/or Nancy's, you should have it for your shelf. If you're not yet a fan, you should definitely pick it up and check it out; there's an awfully good chance you will end up being a fan by the time you get a few pages into it. 

Uncle Scrooge: Lost Beneath the Sea (Fantagraphics) The latest volume in Fanta's Carl Barks Library contains various Uncle Scrooge comics from 1963 and 1964, ranging from the sorts of big adventure stories that we tend to think of when we think of Barks and Scrooge to a couple of face-offs with Scrooge's perennial enemies Magica De Spell and the Beagle Boys (and both at once, in one story!), and from comedic, Duckburg-set stories to one-page, space-filling gag strips

The title story is one of those adventure stories, a 22-pager in which Scrooge's lucky dime is lost at sea...and in danger of falling prey to an unlikely salvage operation by four-armed Martians, a story bookended by Donald's attempts to make it as a newspaper reporter, even if he has to make up outlandish stories on slow news days. (Despite being the length of a standard modern comic book story, this one feels much longer, thanks to how many panels there are per page, and how much Barks packs into each one.)

That's followed by "The Status Seeker," in which Scrooge finds himself in a race to recover a particular jewel that resembles peppermint candy, his opponent being one of those mustachioed anthropomorphic pig villains discussed in a prose piece in the recent "A Little Something Special" and Other Tales of Fiendish Foes (The pig man villain design resurfaces in a second adventure in this very volume, wherein he is named "Foulcrook", is teamed with a dog man named "Slyviper" and tries to steal the discovery of a lost city out from under Scrooge and his nephews in an attempt to make it into an archaeological society).

As for Magica, she uses catastrophic weather events and magical disguises to try to break into the money bin in one story, later hires the Beagle Boys in an attempt to beat Scrooge from acquiring a flock of geese that lay golden eggs and later still comes up with a bizarre—but quite visually interesting—potion that transforms one's face into that of whoever he has last looked at. 

In addition to all of the Scrooge stories, this volume contains a couple of shorts starring Gyro Gearloose and his mechanical helper, Helper, none of which did much for me personally; I guess I'm so used to seeing the inventor used as a sort of plot device in Scrooge stories that it's hard to find him too terribly compelling a star in his own right, even if each of his stories here are rather short ones.

Interestingly, among the usual generous amount of backmatter discussing each story and its history, and the original comics covers, there's a double fold-out poster of a Gyro image Barks drew. 

As with Bushmiller's Nancy discussed above, I don't know that I have anything to say about the quality of Barks' duck comics that hasn't already been said before, but I'm aways happy to add another volume of Fantagraphics' Carl Barks Library to my bookshelves.

BORROWED: 

Batman Vol. 1: Daylight (DC Comics) This is a technically very well-made comic. Artist Jorge Jimenez is as skilled an artist as any that has ever drawn a Batman monthly, and he's quite adept at every part of comics-making, from distinct character designs to an occasionally Breyfoglian sense of dynamism when it comes to Batman in action (Check out this kick from Batman #4; I know that pose is from a Breyfogle-drawn comic, but I'll be damned if I can remember which one.)

Similarly, writer Matt Fraction's plotting is strong, and, with one glaring exception I'll get to in a bit, he has a solid grasp on all of the characters, who all seem to be and sound like themselves, and his presentation of Bruce Wayne on a maybe date with a scientist whose work might be behind some strange goings-on involving Arkham inmates is an inspired blast of flirty dialogue and action sequences.

Despite the considerable, even obvious talents of the creators though, this first volume of the new Batman series still left me kind of cold. I could appreciate most of its component parts, but I couldn't really personally connect with the book, let alone get lost in it.

That likely has to do with the sense that we've seen all of this before, even as the comic takes the pose of giving us something new (Check out that dramatic new Batman costume, for the most obvious example, with Batman back in blue for the first time in over 30 years!). 

So, there's a supervillain in a position of governmental authority and using his resources to target our heroes, something I complained about as feeling tired when Jason Aaron introduced villainous New York City District Attorney Hieronymous Hale in his 2025 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Vol. 1: Return to New York (reviewed in this column).  

Batman is on the outs with the Gotham Police Department, as he has been off-and-on from Batman: Year One to James Tynion's IV's 2020-2022 run and, I think, beyond. 

Militarized law enforcement specialists are brought in to deal with vigilantes and supervillains, again as in Tynion's run. 

Killer Croc is apparently devolving and becoming more bestial, with a newer, scarier design featuring a long, Venom-like tongue, as in the 2002-2003 "Hush" storyline. 

One of Tim Drake's loved ones notices that when Tim spends time with Bruce Wayne, he tends to get injured, and je blames Bruce, as was the case in Chuck Dixon's 1990s Robin run. 

I realize that this might not be a Batman problem so much as a Caleb problem. Maybe human beings just weren't meant to read that many Batman comics over the course of a single lifetime, and that even if so much of this seems recycled to me, well, perhaps many of the other readers of this Fraction/Jinenez run are seeing these things for the very first time (Although, given how recent Tynion's run was, and the fact that so many Batman arcs like "Hush" remain in print forever now, I kinda doubt that). 

Even the villains are, for the most part, ones we've seen more or less constantly for decades: Killer Croc, The Riddler, The Penguin, Hugo Strange. An upcoming appearance by The Joker is foreshadowed. There are two exceptions, the mysterious masked Minotaur, presumably a new character, and, disappointingly, an anime-coded woman with glowing swords who can transform into a flock of birds; she seems like a brand-new character but, once defeated, Robin Damian Wayne dismisses her as "Lady Death Man", so apparently this otherwise strikingly different character is connected to extant IP (Oddly, Damian doesn't mention Flatline, one-time sidekick of Lord Death Man and his ally/friend/love interest here at all). 

In Daylight, Fraction and Jimenez have Batman, sporting a new blue and gray costume (it's not simply a return to that of the one he wore before "Knightfall"; you'll note the bat-symbol on his chest is quite different), Batmanning around, despite the fact that the Gotham City Police Department, now bizarrely run by Police Commissioner Vandal Savage, not only doesn't sanction his freelance policeman status, but are now actively targeting him with arrest or worse.

Batman encounters a series of old foes—first Croc, then The Riddler—who both escape from the current incarnation of Arkham (the sky-scraping Arkham Towers, rather than the old asylum) and act strangely out of character, presumably because their minds have been messed with by "The Crown of Storms", a new invention of Wayne-funded scientist Dr. Annika Zeller who, conveniently, appears to be both rather young and pretty hot, so she can also function as a love interest of sorts for Bruce Wayne...maybe. 

Meanwhile, the masked Minotaur has organized crime in Gotham City, including Commissioner Savage, The Penguin and others, into a fine-tuned, money-making machine that's so behind-the-scenes no one seems to know their organization even exists, including the Batman.

Damian Wayne and Tim Drake are both active as Robin, although after an issue or two spotlighting how awesome he is, Tim seems to go into semi-retirement, spurred on by catching a stray gunshot from a Gotham police officer (Given how many bullets Tim's dodged over the decades, it's perhaps a little convenient that he gets shot here at all in such a fashion) and his boyfriend Bernard's worry that hanging out with Bruce somehow endangers Tim.

James Gordon, Harvey Bullock and Alfred are all around. Jim's a beat cop now, and Alfred is either a ghost or a hallucination of Bruce's. Indeed, Alfred pops up in here about as much as he always has and, at first, I thought he might be some kind of programmed holographic AI Batman had built, but instead he seems to be a figment of Batman's imagination, as he talks to him about his current cases and conflicts, often receiving admonishment or advice in return. 

I actually haven't read a regular Batman monthly since Tynion's climactic "Fear State" arc, so I'm not up on what's going on in the DCU's Gotham City at the moment, but Batman seems to be spending most of his time at "Pennyworth Manor," which looks to be a sizable mansion within the city limits. Bruce Wayne still seems to be very rich and to be running his company, so I assume he's recovered his fortune but lost Wayne Manor somehow...?

Fraction's take on the character is very gadget-heavy, with Batman and his Robins employing all sorts of high-tech gear throughout, including toyetic flying and stealth suits, and, charmingly, every time they use one, even something as simple as a grappling line, there's a little box introducing and explaining the gadget in question. 

Now I don't want to rain on anyone's parade here. Fraction and Jimenez's Daylight represents good, solid, entertaining Batman comics. I am interested to see where this is all going, if The Minotaur is someone we know (or who I suspect it is) and if Fraction later justifies choices like the use of Savage in this story or why Anarky Lonnie Manchin suddenly seems like an idiot (Again, more on that in a bit).

It's just not great, and, at this point, I want really great comics, not just really good ones. 

You probably think I've gone on long enough at this point, but here are a few bullet points regarding particular gripes of mine from these otherwise quite solid comics...

•Okay, I give up: Why is Vandal Savage the Gotham City police commissioner now...? Is this an original idea of Fraction's, or a holdover from a previous Batman or Detective Comics writer's run? 

Now, if you're reading this blog, then you are probably a longtime DC Comics reader, and therefore probably already know all about Vandal Savage, an immortal caveman who has been menacing various DC superheroes since he first appeared in a 1943 issue of Green Lantern, from back when the only GL was Alan Scott. Though he and Batman have obviously crossed paths repeatedly over the decades, Savage is generally a Justice Society or Justice League villain, with world-ruling ambitions, and to see him show up in Batman at all, let alone as a government official, seems...weird, to say the least. (I work in a library, and they ran a background check before they hired me; does Gotham City not check to see if their new hires have criminal records, have ever been part of a team of super-villains or tried to conquer the world?)

Making it even more odd, in these first few issues of Fraction's Batman at least, he doesn't do anything that required the character to be an immortal caveman supervillain. He is anti-Batman and, presumably, opposed to all of the other Gotham vigilantes. He frames Batman for a murder. He threatens to kill a subordinate...and then perhaps kills or has him killed off-panel later on. All stuff that, like, any bad actor could do, whether it was an original character, or another supervillain taking at random. 

Like, why Savage, and not The Ventriloquist or Captain Cold or Amazo or Starro? I just don't get it. (Also, in the scene of The Minotaur having a sort of staff meeting with various crime heads, Savage seems to very much be that character's lieutenant, which doesn't seem very Vandal Savage-y, does it? )

•The biggest misfire in this book is, I think, Fraction and Jimenez's treatment of Anarky (That is, believe it or not, Lonnie Manchin getting kicked in the face in the panel at the top of this review). Now, I'm a huge fan of writer Alan Grant and artist Norm Breyfogle, one of the best Batman teams to ever do it, and I similarly love their character Anarky, one of a handful of original characters they added to the mythos during their time managing it. 

Anarky started as a one-off vigilante in the mold of What-if-Batman-was-more-hardcore-and-worked-to-change-the-world-rather-than-just-fought-to-uphold-the-status-quo?, tackling pollution and corporate greed in addition to the prevalence of illicit street drugs, which Grant's Batman seemed to spend most of his time dealing with. As Anarky became a recurring character, he quickly developed into a sort of anti-Robin and, by the time he earned a miniseries and a short-lived ongoing, (in 1997 and 1999), he was a full-fledged superhero, with a secret base of his own in Washington, D.C., and coming into conflicts with characters as various as Etrigan, Darkseid and Green Lantern Kyle Rayner.

He was also brilliant, constantly quoting philosophers and lecturing his dog and/or readers about political and economic theory. Breyfogle originally costumed him in a wide-brimmed hat, cloak and face mask patterned after the lead character in Alan Moore and David Lloy's V for Vendetta. 

He is completely unrecognizable here.

Jimenez's radical redesign has him wearing what are essentially street clothes, a big, puffy red jacket with a tilted A-for-Anarchy symbol (spraypainted) on the front of it and wearing a gold mask that looks nothing like his usual one, with bright red eyes and a jagged, zigzag along the lower half as if to suggest pointed teeth.

When we first meet him, he and two henchmen, both wearing gold masks, are trying to hijack or rob a semitruck for some reason. Why does Anarky have henchmen? The scene provides a reason why he shouldn't; one of them shoots the driver dead, and Anarky berates him: "You moron-- --This wasn't the job!"

I was just sort of assuming this was a new, second (or third, I guess) Anarky, until Batman later tracks him to his hideout, throwing two more random guys through the window—apparently more of Anarky's men—and addresses him as Lonnie. Batman catches him easily (the best fight Anarky can put up is spraying Batman in the face with something, which slows him down for a panel).

Tell me, does this sound like Anarky Lonnie Manchin?

Just before Batman arrives, he's talking to himself:

Dammit, dammit, dammit. 

Okay. Be cool. Come on.

Be cool, grab your gear and get-- 

AAAHH!

And then, after Batman has caught him and tied him upside down, we get this dialogue:

I don't know man, I swear.

Guy paid me a grand to boost the truck and dump i into the river. That's it. That's all.

But everything went bad.

...

I-- I wanna turn-- Whatchallit-- --State's evidence.

Take me to the cops. The D.A. The Feds, I don't care. Just take me in.

"Whatchallit"...? Does that sound anything at all like Lonnie Manchin...? 

Now, both Croc and The Riddler were notably having trouble thinking, and were acting much, much dumber than usual, so I suppose it might later be revealed that Anarky has also had his mind messed with by The Crown of Storms, but, given that he has never been an inmate of Arkham, that seems extremely unlikely...and his relative lack of brains here isn't presented as an anomaly the way that Croc and Riddler's were (Other than Batman commenting on Lonnie's "friends" seeming "pretty stupid" and then later asking "What was the plan here, Lonnie? Because this one seems pretty weak", Batman doesn't acknowledge how out of character his old enemy is).

Remember, Lonnie wasn't just an ordinary genius like Batman, Tim Drake or Barbara Gordon, but he later used a "biofeedback learning enhancer" to make himself ten times smarter than he already was, as well as fuse the two hemispheres of his brain, giving him a uniquely brilliant mind. Lonnie Manchin should seem at least as smart as Batman or Lex Luthor or Mr. Terrific. He should use big words. He shouldn't say "Whatacallit". He knows the term "state's evidence".

•In general, I'm not a fan of killing off characters, as it just seems intuitively counter-productive for a storytelling "universe" like DC Comics to voluntarily reduce their cast and options for their creators...and, of course, as we know now, no one stays dead anymore. Not Bucky, not Jason Todd, not Bary Allen. Hell, even Uncle Ben has come back to life temporarily, hasn't he? So, killing off super-comics characters at this point in time just sets up some dumb resurrection story in the future...I mean, someone is going to have write a story where Alfred has been put in a Lazarus pit and then went into secret butler training for years before he shows up alive at Wayne Manor again in a year or three or ten.

So, killing off Alfred, something that actually happened during Tom King's run, sometime after I tired of it and dropped Batman...? Not a fan! I think Fraction's run helps demonstrate why. Clearly Fraction wanted to write Alfred into his Batman story, and he wanted it badly enough that he went ahead and did so despite the fact that Alfred was, you know, dead. Which means we get scenes of him as Batman's imaginary friend in this book, like that above.

The scenes aren't poorly done or anything, but they do serve as a constant reminder that maybe King and DC shouldn't have killed him in the first place...?

Birds of Prey Vol. 4: On the Run (DC) This book collects the final nine issues of writer Kelly Thompson's Birds of Prey run, and I'm sorry to see it go; this is the longest I've stuck with an iteration of the title since Gail Simone's first run, circa 2003-2007 and thus, obviously, the one I think is the best since. 

Now, there are basically two ways to conclude a series like this once the publisher decides to cancel it for whatever reason...and by "like this" I mean one featuring a team that has starred in various one-shots, miniseries and ongoings for 30 years now, and is thus all but guaranteed to return in a new book before too long. 

The first would be to simply end the series, wrapping up whatever plotlines were ongoing and maybe giving the characters a bit of a sendoff, while implying that the team will be staying together and continuing to have adventures, just off panel, rather than ones that are chronicled every month in a new issue of a comic book. The other would be to temporarily break up the team, scattering the cast so that they can be used elsewhere, and leaving it up to some future writer to reassemble some version of them. 

Here, Thompson does the latter, and I assume this has something to do with the fact that most of the cast she has been using have other comics in which they are appearing. I know Batgirl Cassandra Cain is currently in a so-so ongoing series, for example, and I have heard that Black Canary is appearing in Tom Taylor's current Detective Comics run (along with Green Arrow; I wonder if Sin will be as well...?), and Barbara Gordon will be starring in a new book in which she goes to jail (the events of which might prove a little challenging to reconcile with those of a Birds ongoing). 

The in-comic reasons given for the team's dissolution seem somewhat abrupt. Babs and Canary decide to break up the team simultaneously, which allows for a sharing of the blame and a demonstration of their co-leadership. 

Babs has realized that the team has essentially made themselves a target to bad actors who want to get their hands on all of the data Oracle has acquired over the years (and, in this case at least, powerhouses Big Barda and Sin/Megaera are targets for different types of possession by those same bad actors), something that Thompson has space and time to foreshadow. 

And Canary wants to spend some time with Sin that doesn't involve the constant pressure of a superhero team, something that feels more tacked-on (There's a sense that this particular ending wasn't necessarily originally planned for, and that Thompson might have had to wrap the series up a little more quickly than might have been ideal; there are other elements of these issues that would support that).

These nine issues are technically two different story arcs—"On the Run" and "Unreality"—but as both feature the team in conflict with the same team of evil opposites, and the bad guys' plot carries from one arc to another, it's essentially one big, novel-length adventure...although it seems to climax somewhere closer to the middle, at the end of "On the Run".

The Birds follow a series of over-obvious clues into a series of also obvious traps (the review at Collected Editions mentions that the connective tissue here isn't as strong as it could be, among other problems with the comics collected herein), the most spectacular of which involves shooting Barda into orbit, blowing her up, letting her fall back to Earth and, the New God thus weakened, allowing one of the bad guys to take over her body, resulting in a cool, menacing visual: A "blacked-out" Barda with a big, white, circular "eye" in the middle of her distinct silhouette. 

While under attack, the Birds must try to figure out who their attackers are and where they are, eventually taking the fight to them. These attackers call themselves The Shadow Army, and consist of Copperhead (who primary artist Sam Basri gives little skin "wings" under his arms, and draws as overall quite menacing looking), Velvet Tiger, Batman Beyond's Inque and new characters Golden Lion and Daemon Prime, the latter of whom seems to be a sort of anti-Oracle, and to have an intriguingly weird design, which looks kinda like...comfy Doctor Doom...? 

(He also talks in a font that suggests an electronic voice and, at one point, Barda crushes his windpipe but he recovers panels later; I would have liked to learn a bit more about his nature, as, by the end, I wasn't clear if he was a regular human guy, or a robot, or some kind of cyborg or metahuman. Maybe we would have learned moer about him had the series not been canceled when it was...).

When the Birds realize that they are in danger, this gives Babs the excuse to call and warn all of the past members of this particular team, all of whom get at least a one-panel cameo here (the only characters to have appeared previously in the series that are missing seem to be Xanthe Zhou, who briefly appeared at the end of one arc in an unofficial capacity, and Meridian, the Mia Mizoguichi from the future...although she will appear briefly in a flashback later in the trade, as it is apparently her tech that allowed Inque to time travel back from Batman Beyond time to the present of 2026). 

And then, when it comes time for a Birds vs. Shadow Army showdown, the good guys call in the reserves, so we see most of these characters join them for a battle...and then a post-victory dinner, during which we learn that John Constantine cannot use his magic to create noodles. 

Written a little differently, it wouldn't be hard to see how this might have been a climax of a decent final story, as it allowed for the whole cast, going back to the very first mission in the very first story arc, to reappear and then work and hang out together one more time.

But then it's time for "Unreality." See, The Shadow Army gets away at the end of "On the Run," and they have yet to use some of the stuff we saw them steal earlier in the arc. This plot involves the Birds going undercover in new "skins" to infiltrate "The Game," an apparently annual event in Gotham City where a super-smart influencer young woman hosts a hybrid game that seems partly online and partly IRL, with some technology involving a blending of the two. It is all a cover for her real goal, which is also a callback to earlier in Thompson's series.

Here, I concur with some of the points in the Collected Editions review, and it seems as if the arc might have needed a little more room to breathe...and/or that maybe Thompson and company found themselves having to rush or squeeze a bigger story into a smaller space. There's a point near the beginning where I felt like I skipped a page or a scene, as we jump into talk of The Game so soon, and then what seems like the set-up for a cliffhanger (All of the Birds subjected to a gas that seems to make them evil and threaten Barbara in the last panels of one issue/chapter), doesn't actually get picked up on in the next issue, but instead simply jumped over...I guess implying that the gas just wears off...? 

I confess that I didn't quite understand everything that happens here, like the precise mechanics of Barda's "big" idea.

That said, Thompson manages to sell this temporary "ending" of Birds of Prey, and, when Barbara and Canary discuss needing to rethink the team, Thompson seems to be commenting directly on the IP and a challenge for the next writer to launch a BOP series.

Here's Barbara explaining her rationale for dissolving the team: 

The Oracle data. It makes us too big a target. For the Shadow Army, for a corrupt GCPD, for Maia, still out there looking for revenge. And so many more enemies.

I think the world needs the Birds, but I have to think about how else we can protect ourselves...If every other mission is the Birds of Prey protecting ourselves, our data, then we're not really heroes.

At least not ones that are making much of a difference. I mean, how many times has our headquarters blown up? We have to find another angle.

"Is that possible?" Canary asks, and Barbra answers, "There must be a way."

If so, it's up to the next writer—or maybe Thompson herself, on a later BOP revival—to think of that way.

As always, the best part of the book is Thompson's strong grasp on the characters, the nuances she's found within them and expanded into her own particular takes on them, and the relationships between those characters, particularly those that don't seem to belong in the same panels, like Barda and Batgirl (Indeed, as the team shares a drink, and Barda attempts to name this era of the team, everyone rejects her first suggestion of "The Barda Era," but they are more accepting of her second attempt, "Big Barda and Small Bat Era".)

(I also liked a short exchange between Barda and Megaera near the end, as the two talk goddess to goddess.)

Like too many modern comics, I'm afraid that Thompson's run, even though it lasted just a little over two years, didn't have a single artist involved, but a whole series of different artists often working in quite different styles, and thus the book didn't have a consistent look and feel to it. Here, Basri draws the majority of the book—Vicente Cifuentes and Cliff Richards draw the rest—and there's really only a single section (the Richards one) where the style changes so dramatically as to kick me out of the narrative. 

I honestly can't say enough good things about Basri's art, though, and I hope to see more of it somewhere soon; it was good enough that I didn't even miss original series artist Leonardo Romero when Basri was drawing.

That said, there is one page that I found completely baffling, and I'm going to share it here with you guys, not to shame the creators, but because I honestly need help understanding what I'm seeing.

Here's the page in question:

This is the beginning of a new scene, so there isn't really any additional context. Batgirl approaches Copperhead as he's moving some nondescript barrels around a warehouse and muttering to himself, he notices her and calls her out, she jumps towards him while he grips some object in his hand that seems to spurt flame, and then he says he's going to kick her ass in the next panel, the mysterious object no longer in his hand or anywhere to be seen.

So, um, what happened in panel four there...? 

At first, I thought maybe he had some kind of taser weapon, but again, it's not there in the next panel. Did Batgirl throw some sort of flame or energy spurting projectile at him and he caught it? (The drawing of Cassandra doesn't really suggest that.) Did the colorist mis-color his drool as fire...? (But if that's the case, there's still the issue of the object itself.)

After turning the page, I returned to this one and pondered it for a while before eventually giving up; whatever is supposed to have happened in panel four, it doesn't seem important to what precedes or follows it.

...

You know, it wasn't until just now, a week or so after reading this book for the first time and trying to puzzle that panel out, and after having spent a while writing all these paragraphs, that I have another guess. 

I noticed that the font and look of the Copperhead's dialogue balloon changes from normal in the first two panels, to more jagged and rough in the second panels. 

Flipping ahead about a dozen pages to when previously mentioned sorta cliffhanger, in which the Birds expose themselves to a drug The Shadow Army was after to see what it does (after Oracle and Batman thoroughly tested it to make sure it wasn't toxic, of course), the affected Barda's dialogue appears to have the same font and balloon shape.

So perhaps Copperhead had some sort of handheld gas-dispensing device and then purposely dosed himself with the drug in order to fight Batgirl while under its effects? 

Readers wouldn't know it at that point in the story, but we will later learn that what the drug does is make people more aggressive. (Of course, if that were the case, then Batgirl should have an idea of what it does, shouldn't she? Because she doesn't mention Copperhead using it as Babs is about to expose them all to test it...).

The other problem with this theory, which I'm becoming more and more convinced is what really was meant to be conveyed in that sequence above, is that Richards draws it to resemble flame or energy more than gas in that panel, while it looks more gaseous when Basri draws it in the later scene and, for whatever reason, colorist Adriano Lucas gave it a degree of luminosity in the Copperhead scene, while it's a duller, flatter color later on. You can see the same drug being administered to the Birds in this later scene, by Basri. (Again, note the style of Barda's dialogue.)

Am I dumb, or is that page Richards drew featuring Batgirl and Cassandra not very clear...? Did no one have trouble making sense of it before it was published, or after? (Remember, I'm reading the trade, so presumably a few thousand people have already read this scene in the single issues before).

Anyway, back on topic: This was a really fun Birds of Prey series overall, and I'm sorry to see it go.

I hope Thompson gets to play with some of these characters, and in the DC Universe, as much as she likes in the future, same as Basri. (I do kinda regret that we never got an appearance by Mister Miracle, who Canary namedrops at one point here; the great fun of Barda in this BOP is, of course, that we get to see her without her husband and the other New Gods, which has so rarely been the case in her history, of course, but wouldn't mind seeing how Thompson's Barda interacts with her husband...) 

Brume Vol. 2: The Forest of Lost Souls (Hippo Park) I reviewed the first volume of this series for Good Comics for Kids, and I was intrigued enough by the cliffhanger that I wanted to find out what happened next, even if I wasn't writing about it for the site. It stars a little girl with mysterious origins who plays at being a witch...and then turns out to maybe actually be a witch after all (At the very least, she performs some powerful magic and defeats a dragon in the first volume).

In this volume, she and her friends—a bespectacled little boy with a crush on her and a very smart piglet—go looking for the village's lost witch, which involves exploring the very dangerous sounding location of the subtitle. 

They do not end up finding her here, but they find some important clues, and the series continues.

I wanted to share what spread from the book, as an illustration of just how good the storytelling is. At one point, Brume and her friends are set upon by a pack of huge black wolves. Just look at this scene! (I tried to scan it a few different times at different settings but it kept coming out looking poorly.)

The growling, roaring wolves fall at them like an avalanche, a roughly triangular mass, with their snouts pointed at their intended prey like arrows. The other panels in the layout are also sharp, pointed triangles, resembling the shape of dangerous blades, as the reader is shown important details—the shocked and panicked wide eyes of the children, the empty eyes of a wolf, and its fanged, drooling mouth.

Wow, what a spread...!

Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead Vol. 19 (Viz Media) While it hasn't come up in quite a while, it was established way back in volume 2 that the zombie virus could also turn animals, as we saw when Akira and Kenichiro faced off against a huge zombie shark in an aquarium, made bizarrely mobile by the legs of human zombies it had apparently gobbled up sticking out of the bottom of its body.

In this volume, the gang head to a zoo, so the fact that animals can be zombified is particularly relevant. They are there looking for ostrich eggs, which are needed in the creation of the vaccine their scientist ally has been working on...but, since "ride an ostrich" is on Akira's bucket list of things he wants to do before becoming a zombie himself, well, why not kill two birds with one stone...?

Of course, perhaps the ostriches have all been turned into zombies at this point. Akira is adamant that they have not, though, given their great speed, their ability to perceive potential predators and their all-around awesomeness.

Another thing to keep in mind? Porcupines absolutely cannot shoot their quills, but creators Haro Aso and Kotaro Takata come up with such an awesome scene involving a porcupine doing so here that it is well worth the perpetuation of that fallacy. (This book is not available digitally on Hoopla, or else I would totally take a screenshot of the spread on pages 70 and 71 and share it here, even if it did spoil one of the best parts of this volume, as it is so awesome that one cannot help but want to show it to others. Here's a hint, though: It alludes to a scene from Terminator 2, and Takataeven draws an image of Arnold Schwarzenegger in the background to make sure readers make that connection.)

Amusingly, the gang enter at the petting zoo, where they face a variety of what should be relatively small, harmless animals, although the plague has made them pretty menacing. If you've ever wondered what a zombified sloth or capybara might be like, this volume provides answers.

They also meet a zombified honey badger, which they are all apparently unfamiliar with (Perhaps they are all too young to have seen that honey badger video on YouTube from years ago...?), and would have totally ended them all...were it not for the timely intervention of a new, totally badass character who makes her entrance riding a tiger.

Despite her warnings, they proceed to the safari park part of the zoo, where all the really big, really dangerous animals are, in search of ostriches. Not to spoil things, but it turns out Akira was right: Not only have the ostriches managed to avoid getting bitten by any zombies up until this point, they are also pretty awesome, and end up saving the day...not unlike the pod of dolphins that saved Akira and Shizuka earlier in the saga. 

I obviously love this series, as I am still reading 19 volumes in, but I thought this volume was particularly strong, thanks in large part to the concept of a zoo full of zombie animals, something I've thought about off and on since the Hitman two-parter "Zombie Night at the Gotham Aquarium".

REVIEWED:

Iron Man: Super Smash! (Abrams Fanfare) After Mike Maihack's trilogy of "Mighty Marvel Team-Up" OGNs starring Spider-Man, Abrams started a new series by Dean Hale and Douglas Holgate focused on Iron Man (Maihack doesn't seem to be done with Spidey though, as a fourth one, guest-starring "Thor?! (And Friends)" is due out this month). Hale and Holgate's first one, Something Strange!, guest-starring Doctor Strange, was pretty good, of course, but this new one, in which The Hulk takes Tony under his wing and attempts to teach him how to smash properly? It's brilliant, and head and shoulders above the first. It's a great portrait of Iron Man, it's a great portrait of The Hulk (if a rather particular, somewhat idiosyncratic version of the big guy) and it features a veritable parade of various Marvel monsters from different creators and differing vintages (Although you can see Jack Kirby and Stan Lee's Fin Fang Foom, who appears sans shorts, on the cover above). I still think it's weird that I now read more comics featuring Marvel heroes from publishers like Abrams, Viz and Scholastic than I do from, you know, Marvel, but with results like this, it becomes more understandable why the comics publisher farms so much of their popular comics-making out to others these days. Anyway, more on Super Smash! here. 

Supergirl's Family Vacation (DC Comics) Although this all-ages original graphic novel was almost certainly commissioned to have another book with "Supergirl" in the title on the stands when the Supergirl movie came out, it could hardly be more different. In it, writer Brian T. Snider and artist Sarah Leuver send the Super-Family of Superman, Supergirl, Lois, Jonathan and Nat Irons on an outer-space road trip in a reconfigured Supermobile, only to have our heroes become embroiled in a plot to liberate a planet that looks a little too perfect from some bad guys, who come in the form of some surprise Justice League villains.  It's great stuff. I reviewed it for Good Comics for Kids, and then wrote some more about my favorite parts in this blog post. 

Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse Versus The Mouseton Society of Evil (Fantagraphics) I wouldn't be surprised if there are comics readers or critics who think differently but, as far as I'm concerned, when it comes to Disney, ducks > mice.

That said, there's no denying the old-school superhero comics appeal of this imported European adventure album, in which Mickey and friends (including Donald Duck, so at least there's some duck content here!) are faced with an evil alliance of many of Mickey villains of varying degrees of notoriety (You probably recognize a few on the cover, which includes a version of some of Scrooge's foes, The Beagle Boys). 

More here. 

Bookshelf #36

This week's bookshelf is a small one, and thus a relatively simple one. Here we move to a new wall, and start a new shelving unit, this one being one I found in my mom's house and turned into a place to hold books; I'm pretty sure it was another old entertainment center (The top two shelves have glass doors that close over them, and there's a huge, spacious shelf below, which I assume was meant to hold a television set, but now hold some art books). 

This top shelf belongs almost exclusively to the work of manga-ka Ken Akamatsu. Let's start in the middle, with the series which introduced me to his work: Love Hina. I believe this is what is known as a "harem comedy."

Aspiring college student Keitaro is trying to get into Tokyo University, mostly in order to fulfil a childhood promise made to a little girl on a playground...whose name he has forgotten. Nevertheless, he endeavors to make it into the prestigious school, in the hopes of meeting her there.

With his parents no longer willing to support him, he plans to move into an apartment building owned by his grandmother, but there's a couple of catches. First, it has since become a female-only building. Second, he is the new manager.

Among the young women who live there—at the outset, five of them, in a variety of shapes, sizes, ages, styles and personalities—is Naru, who is also trying to get into Tokyo University, and eventually agrees to help our hero. Could she be the little girl Keitaro had once made his promise to? And, regardless, could she be the love of his life, the woman he is meant to be with?

The answer will seem clearer to readers than to the characters, of course, despite plenty of complications. Much of the humor, as I recall, revolved around various misunderstandings, with Keitaro often accused of being a pervert and one of the women or another reacting with over-the-top slapstick violence, like Naru punching Keitaro so hard that he flies up into orbit and becomes a star. Despite this, he and all of the young women eventually become good friends, even something of a family, and most of them, at one point or another, seem to develop feelings for him. 

I liked it well enough that I read the whole series and sought out Akamatu's other work. (There was also a Love Hina anime. I never watched it. Just the opening on YouTube; the theme song is pretty upbeat and catchy though and gives you an idea of the various characters, as well as the physical punishment Keitaro takes.)

Prior to Love Hina, and thus shelved to the left of it here, Akamatsu had created a manga called A.I. ga Tomaranai!, which Tokypop imported as A.I. Love You, which was a pretty solid title in 2003 ("A.I.", obviously, stands for artificial intelligence, while "ai" also means love in Japanese). In 2026, not so much, as the term "A.I." no longer evokes a far-off, fantastical future, but is no associated with making Internet searches less reliable, making phone calls to customer service more unbearable than ever and the production of shitty art.

According to the Internet, A.I. Love You was collected into nine volumes, and Tokyopop published eight...although, as you can see, I only got the first four. It was about a high school programmer whose computer program comes to life in a freak lightning streak. The program is, obviously, a beautiful young woman, and high jinks ensue. I barely remember it and obviously didn't like it as much as Love Hina, as I dropped it midway through. 

After Love Hina, and thus to the right of it here, Akamatsu created Negima! Magister Negi Magi, which featured more girls than Love Hina by a factor of ten or twenty, and many of them more colorful than those in that series (I remember a vampire and a robot, for example). This beautifully drawn series had a rather weird-ass premise, basically What if Harry Potter was a teacher at a Japanese all-girls school? 

Here are the first eight volumes of the series, which I had kept up with for a while. I later found a bunch of future volumes for sale at a Half Price Books and bought those, assuming I would catch up with the series at one point, but those are currently in the piles we looked at in a previous installment of this series. 

Akamatsu seems like a pretty interesting guy. After his obviously quite successful career in manga, he became a successful politician. His Wikipedia page is a pretty good read. 

I honestly don't remember when, where or why I acquired those volumes of Jin Kobayashi's School Rumble. Given that I have volumes 6, 12 and 13, plus a three-volume collection numbered 14-16, I am guessing that I had read the series via the library, and that these are ones I acquired at a sale somewhere...? At least, a cursory look around my "library" didn't reveal any more volumes of it anywhere. I guess we'll see as I continue to explore my bookshelves.

Anyway, this one is a fun, somewhat silly high school romance involving a love triangle of sorts. Recovering juvenile delinquent Kenji Harima (who has a goatee, longer hair and always wears sunglasses) has a crush on Tenma Tsukamoto, his cute, petite classmate, but Tenma has a crush on Oji Karasuma, a weird, listless boy who has a crush on...well, he doesn't seem to have a crush on anyone, but he does love curry, which seems to be his main personality trait. 

I can't remember how far I made it into this series now, but as I don't remember the resolution, I am assuming it wasn't very far. I suppose I should try rereading it while I wait for new installments of the ongoing manga I'm currently reading——Zom 100, Skip and Loafer, Now That We Draw—to come out...

Finally, see that small object atop of this entertainment center-turned-bookshelf....? What do you think that is...? Certainly, it can't be anything comics related, can it...? 

Sure it is!

It's a tiny little bottle labeled "Super Spy Mint Flavored Cyanide Capsules", with a drawing by Matt Kindt. This must have come with a review copy of Kindt's 2007 Super Spy from Top Shelf. Jiggling it, it seemed to still be full, and lightly trying the cap, I don't think I opened it when I received it, um, 19 years ago now.

I assume that it actually contains real mints, rather than mint-flavored cyanide capsules, but I wasn't so sure that I ever tried one...

Farewell, Books Galore

I was very sorry to hear that Books Galore in Erie, Pennsylvania is closing.

I went to college at Gannon University in downtown Erie, and Books Galore was my comics shop during those years...and the year or so after I graduated but before I moved to Columbus. So, between 1995 and 2000, I used to visit pretty much as often as I could.

Books Galore seemed to be a big, old brick house repurposed into a used bookstore with a comic shop in the middle. At one end of the ground floor was a desk and cash register, at the other, racks of new comics, divided into DC, Marvel and every other publisher, with long boxes of back issues between. This area was bordered by bookshelves, and these were lined with used prose books. (There were a few shelves of trade paperback collection and graphic novels just to the right of the counter, but, back then, such books were still something of a rarity). 

There was an upstairs, where I think they must have stored more comics and/or books and that was only open for special sales, but I never went up there, so it seemed quite mysterious to me. 

The store was just outside the footprint of the Millcreek Mall on Peach Street, a very busy, high-traffic street lined with national chain restaurants and other businesses that were a pull for out-of-towners, and, while I don't know the history, I assume the building had been there for a long time, pre-dating the mall, and that the mall and all the other retail establishments just grew around it.

I don't remember the first time I visited it, although I know the day of my overnight orientation at Gannon, my family stopped there before dropping me off, and I had bought 1993 New Titans Annual #3, the "Bloodlines" crossover introducing "New Blood" Anima. I remember staying in the dorm room that night reading it, instead of going to one of the many horrible icebreaker or mixer activities the orientation consisted of. 

This is the store where I used to buy Grant Morrison, Howard Porter and John Dell's JLA and Garth Ennis and John McCrea's Hitman off the rack. I bought my first manga there, the earlier collections of Rumiko Takahashi's Ranma 1/2.  I bought the How To Draw DC Comics Super Heroes Book I mentioned on Bluesky recently there. I started reading Peter David's Aquaman via back issues from their long boxes, which I would buy pretty much at random, based on whichever guest-star was on the cover (Superboy, Lobo, Martian Manhunter, Swamp Thing).

Books Galore was about four and a half miles from Gannon's campus. I would usually get there by bicycle, taking side streets to avoid the traffic on Peach Street. More than once I rode in the pouring rain. 

I would often bug the people I knew with cars, like my best friend and later roommate Diane or my upperclassmen girlfriend Elaine, to take me there, especially on Thursdays, which was the day I mistakenly thought new comics arrived (I don't know if this was a quirk of when and how they racked their shipments, but it seemed every Thursday I went in, it was full of new comics, as opposed to all of the other days).

When my grandparents would come up to visit, as they occasionally did as the nearest Veteran Affairs hospital to our hometown was actually in Erie, I would ask them to take me there. They were usually only too happy to do so, since Books Galore was on the way to Golden Corral, a buffet-style restaurant they liked to eat at (Erie was full of restaurants that we didn't have in Ashtabula). 

When I graduated and moved back to Ashtabula for about nine months or so, I submitted my first and only proposal to a comic book publisher. It was for a miniseries called The Book of Tentacles, in which a goth girl found a copy of a Necronomicon-like book of ancient spells in a used bookstore/comic book shop, with which she summoned a Lovecraftian space god/monster to destroy her hometown, and it was up to her comics nerd classmates to combat it with the help of the bookstore owner and the power of imagination. 

I had submitted it to Oni Press, which was then relatively new and seemed to exclusively publish awesome comics, almost all of which I bought as they came out at the time. It was, of course, rejected, but editor Jamie S. Rich included a nice, brief hand-written note, saying that "I think we have enough tentacles with Jenny Finn at the moment!" (Jenny Finn was a two-issue miniseries written by Mike Mignola and drawn by Troy Nixey that has since been republished elsewhere.) 

I'm sure Rich and/or whoever else might have looked at the proposal were right to reject it, but at 22 I was more confident and ambitious than I was realistic...by that point, I had also written a terrible, terrible prose novel that I was busily submitting to publishers and collecting rejections for.

The bookshop/comic shop that the series would have revolved around was, of course, based on Books Galore.

Books Galore was not the shop that I bought my first comic books from; that would have been a succession of two shops on or near Main Street in downtown Ashtabula. And it wasn't the shop that I bought the most comics from during the high-point in my comics-buying; that would have been The Laughing Ogre in Columbus. But it was the comic shop I was going to when I really fell in love with the medium.

I haven't been there in years, but I'm sorry to think that I will never be able to go there again, and that no one else will...either and maybe miss their opportunity to fall in love with comics. 

**********************

Modern media being what it is, I couldn't find a decent article online that either wasn't paywalled or that contained any more information than was in the store's own social media announcement, but here are a few links if you want to learn a little more. It sounds like there will be a notable sale all month, if you're anywhere near Erie.

•Here's the store's website.

•Here's their announcement on Facebook. 

•Here's a gallery of photos from the store; it looks like it has changed a little, but not too terribly much, in the last few decades. The gallery definitely gives you a sense of just how jam-packed with books it is.

•Here's a 2020 article from The Erie Reader about the store and its history. 

Review: Record Journey Vol. 1

Ryoichiro Kezuka's Record Journey is a rather literary manga, a collection of interrelated short stories that all revolve around records and music in one way or another. Kezuka dwells on the importance of music, particularly on how it can form and evoke memories and connect people to one another, but he makes his points with necessarily abstracted examples. The particular records, the most prominently featured band and even some of the countries which some of the stories are set in or refer to are all fictional. 

This first volume of the series has six chapters, comprising five stories (one is a two-parter) set in different parts of the world and, if I am reading them correctly, different eras (Kezuka's short afterword, during which the characters from different stories gather, seems to suggest as much, with talk of a "time paradox").

The first story, "Recollection Record", stars Miyama, a young woman that works at a Japanese record shop called Miyama Records. She arrives at the home of the grandfather of another young woman, Mayana. Her grandfather has just recently passed away, and Miyama is there in order to buy his extensive record collection (That's Miyama on the cover, by the way, and Mayana behind her).

Just as Miyama has finished up and given Mayana an estimate for the collection's value, they stumble across one more album: A mysterious 45, with writing in a language they have never seen on it, and Mayana's name hand-written on the jacket by her grandfather, in English...or maybe in Japanese using romanji, I guess. 

They play it out of curiosity, but the mystery only deepens. "What a curious melody...it sounds like ethnic music," Miyama says, and Kezuka tries to visually communicate the music's strangeness in the art, drawing a series of big black musical notes floating throughout a panel, the style they are rendered in vaguely suggesting a more exotic Middle Eastern or perhaps Indian font.

The girls go back to the record shop, and Miyama's grandfather, who is still alive and apparently works there with her, recognizes the instrument making the music, which points them to a country of origin: Pajal. 

"Have you heard of this country before?" Miyama asks. 

"No, not at all..." Mayana replies.

Me neither, so I Googled it. It turns out there's a good reason that these two young Japanese women had never heard of it, as it's not real...at least, not here in the real world.

Their curiosity leads them on a search that takes them to a Pajal restaurant, and then another one in the mountains run by a woman from Pajal, and they eventually unravel the mystery, including where Mayana's name came from, and a sort of secret history of her grandparents that she had ever known, this unusual music connecting her to her grandfather and, ultimately, to remark, "I can't believe I'm making memories with him after he's gone."

The next story, "Night at the Secret Record Shop," seems to be set in the Cold War Era, and in a country that looks and feels a bit like Soviet Russia, or a country they controlled, given various signifiers, from the style of fur hats to the Cyrillic alphabet. The country, however, is never named.

This one stars Lana, a young woman who listens to pirate radio of music from the outside world late at night and works as a server in a dining hall. When she overhears some patrons talking about a record shop that sells contraband, she visits Krot Muzika, looking for an album the Beatles-esque band The Staggs (I actually Googled this name at first too, just to check; the more I saw of the band in the manga though, I recognized that the foursome was a Beatles analogue, and the name itself likely a reference to stag beetles).

This minor act of defiance leads her to secret record shop beneath the record shop, and involves her in a world of policed contraband, thought crime and even smuggling, the dangers of which are conveyed at the beginning of the story, when she sees a group of soldiers chase down and beat up a man just for possessing a banned book. 

In the third story, "The Staggs Invasion", we meet The Staggs themselves, when their plane is unexpectedly grounded during tour in a small, poor country that is also never named. Their manager wants them to stay in their hotel room, but they escape to explore the nearby town and end up being chased around by their manager a bit.

Two of them stumble into a local record store, where a brown-skinned young woman recognizes them...but is insulted by their talk of how cheap everything in her country seems (Holding a homemade guitar when they enter, she angrily plays one of their songs at them in retort to their comments).

Eventually, she challenges them to a competition of sorts, which involves her jamming with them on the shop's rooftop, while her "master", the sitar-playing hermit from the crossroads acts as judge...and secretly records them. 

"This'll be worth good money someday," he tells her after The Staggs have left. 

At the end of the story, we check in with Miyama and her grandfather, who have the bootleg Staggs record that the hermit apparently made of the jam session. 

I'm not really conversant in Beatles trivia or lore (or that of The Rolling Stones, though one of the Staggs members looks like he has a Mick Jagger's bowl cut, and another resembles George Harrison at one point in his career), so I can't really comment on the degree to which this story might be a mini-Beatles pastiche. But, even to a novice like me, elements of it felt Beatles-esque, like the members running around on an adventure ala one of their films, or, like, the presence of certain keywords, like "rooftop concert", "sitar" and India. 

Maybe this chapter will hit other, older (or at least more Beatles fluent) readers differently than it did me, though. 

Then comes the two-part story, "Steer the Waves Over the Water!", which is about Seagull Radio, the same pirate radio station that Lana listened to in her story, broadcast from a boat. This too stars young women, and has a quite beautiful, evocative passage about the power of music, how it moves through the sky like the moon and the stars, and draws a sort of equivalence between the waves of the sea and radio waves.

Also like Lana's story, this one involves danger and adventure, as the Seagull Radio ship flees being captured by a ship likely from Lana's government (which shoots at them at one point). The two young protagonists are swept overboard at one point during a storm. And, when they finally arrive in London, one of the rare real-world locales in the book, there's a car chase. 

The final story is "Ashlee's Diner," and this one is set in and around an old-fashioned American diner (not sure which country it's in, though). Ashlee is the young woman that works there and extols the restaurant's value as a community gathering point and loves its juke box, which she has named "Juke",  and there's a local band that patronizes the place, which includes a man with a crush on Ashlee and a cynical young woman who makes fun of him over it.

When the band discovers an old-fashioned machine that presses vinyl, they set about making a record for Ashlee to put in Juke, leading to a fun moment where she struggles to express her reaction to the song properly, and the young woman, with little patience for Ashlee chastises her.

Depicting sound in comics, and particularly depicting music, is notoriously difficult. Kezuka's comic is about music, but doesn't spend much time ever attempting to visualize it, and thus leaves the particular sounds of the particular songs that appear throughout it to the imagination of the reader. Still, certain images, like Lana happily dancing to The Staggs album the proprietor of the secret record shop plays for her, or that of the Staggs and the young local girl with the homemade guitar playing on the rooftop (below), manage to evoke a feeling in the same way listening to a song might. 

In that regard, the artist's visuals are just as strong as the other parts of his storytelling.

As a fun bonus, at the end of each story, Kezuka provides a location drawing of each record shop or relevant setting, demonstrating how much thought went into each (In the afterword, Kezuka explains that these locations are composite ones of various real record stores he's visited for research.)

Not really a review of Supergirl

•It is certainly a choice for James Gunn and other DC Studios decision-makers to follow last year's joyful, inspirational, all-around fun Superman with this movie, in which the traumatized star attempts to self-medicate by badly abusing alcohol in a dark, grimy part of the galaxy, fighting a band of little girl-hunting sex slavers in order to save the life of her dog, the lovable scamp Krypto from the previous movie, who spends the majority of this movie on his deathbed, dying from a painful paralytic poison. Much of the comic relief comes in the form of a violent mercenary who distinguishes himself from the villain by boasting that he kills for money, not sport. 

•Call me crazy, but I think it might have been better if they had made a Supergirl movie that was appropriate for all-ages, rather than targeted towards the same grown-ups who read DC Comics and still go to theaters to see the latest Marvel movie. That is, a Supergirl movie that actual girls could enjoy and maybe, just maybe, a heroine they could relate to and seek to emulate. 

•Yellow sun, red sun, green sun, everywhere is equally poorly lit.

•And yes, there's a green sun, something that I, a comics blogger and semi-professional comics critic who has been reading DC Comics for 35 years now, have never heard of. After the movie, I looked it up, and apparently there was a single appearance of a green sun in a single Superman comic, 1962's Superman #155 by Bill Finger and Wayne Boring (Actually, the planet their Silver Age story is set on orbits a blue sun, but the villain apparently uses a satellite to turn its light green, rendering Superman powerless in the same way a red sun would). The only other usage of a green sun in a DC comic, according to the Grand Comics Database, is Tom King and Bilquis Evely's Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, which this film is apparently a rather direct adaptation of (I never read it, and you can't make me). It is an innovation of King's that a green sun wouldn't simply strip a Kryptonian of their powers, but actively poison and kill them like exposure to green kryptonite might. 

And so, like the hypno-glasses mentioned (jokingly?) in Superman, this is a bit of trivia that was a) new to me and b) technically from the comics, but not exactly common. Unlike the hypno-glasses, this is an important plot point in this film. 

•The beams that Kryptonians empowered by the light of a yellow sun shoot out of their eyes are heat beams and therefore would not work anything at all like that. I guess Cyclops' mutant ability, to emit force beams might, but that's another superhero, franchise and universe.

•I counted two uses of the word "bastich", zero usages of the word "frag" or expression "Feetal's Gizz!"

•While Lobo was one of the brighter spots in the film, I think the filmmakers played him a little too straight, and took him too seriously, so that he came off as the sort of character he has more often than not been a parody of. More on this below. 

•I didn't like that his flying motorcycle/space hog also had wheels like a regular motorcycle and was more often than not depicting as driving around on the ground, rather than flying above it. I can't explain exactly why, but if felt a little weird and cheap to me, like something we might have seen in a 1970s or 1980s TV show featuring Lobo...not that Lobo was around that long ago, of course.  

•I thought Milly Alcock was pretty great as Supergirl in the film. Oddly, although perhaps refreshingly in some respects, I don't think this Supergirl is much like any Supergirl we have seen previously anywhere else...not even in last summer's Superman, where she seemed to be more of an intergalactic party girl in the mold of Alan Moore's Tesla Strong (at least as Tesla appeared in Tom Strong's Terrific Tales #1, in that memorable short story drawn by Jaime Hernandez). Here she seems less Tesla Strong and more of a Greg Rucka-written hard-drinking anti-hero...or maybe an early Vertigo John Constantine (She's even got the coat!).

I'm hardly the first to observe the subversive nature of giving the role of the aging, world-weary warrior who has seen some things to a little slip of a girl who we are explicitly told has just turned 23, but it's neat, and Allock sells it. Hell, she sells everything, from drunk, happy Kara, to sad, traumatized Kara to confident, powerful Kara. 

I like that they cast someone who wasn't already a household name—I know she's got some roles under her belt, but this is the first time I've seen her—which makes it easier to believe in her as Supergirl than, say, Jason Momoa as Lobo or Will Smith as Deadshot or Ben Affleck as Batman or Insert Your Own Example Of A Quite Famous Actor Playing a Comic Book Hero.

In addition to carrying the movie, I also like that Alcock has such a distinct face, so that she looks like a real person rather than a generic blonde baddie, and that the movie doesn't do a damn thing to glamorize her. I've never seen a Supergirl, for example, who looks like she not only didn't brush her hair that morning but might never have brushed her hair in her life. 

•Jason Momoa was fine, I thought, and he clearly seemed to be having fun. That said, he didn't seem to quite fit into the movie, and, days after seeing it, I'm actually kind of wondering why he was in it at all (Maybe to sell tickets? I know I was more interested in seeing what a live-action Lobo might look like than I was seeing, like, the fourth or fifth or sixth live-action Supergirl). 

I think part of the problem was that he was relatively tame, presented as an anti-hero rather than a parody of an anti-hero. Most Lobo comics portray him as completely over-the-top, more cartoon character than comic book character, and even when he's interacting in a more serious fashion with other characters in a crossover or team-up, there seems to be an inherent tension between his character and the others (I mean, just stand Lobo next to Superman and it's clear they don't belong together). 

A greater problem might be that because the movie is so goddam dark—in content as well as lighting, costuming and set design—that he doesn't stand out at all. Plop Lobo into Metropolis or the midst of the Justice League, and the sharp contrast makes him pop in the world of colorful superheroes. But in dark, smokey bars, nighttime brawls and shadowy prisons, up against a bunch of other guys who dress in black and wear big boots and chains? There's little to distinguish him from the Brigands he fights.

It will be fun to see if Gunn and company make use of him elsewhere, maybe duking it out with Superman at some point, or perhaps even starring in his own movie.

The one aspect of the character I thoroughly enjoyed here was the intense, almost perverse interest he had in watching Supergirl or Ruthye (Eve Ridley) when they were either committing an act of violence or were about too. He had a real "Sicko"-at-the-window meme vibe, or perhaps that of the Jack-Nicholson-nodding-expectantly meme, and I wonder if, had the director leaned into it a little more, Momoa looking approvingly toward Kara near the climax might have become an enduring meme, regardless of how the movie gets remembered. 

•I guess it's nice that they named a planet after Woman of Tomorrow artist Bilquis Evely. If the movie is as closely based on that miniseries as everyone says it is (again, I didn't read it), well then, they could have gone ahead and put a "Based on the graphic novel Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow by Tom King and Bilquis Evely" in the opening credits, rather than the "Based on characters by DC" or whatever the exact verbiage was. Heidi MacDonald seems to have sat through the credits, as she reports how those credits referred to the various comics creators whose work served to inspire the film at the end of her review, if you're curious).

•One of the major throughlines of the film involved whether or not Ruthye, the girl who watched her whole family get murdered by the film's villain Krem of the Yellow Hills (Matthias Schoenaerts) near the beginning, should kill him. Supergirl says no, that taking a life for revenge will change and haunt Ruthye for the rest of her life, only adding to her trauma rather than healing her.

They argue about the point off and on throughout—the only reason Supergirl and Ruthye spend the whole movie in pursuit of Krem together is because Krem also poisoned Krypto and carries the antidote on his person; that, and because Ruthye keeps following her—and the climax of the film involves what Ruthye decides to do when Krem is at her mercy, lying helpless on his back with her sword literally on his throat.

The argument, and that moment (and the moment that follows), lack much weight because, throughout the movie, it isn't entirely clear what Supergirl thinks about killing people. 

Now, Krem looks human, albeit with a face covered in metal studs, and the guys he hangs out with, The Brigands, are all similarly humanoid, although some have horns (They actually all look kinda like background characters from Mad Max: Fury Road). We are told at one point that Krem has the strength of a thousand men, and, at another, we see him catch a very heavy object that falls on him and toss it aside, implying that he has super-strength.

He also seems to have some degree of invulnerability, as he survives a whole bunch of super-punches, kicks and various flying body slams and piledrivers from a fully-powered Supergirl near the end—in fact, the reason he seems to be at Ruthye's mercy at the climax is because Supergirl has pummelled him so badly. (Despite his ability to absorb Kryptonian blows without being pulped, he is apparently still quite stab-able; an unfortunate aspect of the movie is the inconsistencies of the characters' power levels. For example, while the fact that Kara's fluctuate depending on what planet she is on is part of the backstory, the colors of the suns don't always explain her strength and weakness. So, alcohol has no effect on her under a yellow sun, which is why she goes off into space to drink on red sun planets, right?. But apparently poison can affect her under a yellow sun. At least on one planet. On a different planet with a yellow sun, it doesn't.)

Are the rest of the Brigands similarly super-powered? No one ever says. (They are apparently all part of the same species though, as the reason they take female slaves is that their species is all-male.) This matters because, if all the Brigands aren't super-strong and invulnerable-ish like Krem, then Supergirl must massacre dozens of them in a couple of fight scenes, as she punches and kicks them, throws them from great heights and blasts them, blasts them her heat-vision and flies through their vehicles, causing them to explode. The fact that she doesn't pulp them with her punches suggests that they are invulnerable, but I don't know, maybe she pulls her punches...?

Again, this only really matters because so much is made about the question of killing but, because the film is so unclear on the matter, by the time Supergirl and Ruthye have to decide how to deal with the defeated Krem, Supergirl may or may not have killed all of his fellows. 

•Supergirl's super-senses, like her strength and invulnerability, similarly come and go...even under a yellow sun. We see her use her X-ray vision at least twice; doesn't she also have telescopic vision, and super-hearing...? It doesn't seem so. There's one pivotal scene where she and Ruthye are in a room for a long time, and she leaves the room to approach a couple speaking to one another in hushed voices in the kitchen; comic book Supergirl would have been able to hear them just fine from the room upstairs, though.

A short time later, she's searching for Krem as he stalks a girl, tauntingly talking to his prey the whole time, yet Supergirl seems unable to hear him, or spot him with her vision powers. 

•So, as I mentioned before, when I first saw the trailer, it didn't excite me about the prospect of seeing the film...or even really pique my interest. Full of glimpses of Supergirl in a dark, junky, lived-in looking version of a sub-Star Wars vision of outer space, dramatically set to an old pop song ("What Becomes of the Brokenhearted"), it looked for all the world like someone doing a pastiche of Gunn's own Guardians of the Galaxy movies...only with all of the wit and color of those trailers drained out of it. 

I'm happy to report that it is far better than that trailer made it look. It's not Supergirl in a GOTG movie with all of the wit and color drained out (Although God knows it could use more wit and, especially, more color). Rather, it's True Grit and/or John Wick starring a troubled young dog mom in a Joss Whedony, James Gunnish version of outer space, fighting space-orcs that could have come from Serenity or Thor: The Dark World or GOTG or Masters of the Universe to save her CGI pet.

Is it a Supergirl movie...? Not one I would have expected, but it's an interesting take. 

I've read a handful of reviews from professional movie critics, and all but one were bad (Heidi liked it too, and the friend I used to watch the Supergirl TV show with for the first two seasons or so liked it). Many of the gripes seemed to be about the script not seemingly quite right, despite Gunn's promise that no DC film would go into production unless and until the script was perfected, and the fact that it seems stapled together from other movies.

It's not as bad as you might have heard and, aside from the murkiness regarding whether or not Supergirl kills throughout and my various nitpicks, for the movie they were trying to make, I think they did a fair job. The main problem with the result, I think, comes down to aesthetics: Our first look at the DC Universe beyond Metropolis in a movie just looks dark, generic, boring and uninspired. 

Maybe this was due to a lack of imagination among the various designers involved, maybe they just didn't have the budget, but, if they were going to adapt Woman of Tomorrow, I wish they would have made it look like it took place in a universe Evely had drawn.