I don't actually want to discuss Supergirl Plus #1, so let's instead look at a Final Night tie-in and Supergirl Annuals #1-2

Gail Simone and company's story from the Summer of Supergirl anthology—which was collected in Supergirl Vol. 2: Hometown Horrors, a trade I reviewed in this column—was about the first meeting of the current version of Supergirl and the current version of Mary Marvel. Reading it made me curious about a previous story about the first meeting of a different version of Supergirl and a different version of Mary Marvel, 1997's Supergirl Plus. 

There weren't all that many Plus books, but I thought they were a pretty fun idea, oversized one-shots featuring a team-up of a popular character plus a sometimes less popular one (There were a whole round of them featuring the cast from the short-lived monster rock band book Scare Tactics, for example). I recall liking the handful of them that I had read (Batman Plus featuring Arsenal by Devin Grayson and Rodolfo Damaggio, Green Lantern Plus featuring The Ray by Ron Marz and Scott Kolins, The Flash Plus featuring Nightwing by Brian Augustyn, Mark Waid and company, and so on). 

I had never read Supergirl Plus, but I rather vividly recall a friend of mine talking to me about how insane it was. A fan of the Supergirl TV show, she went looking for Supergirl comics during its first season on the air, and this issue was one that she found. That it featured another young female superhero just made it all the more appealing. In her words, it was about Supergirl and Mary Marvel teaming up to fight a child molester at the mall.

As I said on Bluesky the other day, I had assumed she was kidding. Or at least exaggerating. 

She was not. 

Seeing that DC had fairly recently collected the one-shot in DC Finest: Supergirl: Body & Soul, I ordered the trade from the library, and was excited to dig in, as the lead story, the team-up, was written by the writer of the Supergirl title at the time, the great Peter David, and it featured pencil art by Mike Manley and Bret Blevins, with Jon Nyberg handling the finishes. It looked great.

But yeah, it's about a child molester targeting Mary Bromfield at the mall...and Supergirl and Mary Marvel don't team up to fight him, but end up fighting one another for most of it. First physically and then, later, taking opposite positions on how to deal with the alleged molester.

I say alleged because the book itself never clarifies whether or not the man, a police officer who is friends and colleagues with this version of Supergirl's policeman father, had sexually assaulted Mary or not. We see him approach Mary Bromfield and put his hand on her shoulder. Then we see Mary Marvel attacking him, saying he tried to assault a young girl. 

As to what happened between those two scenes, we get Mary's telling and the man's telling. The basic events line-up—suspecting her of shoplifting, he takes the young Mary out of the mall and to his car, she escapes and runs away—and even the dialogue is close if not exact in both tellings. In Mary's, he's depicted as lascivious and she says she touched her before she manages to run away. In his telling, he's completely professional throughout the entire encounter.

Before reading it, I was planning on reviewing the story for a blog post. But having now read it, I don't want to. It was just too weird and too dark and too unpleasant. 

I don't want to speak ill of the recently dead David, an unquestionably great writer who has produced an incredibly revered an influential body of work, including several series I quite enjoyed. 

I don't want to quote and try to parse the dialogue.

I don't want to scan an image of the middle-aged police officer licking his lips as he pushes Mary into the car in her telling of events. 

And I just plain don't want to spend an hour or two thinking about the subject matter, honestly. 

Maybe I wouldn't have minded doing so as much in the late '90s, when it was originally published, or in the late '00s, when I launched my blog, but not now, when there is a man adjudicated of sexual assault and accused of at least 20 more sexual assaults in the Oval Office, when there is an apparently whole of government effort to cover up the Epstein files, full of stories of adult men preying on minors, which is being led by the current Attorney General of the United States, and not when the story of a horrific rape at Cornell University is in the news, a story that has provoked a grotesque, inhumane backlash against the alleged victim and a defense of the young men who raped her (and other young men who were told about the events in real time and yet did nothing to stop them). 

Now, that 29-year-old comic book story is technically well-written. And it is quite well-drawn. 

But it's weird as hell that DC Comics published it. 

We, the readers, never find out what exactly happened, whether the man did attempt to sexually assault a child or whether Mary had misinterpreted the situation (The ending, showing the man alone in his car and bursting in to tears suggest he likely did assault her...although it's also possible to read it that he was so upset over the fact that he was accused at all that he broke down). 

But the story presents us with one superhero who may have been mistaken about whether or not she was sexually assaulted in Mary Marvel. And another superhero, the one whose name is on the book, torn between whose word to take, and ultimately deciding that the legal process must play out to determine whose version of events is actually true (A technically, legally correct opinion, I guess, but why would the writer maneuver her into this position at all?). 

That Supergirl learns that Mary Bromfield and Mary Marvel are one and the same by the end of the story, and that Mary is thus hamstrung from pursuing justice through the legal system because she also wants to preserve her and Billy Batson/Captain Marvel's secret identities, doesn't seem to factor into Supergirl's thinking at all.

I guess I said more than I meant to say about it, but there's a lot more I could say. 

Let's leave it at this: What a weird fucking comic book story this is.

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Instead of a full discussion and dissection of the Supergirl story I picked up this collection in order to read, let's instead focus on a few other points of interest in it, tie-ins to various DC Comics events of the time. 

This volume collects the first 18 issues of the 1996-2003 Supergirl series, all written by Peter David, plus Supergirl Annuals #1-2, the aforementioned Supergirl Plus #1 and a short story from Showcase '96 #8. Flipping through, I noticed that meant a tie-in issue to the 1996 Final Night crossover event and annuals from the "Legends of the Dead Earth" and "Pulp Heroes" theme years. 

I have at this point read almost none of this iteration of the Supergirl book; two issues for sure, maybe four at the most. (Scanning the cover gallery on The Grand Comics Database, I think I only read 1999's #38, a Zauriel team-up and a Day of Judgment tie-in, and 2001's #63, a Batgirl team-up and a Joker's Last Laugh tie-in, which was collected in last year's DC Finest: Batgirl: Nobody Dies Tonight. It's entirely possible I also read #36 and #37, which were part of a crossover with Young Justice, but, unlike the issues of Young Justice in which Supergirl appeared, I have no memory of them).

If I understand correctly, this Supergirl series started out being about the post-Crisis Matrix Supergirl, a being made of synthetic protoplasm with psychokinetic powers who took the shape of the dead, pre-Crisis Supergirl, a being who then somehow bonds with a dying human girl named Linda Danvers in the small town of Leesburg.

And that is about all I know, really. 

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I liked the Final Night crossover in general. The main, four-issue series was written by Karl Kesel and penciled by Stuart Immonen and the plot involved the threat of Earth's sun being extinguished by a Sun-Eater, something from a 1960's science fiction comic that had since become part of the DC Universe. Its name tells you what it does.

While the mini-series follows the superheroes' valiant efforts to save the sun, the day is ultimately saved by a bit of deus ex machina from Parallax Hal Jordan, who seems to expend all of the energy he has amassed in the previous years doing so...and gives his life, giving the character a noble (and ultimately rather temporary) death after his previous heel turn.

What was different about the storyline, and what made it of greater interest to me, was how hopeless things eventually got, with parts of the main series and many of the tie-in issues featuring not just the heroes trying to stop the Sun-Eater or deal with the threats of the sun going out and the Earth starting to freeze but also visiting their loved ones to say goodbye. For all the DC Comics stories about the world almost ending I've read, this was the rare one in which the actual end of the world seemed imminent enough for characters to react as if this was actually it (My favorite tie-in was Hitman #8, in which the only mildly super-powered Tommy Monghan and his hitman social circle barricade themselves in their favorite bar and tell one another stories as they wait for the world to either end or for the superheroes to sort things out as they usually do). 

DC released a collection of the main series, a Parallax one-shot tie-in and the issue of Green Lantern dedicated to Hal's post-event funeral in 2021. I enjoyed Final Night every time I've read it. The tie-ins haven't all been collected together before, and you're most likely to find them in trade collections of the title they appeared in. The Supergirl one, for example, is in this volume DC Finest. 

Now, it's actually not much of a tie-in. If this were a comic with the Crisis On Infinite Earths branding rather than the Final Night branding on the cover, we'd call this a red skies issue. Of course here, the sun has gone out, and so the skies are black...and snowy.

Given that this is only the third issue of a new ongoing series, however, I suppose we can forgive David for not completely committing to the crossover event, and instead doing the bare minimum to do so (Of course, if memory serves, David's Final Night issue of Aquaman was rather half-hearted in its connectivity to the crossover as well, with the cover depicting Aquaman's harpoon hand breaking through the ice of a frozen ocean, while the inside mostly had the characters going about the story David had presumably already written for them, likely altered to involve the sun temporarily going out and the ocean's surface freezing). 

Supergirl is in Leesburg and trying to keep the populace calm while everyone is understandably pretty freaked out. There are riots in the streets and fires everywhere. In the opening scene, Supergirl is in a church, facing a crowd that soon turns violent and, when she realizes one of her old powers doesn't seem to be working and it's not as easy to escape as she thought, many of them attack and start beating her (Don't worry, she's fine; her invulnerability is working as always).

Soon, her/Linda's father appears with some other cops in riot gear and calms the mob down.

Meanwhile, Linda's mom is driving slowly around town in a car with a loudspeaker on top, encouraging people to meet at the church for prayer and counseling. She's soon attacked by rioters.

Before long, it's clear that the rioting isn't the natural result of panicked people facing the literal end of the world, but that they seem to be...devolving...?

They are. This is thanks to a talisman called The Heart of Darkness, according to recurring character Buzz, who tells Supergirl its spell only works when there's an eclipse of the sun. Or, as here, when the sun seems to be in the process of being eaten. 

So that's the only real connection to Final Night. Were this not a crossover to the event, David might have only needed to change a line of dialogue here or there. Of course, as is, the sun going out provides a good fakeout for the rioting, with readers suspecting one rationale, before learning what's really behind it. 

On the final pages of the issue, Supergirl discovers who it is that has the talisman and is thus behind the madness afflicting her town, endangering her parents and the death of a friend's brother: Gorilla Grodd.

While I obviously was in the dark about the ongoing Matrix-and-Linda-are-now-one plot and this Buzz character and the off-panel, seemingly demonic entity he converses with in one scene, everything else was easy enough to follow and is as well constructed as one might expect from a Peter David comics script.

One could complain about the "red skies" nature, but, again, this is only the third issue of a new series, and David understandably prioritized making it more of a Supergirl issue than a Final Night tie-in. It might have been interesting to see what he might have written if Final Night fell on, like, the twenty-third issue of the series, or if DC had given him a story in a special Supergirl tie-in or an anthology to deal with her reaction to the sun going out/the world ending. 

I was quite surprised by how much I liked the art, as it was penciled by Gary Frank. When I think of his work, I tend to think of his many collaborations with Geoff Johns, on the likes of Superman various Superman books, and Batman: Earth One, the New 52 Shazam! and so on, where his work is very realistic, and quite full of fussy little lines that can lean toward what I personally perceive as a sort of ugliness. 

I suppose it's possible his style evolved between his work on Supergirl and his work on Action Comics a decade or so later, but I have to assume some of the difference comes down to the inking. This Supergirl art has all of the virtues of Frank's work, including his solid characters and realistic style, but it looks far smoother and cleaner than his later Johns collaborations. This issue of Supergirl, he is inked by Cam Smith. 

Of course, there's at least one point wherein that realism is something of a detriment. His Gorilla Grodd looks way too much like a real gorilla in this issue. In fact, it seems as if Frank used photos of real gorillas for reference, as this Grodd's face lacks the spark of intelligence, and he's missing his shaggy sideburns. He also doesn't have any attributes to suggest he's something more than the gorillas you might see in the zoo; he has no elongated skull, no big pot belly, no upright stance, no expressions. (I should note that Grodd looks more Grodd-y on the cover of the next issue, though.)

Oh, and he also looks really, really small, about the size of a real gorilla, I guess, rather than the towering brute he usually is (In all except one panel, where he seems to have suddenly grown about five times as big, and dwarfs a prone Supergirl, who was taller than him in previous panels). 

Having done years in the blogosphere and online comics news sites, I suppose it's also worth addressing the subject of Supergirl's skirt and shorts here, huh? This Supergirl costume, as Frank draws it, has a really, really small skirt. In fact, it's so short that I realized early on that I think it's meant to be more of a decorative element than a garment. That is, it makes sense to think of Supergirl's costume as a blue bodysuit with a skirt wrapped around it for a splash of red color, rather than the skirt being something meant to conceal what's beneath it (There's a panel early on, for example, where Supergirl plunges straight down from the sky, and her skirt naturally flies straight up and one sees that she's basically wearing a long-sleeved one-piece bathing suit, rather than a top and skirt over a pair of underwear or shorts.)

Er, except on the cover of this issue. There it looks like Frank just drew her bare ass under the skirt, and the colorist later added tiny blue shorts under it (The blue color is there, but there's no black line designating where the artist would have drawn the shorts ending and her legs beginning).

Now, how exactly Supergirl manages to save Lessburg from Grodd isn't revealed until #4, which I did not read, but I did flip through it pretty thoroughly, looking at the drawings of Grodd and Supergirl, and interestingly/depressingly, once Supergirl falls under Grodd's mental thrall and thus temporarily becomes bad, she naturally starts dressing in sexier clothes.

As you can see on the cover for #4, she changes into a crop top and leather pants with cut-outs along the sides. (Also, her hair suddenly gets much curlier and seems to have much more body than when she's in her normal "good" frame of mind, for some reason.) I suppose this is another example of the men who make superhero comics designating that a heroine has gone bad by having her start dressing sexier or in fetish gear (Hellfire Club Jean Grey, Sue Storm's Malice personality, Supergirl on Apocalypse in Superman/Batman, Countdown's Mary Marvel, etc.).

Again, I didn't read that issue, just flipped through it, so I don't know if Supergirl explains why she decides to change clothes (and tease out her hair!) now that she's being psychically dominated by a telepathic super-ape...or if Grodd made her change clothes and, if so, why, as it would be weird for Grodd to be interested in women in leather, wouldn't it...?)

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By 1994, DC had abandoned their summer annual events, in which each series' annual was part of a big crossover event storyline, and they had instead moved to doing standalone annuals all organized around a shared theme. The theme for 1996 was "Legends of the Dead Earth", explained thusly:

Earth is dead.

Those who once might have called it home are long scattered to the endless stars.

But in that scattering, on a thousand different worlds, by a thousand different ways...

Earth's greatest legends live on. 

What, exactly, did this mean...? I'm not entirely sure, having only read a single one of these 25 annuals (That would be Doug Moench and Vince Giarranno's Batman #20, purchased because I so liked Giarranno's over-the-top art; it was no great shakes, but it did let Giarranno redesign Batman and his supporting cast, giving us a furry version of Catwoman and a Scarecrow with the head of a crow. I wouldn't mind reading more of these now though, should DC decide to collect them into some DC Finest collections...although I would hope they would do Armageddon 2001, Eclipso: The Darkness Within and Bloodlines first).

It seems to be that all of the annuals were sort of Elseworlds stories ("Elseworlds" was actually the theme for the 1994 annuals), with the scope narrowed so that they had to be set in the far-flung future, which seems to have translated into science-fiction legacy versions of the heroes of 1996.

The Supergirl annual contained three stories, and thus three different versions of Supergirl...or, I guess, two different Supergirls and a story of a third. That translates to a 22-page lead story and two eight-page back-ups. (That's 38 pages total, for just $2.95!)

The lead story is "The Surrogate" by writer Chuck Dixon, pencil artist Ron Wagner and inker Bill Reinhold, and it's the one that corresponds to the cover. It involves a sort of clever sci-fi mining operation, in which a scientist in the employ of a mining company straps unwilling human subjects into chairs and puts a special apparatus on their heads that allows them to control big, metal, shape-changing humanoid mining avatars in an incredibly hostile environment that no human being could possibly survive.

These are all big, squarish-looking entities that visually suggest more machine-like versions of Marvel's Mindless Ones, and the shape-changing is apparently limited from the wrist down, so they can turn their "hands" into whatever tools they might need. The scientist and mining people refer to them as "Tooljerks."

One such unwilling subject for the procedure is a young blonde woman named Cryssia, whose parents used to tell her stories of Supergirl when she was a little girl. Something goes wrong (or right, I suppose) with the procedure, however, and the machine that would allow her to control her Tooljerk loads too much of her into the avatar, and she is therefore able to control it more completely than she should be able to, and rebel against the safeguards put in place.

She immediately transforms it into the shape of Supergirl, drawing an S-shield over its breasts, and then attacks and destroys the whole mining operation before heading off into space (On the cover, this Supergirl is silver in color, while the one within the book is golden...and thus looks an awful lot like a prototype for Superman Kal-El as he appears in the 853rd Century in DC One Million). 

It's a fine and direct, if simple, story, and one that probably didn't need all 22 pages to tell, but Wagner's art is fun, and he makes good use of the extra space to draw cool stuff. 

The first back up is "The Legend Lives On", by writer Barbara and Karl Kesel, with pencils by Dick Giordano and inks by George Perez (That's quite an art team for a back-up in an annual!). Well, this is the first back up in this particular trade, anyway; on the table of contents for the annual, the back-ups are reversed.

This features four sexy space ladies in various skimpy costumes; two look human, one is clearly Tamaranean and another is orange with antennae, and thus appears to be the same species as that one guy from the Legion of Super-Heroes (She's referred to as half-Durlan at one point). 

They find the fifth member of their crew dead in the cargo hold of their space ship, and she seems to have been in the process of drawing an S-sheild on the floor when she died, which they assume means she was trying to identify her killer.

This leads to a discussion of the Supergirl legend, which is interestingly and amusingly garbled, no doubt the result of a centuries-long game of telephone in the telling. (The most interesting bit is a panel that refers to her being active until "the time of the Legion of Titanic Heroes", in which we see this story's gloved version of Supergirl amid a group that seems to consist of Robin, Nightwing, Donna Troy, Red Star and Starfire (and someone I don't recognize) wearing what look like matching, Legion versions of their costumes. Legion Robin looks pretty cool, actually!)

Anyway, the women quite paranoidly accuse one another of being a murderous Supergirl in disguise, laser blasting each new suspect until the whole crew is dead from one cause or another, and the Kesels give us a twist, stinger-style ending that explains what exactly happened in the story. 

Again, there's not much to it, but it's a solid bit of storytelling, with pretty much perfect art for a superhero comic.

Finally, there's "Shootout at Ice Flats," written by Joe Lansdale and Neal Barrett Jr., pencilled by Robert Teranishi and inked by Stan Woch.

This is basically a Western, even if set in a small town on a distant planet, it's familiar-looking society full of familiar objects from our time that the characters don't seem to completely understand...or even recognize. Young, blonde schoolmarm/sheriff Eileen Garrett gets her butt pinched in a bar by a literal cowboy, a humanoid bull*, and she slaps his wrist and knocks him down with her weapon, a ruler.

He says his sister will get her, and Eileen and the bull-man's cow sister do indeed have a showdown. Eileen gets an unexpected surge of power from a good luck talisman that her mother gifted her the night before, a star with an S on it that she says came from Sardine Girl, presumably another joke about how the Supergirl legend has gotten garbled over the centuries. 

Again, nice art (I'm not familiar with Teranishi at all) and a light story. Probably the lightest of the bunch, actually, but it's not so bad as to cancel out the good that came before it. I didn't find any of the jokes particularly funny. The minotaurs in a western setting is probably the most inspired gag but, by this point, I had seen it before elsewhere. 

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After "Legends of the Dead Earth", the next year's annual theme was "Pulp Heroes", in which creators were apparently invited to put DC's heroes of 1997 into various "genre" stories from the pulps that preceded comics, like Westerns, romance, detective, action adventure and so on. They also all had painted covers.

Still a relatively poor college student, I didn't buy or read that many of these the year they came out that weren't attached to ongoings I was already reading (JLA, Hitman, Aquaman, etc.), but, in the years since, I have found several in back issue bins, and I don't think I've read any that weren't at least pretty good. (Looking over the list of 23 annuals now, I think I've read 10 of them; again, this line of annuals would make for a great set of DC Finest collection!)

("Pulp Heroes", by the way, was the last of the line-wide annual themes or crossover stories; 1998 and 1999 were limited to JLA and some of the ongoings starring members of the League, for the crossover stories Ghosts and JLApe. Then in 2000, there was "Planet DC", which introduced international heroes and characters, but there were only a handful of these annuals and, after that, DC seemed to have given up on the idea of annual events of any kind.)

Now, these stories weren't Elseworlds-like reimaginings of the title characters as pulp-style heroes, but rather in-continuity, DCU stories within a particular genre. For the most part, they tended to still be superhero stories, and the degree to which they embraced the assigned genre varied from book to book (Two of the "Weird Western Tales" books I recall, for example, were the Hitman and Robin annuals, in which writers Garth Ennis and Chuck Dixon sent Tommy Monaghan and Tim Drake West for adventures involving shootouts and other elements familiar to the genre).

Supergirl Annual #2 was a "Young Romance" title, but the men who made it—and yes, all of the writers and artists involved in the annual's two stories were men—basically just present us with superhero stories with elements of romance to them. Certainly the romance elements of the lead story, by Tom Peyer, Anthony Castrillo and Jordi Ensign, are more-or-less bolted-on, the nods to the genre coming on the cover, and a pair of splash pages of Supergirl and the time-lost Brainiac 5 kissing while melodramatic narration fills too many boxes with their thoughts.

The back-up, a 17-page story by Chuck Dixon, Greg Land and Prentis Rollins, is actually more romance than superhero, depicting as it does a pair of teenagers yearning after their respective crushes and ultimately becoming a couple, but it's still a superhero comic. 

The Peyer-written lead story is entitled "Secret Hearts" (Although the cover calls it the more confessional sounding "I Lied For Love!"). In it, Linda Danvers finds that things in Leesburg are going crazy in a very Silver Age-y kind of way, the precise sort of wackiness that, when seen in a Super-book in the '90s, generally meant Mr. Mxyzptlk was responsible.

For example, her mom is about to prepare dinner, and water shoots out of the stove top. Her dad puts his key in the ignition to start his car, and his car immediately starts shrinking. At the hospital and police station, things are just as weird: An IV bag full of hummingbirds, a cop de-aged to a child and so on. 

Linda eventually calls Clark Kent for advice (Having read so little of the book, I'm not clear on the pair's relationship, but Linda tells her she's "Mae" on the phone, which I guess was their name for Matrix when she wasn't Supergirl, "Mae" being short for "Matrix.").  She needs someone smart to help her figure out what's going on, and after demurring that "most of the geniuses that I've met are pretty nasty characters," Superman directs her to "the smartest person on Earth" at the moment, the Legion of Super-Heroes' Brainiac 5 (As you guys know, I'm pretty ignorant of the LOSH and their goings-on, but this seems to be during the point in the 1990s when a group of teenage Legionnaires were temporarily stranded in the present day DC Universe).

Brainiac, who Peyer establishes is already smitten with Supergirl, as he apparently a thing for strong blondes, is happy to help her investigate, but taps out when he realizes the cause seems to be magical rather than scientific (And, for the record, it's not Mxyzptlk).

Here's where the lying for love comes in. 

"I really hate to do this," SG narrates, before she lays her head on Brainiac's shoulder and says, "Oh, Brainy... ...what am I going to do?"

That seems to be enough seduction to get Brainiac to overcome his aversion to magic and continue to help her against his better judgement. The cause and solution to the madness is basically super-science gobbledygook with perhaps a shade of meta-commentary to it, but the pair ultimately save Leesburg, come clean with their feelings for one another and how they were both dishonest in an attempt to get what they want. And then they share a kiss. 

Again, not reading this volume of Supergirl, I'm not sure if anything ever comes of their apparent mutual attraction and the potential of a romance promised by sharing a kiss, or if this is more like the Batgirl/Superboy kiss in Batgirl #41 that seems to have never been referred to again. Scanning the cover gallery on The Grand Comics Book Database again though, it doesn't look like Brainiac or the Legion reappear in Supergirl for the rest of the run. 

The back-up, "Object of Desire," follows a pair of teenagers at a pizza place in Leesburg. The boy is a Supergirl-obsessed delivery driver with a terrible haircut reminiscent of that of Damage's (The story opens in medias res, within a daydream of his in which he's a dumb-looking, '90s Image Comics-esque superhero saving his girlfriend Supergirl from a giant robot). And the girl is a waitress who has a crush on him, despite the terrible haircut.

He happens to see Supergirl fly over on her way to deal with a dangerous emergency, and he follows...only to end up in deadly peril. In fact, he would have died...were it not for the fact that the waitress with a crush on him had also followed and was able to bring emergency workers to him in time to save his life. 

Having thus been saved by a girl he knows in real life, he henceforth only has eyes for her. A fact attested to when Supergirl again flies above him in the last panel, and he doesn't even notice.

Supergirl is in this, but it's not really a Supergirl story, so much as the story of the two pizza shop kids.

It's actually kind of cute, and not the sort of story I would have associated with Dixon. Also, this still being the '90s, Land's art still looks like something human hands might have drawn (although his style is growing increasingly more realistic, making this story look somewhat of a piece with that of Frank's art on the ongoing), rather than random photos found online and manipulated in Photoshop.

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By the way, the very next issue in this DC Finest collection following the second annual is Supergirl #14, the cover of which brands it as part of DC's Genesis crossover event series. Like Final Night, Genesis was composed of a mini-series, with issues of the publisher's various ongoings devoting tie-in issues to the storyline.

Shouldn't I also read and write about this issue too, then...?

Ha ha ha! No, of course not! There is a key difference between Final Night and Genesis, and that is that Genesis is not good. 

Written by John Byrne, this 1997 mini-series revolved around a "Godwave", a Source-spawned wave of energy that created gods as it passed over the universe and then, on a second pass, created superheroes...in a somewhat nebulous, ill-defined way, given that DC's scores of superheroes all have vastly different origin stories that an hardly share a retroactive root cause.

I read the main series and some of the tie-ins, but I was never really sold on this core premise, and some of the tie-ins with the Genesis-branding on top didn't really tie too directly into the events of the mini. For example, the Batman issue just had the hero dealing with a feeling of unease, as the Godwave not only bestowed particular super-powers, but also feelings of confidence and inspiration and faith that lead guys like Bruce Wayne to dress up in costumes and fight for justice, I guess...? 

So yeah, I'm not reading an issue of Supergirl that ties in to Genesis, but if that sounds like something you're into, feel free to do so and let me know what you think. 

*If you're wondering, as I did when I saw this, the Ryan Browne-created cartoon Wild West C.O.W.-Boys of Moo Mesa debuted in 1992 and thus predates this.

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. 

Ten scenes of note from Supergirl's Family Vacation

When this book was first announced, I wasn't interested. I'm not a fan of the character, I wasn't familiar with the creators, I didn't recognize the other characters on the cover, the apparent sci-fi setting (Kandor? Outer space?) didn't appeal to me, and the apparent Adventures in Babysitting homage wasn't doing much for me.

Then I read a blog post about it—this one, to be precise—and learned that the rest of the/a Superman Family was also featured in it (That's actually Jonathan Kent and Natasha Iron on the cover, by the way), I saw how great Sarah Leuver's art was, and I read a few short scenes in the sample pages that made me realize that, contrary to my first impressions based solely on the cover, the book might actually be...delightful? (This instance also reminded me of the utility of comics blogs in selling readers on particular comics; I think comics has lost something fairly valuable as the number of active comics blogs have dwindled so precipitously.)

So, I read Brandon T. Snider and Sarah Leuver's Supergirl's Family Vacation, loved it and ended up reviewing it for Good Comics for Kids. 

It's great, and, if you are a Superman fan, or have any interest in reading more about him and/or his little cousin, you too should go read it. Now, preferably. And then you can come back here to read the rest of this post, which will have a couple of spoilers in it, but I promise not to include the big ones, as exciting as those are; the surprise villains of the piece are interesting choices, and the nature of their plot sort of informs the way much of the story unfolds.

1.) Two things of note here. First, I was impressed with just how stretchy that harness Lex wears actually is. Look at how far he dangles from her hand! It's almost like he designed and wears it specifically so that superheroes can comfortably pick him up by it and carry him around like luggage!

Second, Supergirl calling herself a "horse girl" is fun because, while I don't know if she knows Comet the Super-Horse here, the character has had a very long, very weird history with that particular horse. 

2.) When Supergirl arrives at the Fortress of Solitude, the departure point for her family vacation, we get this great, two-page spread of its interior. I love images like this in comic books and this one is just full of little Easter Eggs, like Kelex dusting the Phantom Zone Projector, the Thought-Beast in the zoo, the Supermobile in the corner and Superman's two best friends getting instructions. Batman and Wonder Woman, it turns out, will be acting as fortress-sitters. 

3.) Is there a better sentence than "We've got a perfectly good Supermobile"...? You'll notice that the Supermobile looks bigger than usual here. Rest assured, it still has its most distinctive feature, although that too works a little differently the first time we see it in action.

"There's a fridge in here," Jonathan shouts out the window of the Supermobile. "And a button with a big fist on it."

"Do not press that!" Lois replies.

4.) Okay, I will spoil this bit, but I did warn you.

Now, I was pretty surprised to see Lobo appear here, although I suppose I shouldn't have been. First, his appearance was somewhat presaged by a small pod of space dolphins the Superman Family sees out of the Supermobile window before they stop at an intergalactic gas station. Second, his well-advertised appearance in the upcoming Supergirl movie have all but linked the two characters in popular imagination. 

On one page, the four-armed alien behind the counter hears someone shouting, "Back off, ya filthy scuzzball!" off-panel. "Ugh. This guy again," he says aloud. "I gotta call a Green Lantern."

Superman, who is dressed quite dad-ishly in Clark Kent clothes, takes off his glasses, and tells the attendant he will handle it. Then we cut to the above scene, and our first look at Leuver's Lobo.

I like the big, bushy mustache. I've never really been sure if Lobo was meant to have facial hair or not. Simon Bisley always drew the dark markings around his upper lip to resemble some kind of paint, like makeup or maybe a tattoo, and seemingly of an entirely different texture than the character's hair and sideburns. I had long since come to regard Lobo's mustache as something akin to Groucho Marx's, a two-dimensional, theatrical signifier of a mustache more than an actual mustache.

Leuver's version of Lobo's stache, on the other hand, is clearly really facial hair. It makes him look more than a little "off" to me here, but also gives him a Yosemite Sam-like look, which seems appropriate, particularly in this book, where the character designs all seem to have been suggested by one Superman cartoon or another. (I'm curious to see what the character's mustache situation might be in the upcoming movie, which is the first time we'll see a live-action Lobo, as remarkable as that might sound.) 

Anyway, Superman confronts his occasional foe, switching into his Superman costume at super-speed when Lobo says, "Dat you, blue boy? I didn't recognize you without your cute little cape and shorty pants."

The confrontation lasts a few pages, during which Lobo threatens Superman's family, Supergirl in particular and then the Supermobile, before he is finally taken out. Not by Superman, but rather by Lois.

There's a closeup of her finger pushing a button inside the Supermobile ("BOOP") and then we see this version of the vehicle's punching feature in action: 

5.) The only thing I don't like about Natasha Irons being Steel in the mainstream comics is that I think, more so than other "duplicate" characters, her appearances seem to come instead of those by Steel John Henry Irons, instead of in addition to them. For example, I don't think I've seen John Henry on the Watchtower or interacting with any characters on the current, massive Justice League line-up, although I have seen Nat.

Anyway, here Supergirl makes a good argument for them both being Steel at the same time: "If there can be three Olivias in my class, there can be two Steels." Sure. I mean, these days, we've got, what, eight Green Lanterns from Earth? Three Flashes? (Or is Barry retired at the moment?). Two Batmen? Two Supermen? Two Wonder Girls? And I can't keep track of who's Robin and who isn't month to month anymore...

6.) So that third panel there, the one of Superman as Clark Kent dancing? That's easily my favorite panel of the book...and one of my favorite panels ever. Leuver just plain draws the hell out of the big guy dancing, and doing so with such passion, such wild abandon and with such good moves. Like, one, two or three of those various Clarks dancing would have sold the gag perfectly well, but all seven of them there? Wow!

As funny as Clark's dancing scene is, though, I love the set-up, in which Superman says, "Wait! This is my jam!" 

For some context, Superman is on an alien planet he has only ever visited one single time before, and he is eating dinner alone in an empty restaurant with Lois, while an alien band plays music in the background for their amusement.

What are the chances that Superman has ever even heard this particular song before, let alone it actually being his jam, and one that he can dance to in such a fashion?

Lois' thought cloud makes it clear that Superman/Clark is acting out of character here, as if he's been exposed to "red-K", the variety of kryptonite that effects Kryptonians in random, unpredictable ways, like giving Superman the head of an ant, or making him grow into a giant or shrink into a dwarf, or rapidly age or grow a beard and so on. 

How Superman is acting in this passage seems akin to a human being getting drunk—indeed, in addition to his bad table manners and lack of inhibitions here, Lois will have to help him walk out of the restaurant, and the next morning he will appear hungover—but I suppose it will depend on the age or experience of the reader to recognize that. 

In any case, it's hard to imagine Superman drinking alcohol at all, let alone enough to get drunk (and he would have to be under a red sun in order for alcohol to even affect his Kryptonian physiology, I imagine), so I guess we'll just go with red kryptonite can affect Superman the way strawberry frozen margaritas affect me...

7.) I mentioned this moment both on Bluesky and in my GC4K review, so I'll at least drop the art here. This is the climax of a sequence in which Lois tells her husband she's off to enjoy a spa day, and, in actuality, she gets to investigating what's really going on with the seemingly too-perfect planet, she fights some robots hand to hand and she ultimately frees a whole stampede of alien animals, one of which is psychic, and is thus able to explain the political situation on the planet, and how Superman is in danger. 

The juxtaposition of those two panels—crusading journalist Lois Lane ready and eager to overthrow the corrupt regime on another planet, a completely smitten Superman taking her in—are about as eloquent a delineation of the modern Superman/Lois Lane dynamic as I have ever seen or can even imagine. 

8.) Up until the climax, we've seen Nat wearing either mechanics' style coveralls (as on the cover) or various street clothes. During the occasions in which she had to fight, she uses special gauntlets. Here, though, she dons a Steel-esque costume. 

I like the contrast between the shiny, metallic silver and the girlish pink (In the current DCU, her Steel costume is a duller, more iron-like gray armor with a red and black cropped hoodie over it). And I love that not only does she get a very brief magical girl transformation sequence, but that it begins with her holding up a disc with an S-shield on it, in the same pose that the Power Rangers used to hold aloft their "morphers" to morph into their costumes.

And if this particular costume doesn't seem as practical as her DCU one, what with her head exposed, don't worry; later, as she's about to go into action against one of the surprise villains, her head and hair also get encased in protective metal. 

9.) Nat's not the only one who gets a disc and a transformation sequence. Supergirl does as well, and it results in a new costume. I really like it, especially how it has so many similar elements to her regular costume yet simultaneously looks so distinctly different.

I'm not sure how I would feel about it being a new, semi-permanent costume—those starfield elements have proven to be hard for some artists to draw well in the past when we've seen them in other folks' costumes—but as a new, temporary, leveled up costume here? It works quite well.

10.) Finally, during the book's epilogue, we see a trio of familiar Green Lanterns in a single panel, including one of the breakout stars of last summer's Superman film, Guy Gardner.
 

Supergirl gets the magazine format anthology treatment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Supergirl: The World

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nice art, but the storytelling was a bit muddy. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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