In fact, one story seemed so poor—the Serbia-set "Foreign Skies' Sun", by Uroš Dimitrijević and Stevan Subic—that I literally had no idea what was happening in it during a pivotal moment (the first four panels of page seven) and reading it over and over a few times was no help. The dialogue on the next page is enough to explain what happened in the art after the fact, but I am quite shocked the passage made it past an editor and saw print.
I quit reading for a few days at that point, as I'm at a point in my writing-about-comics "career"/habit that I don't really want to spend my time either reading or writing about comics I don't at least expect to like (or that I don't at least find interesting for one reason or another), but, well, I didn't really have anything else for this week's Thursday post, so I decided to go ahead and finish the anthology strictly for post-generating purposes (I've mostly been reading manga these last two weeks, though wasn't quite ready to write about any of them, and those G.I. Joe posts I've been doing are labor-intensive enough that I didn't have one ready to go this week).
In the end, Supergirl: The World is like too many anthologies, a mixed bag. There's some interesting stuff in here, there's some less interesting stuff, and the visual styles are diverse enough that some will be to most readers' liking, while others will not. I don't think there's a truly great story in here, but I definitely enjoyed a handful of them.
In the end, I think perhaps the most interesting thing about the book is that it exists at all. DC doesn't do these The World books too terribly often, after all, and the previous ones featured Batman (2021), The Joker (2024) and Superman (2025). That's interesting company for Supergirl to be in, as it not only includes her among some of the publisher's most popular and iconic characters, but it also gives her such a spotlight before the likes of Wonder Woman, Robin or Lois Lane. (I imagine her upcoming movie has something to do with that, of course).
The Batman one was actually the only one I've ever read before; at this point, I'm not sure exactly what I thought of it, but I must not have loved it enough to read the next two The World anthologies (I did try to Google everydayislikewednesday + "Batman: The World" and was, quite unhelpfully, told by AI that "'Everyday is like Wednesday' perfectly captures the gritty, nontstop vigilance of Gothams protector" and that "For Batman, rest is fleeting, and the relentless fight against crime never stops" which a) Isn't what I asked, and b) Isn't true, is it? I mean "perfectly", AI...? Really? And blogger.com is flagging "Everyday", "nonstop" and "Gothams" as misspelled and/or grammatically incorrect.*)
One thing I noted overall is that the Supergirl character seems less...settled than Batman was, with different stories giving her rather wildly different looks and costumes, suggesting difference appearances and ages for her (which is a fun thing about seeing 14 different artists tackle her, of course), but also suggesting different status quos for her. Like, this is mostly the fault of how DC has treated her since at least Crisis on Infinite Earths, but I don't really have any idea of fairly simple things like what Supergirl's secret identity is, what city she lives in, what her day job is if she has one, what her superhero "beat" is and so on. (On the other hand, at least the book seems consistent with which Supergirl is used; it seems like these are all Kara Zor-El, Superman's cousin from Krypton.)
Another thing I noted here is that she's portrayed as very much part of the Superman franchise, with Krypto appearing in several stories (four total), presumably due to their connection in the last Superman film and the upcoming Supergirl one, and the villains are mostly Superman's (Lex Luthor, Toyman, Rampage) and, unexpectedly, in one case, The Joker. Batman guest-stars (twice!) and, randomly, John Constantine appears in a panel or two of one story. Meanwhile, Superman himself only appears on panel in a single story.
Anyway, let's take these stories one at a time...
•"The Chicken" by Mariko Tamaki and Skylar Patridge This is the American story in the anthology, and you may wonder, as I did, why there even is an American entry—I mean, we've had hundreds of American comics featuring Supergirl over the years already, right? Well, I guess the other The Worlds must have had them too.
Still, writer Maiko Tamaki doesn't do anything all that "American" in the story. That is, many of the other stories in the book highlight some aspect of the country's geography, history, folklore or culture, whereas this one does not. In that regard, it feels like a sort of generic story, the sort of inventory story that could be slotted into any anthology whose theme it happened to fit.
I mean, I guess someone mentions pie at one point. Does that count as American cuisine...?
•"Supergirl y La Maliciosa" by Aneke Supergirl flies to Spain with a short jacket over her regular costume rather than a cape and, after soaring over the mountains, changes into plainclothes to take in a museum in the capital, where Aneke shows us the various famous paintings she looks at.
While there, she overhears a couple talking about the legend of a particular mountain involving "La Malicosa", some kind of witch. Supergirl investigates and, unknowingly, meets the subject of the legend, helping her escape her fate.
The art is nice, particularly the colors, and while there's not much to the story—all of the stories are so short there's never much room to accomplish all that much—Aneke goes bring Supergirl to the country meant to be the focus of the story, and enmesh her in both particularly Spanish tourism and a folkloric encounter.
•"Dark Reflections" by Francesca Michielin, Irene Marchesini and Federica Croci This is the first of two stories in which I honestly couldn't tell you what was meant to be happening in a scene. Here, it's the first scene, where I think Supergirl is maybe listening to a recorded lecture, and then it cuts to an arguing couple who we only see the hands of, and there are words in a box that just looks like those of the lecture, but now they are emanating from a television...and later the television explodes...? I don't know. What do you make of this...?
Here Supergirl, Supergirl's narration that she ended up "here...for the sun...I was sent here to study, work, do my research." I assumed she meant Italy...but later I wondered if maybe she meant Earth...? Also, what does Supergirl study, what is her work and what is her research...?
Most of the story deals with her reflecting on herself and her place in the world/universe, with a fancy handheld mirror as a plot point and central metaphor.
Aside from being confusingly told, I didn't find it very interesting, although Croci's art is obviously lovely, as you can see above.
•"Foreign Skies' Sun" by Uroš Dimitrijević and Stevan Subic I know I already mentioned this one, the book's Serbian entry. Lex Luthor finds evidence of white kryptonite in a mine in Serbia, which he reopens to extract the valuable mineral (I confess I just had to Google it to see what that one does, and I guess it is lethal to all plant life).
The locals protest, and Luthor has security forces in riot girl violently put them down. This draws the attention of Supergirl, who intervenes. She goes into the mine after Luthor who, in his suit, gets in a pretty good dig that also alludes to the pocket universe a Supergirl came from...
I'm not a fan of this kind of...let's say photo-referenced art, although I guess Alex Maleev and Michael Gaydos have been successful with it. I think it looks ugly, and sort of defeats the purpose of reading a comic book, which I personally do to see cool drawings of stuff, but that's just aesthetic preference.
As for the storytelling, well, that's not the way to introduce a new character into your narrative.
As for that character, it is one of the protestors, using some sort of prototype battle suit her father made. We get a slightly better look at it in longshot on the final page.
The Toyman similarly gets redesigned. Here he's a hulking brute in gloves and overalls, his face hidden behind a smiling baby-faced mask. He looks like something out of a particularly unsettling slasher movie, and his plot here is similarly gruesome: He's been attempting to abduct young women and surgically transform them into living dolls.
When Supergirl tracks him down to Buenos Ares and their battle spills out into public, the crowds of women lend Supergirl a hand, pelting Toyman's battle suit with rocks.
This is one of the most straightforward superhero stories in the collection, but, thanks to the art, I think it's also one of the coolest looking.
•"Children of Ngonnso" by Njoka Suyru, Coeurtys Ulrich Minko and Ejob Nathanael Ejob This story from Cameroon is the first of two in which Supergirl is on a mission for the Justice League, with the voice of Batman in her ear. At least, I think it's Batman; the boxes devoted to his dialogue are gray, he refers to "your cousin" at one point and, when she dismisses him, she says, "Yes, Bruce Kent. Or is it Clark Wayne?" (This is confirmed in the last panel, where we see Batman reacting to Supergirl silently, with two little dots over his head.)
She ignores the warning not to rush headlong in, and pays the price, as her opponents are armed with kryptonite bullets (here, the proper color to hurt a Kryptonian: Green). Luckily, Supergirl gets some supernatural help, and allows her body to temporarily be possessed by Ngonnso, "founding mother of the Nso", whose statue Supergirl was sent to protect from mercenaries paid and armed by Luthor.
The art is somewhat abstracted and flat, but clear and easy to read. Like that in several of these stories, it also seems refreshingly outside of what one expects to see in a DC superhero comic.
•"Strong Girls Can Make History" by Johanna Sinisalo and Rosi Kämpe I thought this perhaps the oddest overall story in the collection. In this first panels of the story, Supergirl intercepts a strange meteor streaking towards Earth, one that seems to be altering the fabric of time and space as it goes and, unfortunately for her, contains green kryptonite, so that it weakens her as she struggles to divert it. She succeeds but finds herself transported to 1908 Finland.
Found by servants at a manor house, Supergirl pretends to be an amnesiac circus performer while she waits for her powers to return, wearing her cape as a skirt of a more proper length for the time than the short one she usually wears.
While there, she learns about and grates against the class system and women's place in society and personally encounters how the issue of Russification is playing out. It's all pretty talky, and thus seems to be much more slowly paced than all the other stories herein, but it does have one great indelible image: When the early automobile she and her hosts were riding in breaks down on a railroad track, and their tangled skirts make it impossible for them to escape as a train barrels down on them, Kara takes a split second to reattach her cape and then lifts the entire car over her head and leaps with it out of the way of the oncoming train:
•"Home Sick Home" by Mahmud Asrar In a scene that seems rather movie-inspired, Supergirl and Krypto are taking up stools at a space bar, even though she rather rudely refuses to buy a space drink, not even a space soft drink ("Isn't this where people come when they're miserable?" she asks Krypto, "Well, I'm miserable". Krypto drags her to Ankara, Turkey, where a shaggy, green, horned giant is laughing constantly as it makes its way through the city, doing something not clear from the art, but Supergirl says it is absorbing everything in its path.
She too gets absorbed, and, in the darkness within the creature, she meets The Joker, who says the creature is called Arcura. Apparently, he has somehow corrupted it. While Supergirl confronts shame over the loss of her parents and Argo City and worries that she has disappointed them, Krypto rallies nearby animals to all make noise at the Joker/Arcura and the sun rises; these things seem to have some effect on it and/or Supergirl, and ultimately, it blows ups and she glows with light (Does she have Superman's "new" solar flare power); this seems to have separated Joker and Arcura and saved the day. Then Batman appears, and we learn that it was all John Constantine's fault, as he tried to "banish" The Joker.
Nice art, but the storytelling was a bit muddy.
•"Down in the Mine" by Anna Krztoń and Kasia Nie Skarbek This is the collection's second story involving mines, and another story in which Supergirl finds herself invited to a local festival after her adventures. Though all of the stories are short, this one feels even shorter than the others, thanks, perhaps to the fact that there's no dialogue. Instead, Skarbek's art does most of the storytelling, while Krztoń's script is all narration, and this in the form of a news article about the events. There's a mine accident in the Polish city of Katowice, and Supergirl flies in to help with the rescue efforts. Underground, she meets a supernatural entity, "Skarbek, the fabled guardian spirit of the mines." The art is quite nice, and while there's nothing wrong with the story, it seems noteworthy that this could have literally featured any superhero character at all, and there's nothing that makes this a Supergirl story, other than that it happens to have Supergirl in it.
A tour guide is explaining a phenomenon the pyramid, astronomy and mythology, and, no sooner is he done than a portal opens, out of which steps a huge, brightly colored dragon. Supergirl pulls open her button-down, Superman-style and flies into action. The dragon is soon followed by a stampeded of similarly brightly colored, but much less dangerous-looking, magical creatures, which the guide tells Supergirl are "Alebrijes....magical creatures, spirit guides." Ultimately, the cause of the disturbance has a Luthorcorp logo on it, and a simple act of smashing is all that's needed to save the day.
•"The Extraction" by Yann Krehl and Marie Sann This German story could fit rather neatly into current DCU continuity, as it features Supergirl as an agent of the Justice League. They have apparently just freed a bunch of aliens from a lab, but, when they did so, they found an empty cage and suspect one had escaped and is currently on the run and in need of help, being pursued by the bad guys he/she/they/it had escaped from.
Kara goes in undercover, wearing a hoodie, jeans and a fanny pack, and spends a surprising number of pages sleuthing around Berlin, investigating the local alien underground, before a climactic, in-costume confrontation with the bad guy.
Sann's art has a storybook quality to it, while also suggesting the character design sensibilities of DC Superhero Girls. This Supergirl has a shot haircut and wears small red shorts instead of a skirt. Perhaps thanks to the hairstyle and the darker eyebrows, I got kind of 1980s Madonna vibe from this Supergirl.
Superman is actually in this story...sort of. He basically phones in an appearance, as Supergirl hears his voice over some sort of League communication device and refers to him simply as "Cousin" when replying. In an early panel, there's a TV news report about the League having freed the aliens, and there's an image of Superman in flight on TV monitors in the background.
That said, the flow between panels isn't always as intuitive as it should be—this is the rare modern comic book that could have benefited from a few little arrows here and there indicating which order to read which panels in—and I didn't care for Rodríguez's lettering which, perhaps ironically since she also lettered the comic—didn't seem to match the art.
The plot here revolves around a very real problem, that of ship sonar messing with and harming whales. In order to present that problem as something that Supergirl could get involved with and solve, the particular type of sonar here comes from an alien machine. Still, it does highlight a problem and shines a bit of a spotlight on the real, cape-less people trying to help the whales suffering from it.
•"Superman & Supergirl vs. Chateraese's Cheap & Tasty Sweets" by Satoshi Miyagawa and Kai Kitago Okay, had I known that the book's entry from Japan was by the creators of the Superman vs. Meshi series and was, in fact, basically a new, standalone chapter from that manga, I wouldn't have been so reluctant to tackle this book.
Superman vs. Meshi is, in my opinion, awesome and, a few weeks ago, I might have said it was my favorite Superman comic in recent memory. (Since then, however, I read Supergirl's Family Vacation, which is probably now my current favorite.) The only thing that really differentiates this story from those in the manga volumes, which occasionally feature Batman and Superman's Justice League allies, is that here Supergirl is the main character, and Superman something a guest-star.
Here, we're told Kara, again with shorter hair, is a high school student in National City, and she has a sweet tooth. After noting a few cliches of superheroes and teen dramas, she flies off to an important mission in Japan: To secure some kind of sweet or candy that is available for only a limited time. Unfortunately, they are sold out when she lands (in the now generic superhero-landing pose, the sort of crouch with one hand on the ground).
In disappointment, she falls to her knees and rests her face on the ground, recalling her origins for a page, only to eventually look over and notice that she's not alone:
While it was fun to see a Supergirl-centric version of a Superman vs. Meshi story, this is actually a fairly weak one, and if you're interested in Superman wandering through the world of Japanese cuisine, I'd definitely suggest you check out the first volume of that series.
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