Supergirl #4 – Review

By: Michael Green & Mike Johnson (writers), Mahmud Asrar (artist), Dave McCaig (colorist)

The Story: That’s it—she’s taking her clothes back and blowing this joint!

The Review: Since Superman was raised among us, it’s not much wonder why he chooses to dedicate himself to the human race.  It’s hard to imagine why other DC extraterrestrials, like Martian Manhunter, Starfire, or, say, Supergirl, would do the same.  Sure, with no other place to go, Earth isn’t too bad of a place to live.  But if they spend just one hour watching our reality shows, you can’t see them thinking, “Gee, I should save these folks from themselves!”

Supergirl has special reasons not to be too fond of humanity.  Her arrival on our planet was greeted with gunfire and hostile mechs, and now she’s held captive and tortured by fatal radiation.  It’s worth mentioning that Simon Tycho does none of this for the sake of global security, which would at least be a semi-rational motivation, but for the most commercial purposes possible.  On discovering Supergirl’s outfit is well-nigh indestructible, he waxes poetic over the applications: “Bikinis and boxer shorts.  Diapers and dishtowels.”

Thankfully, our species may be redeemed in Supergirl’s eyes by the noble actions of one “Jacobs,” the same guy who ordered his men not to shoot at her when they first attacked in #1.  Green-Johnson are careful to explain how such a nice guy can work for such a baddie: “I thought Mr. Tycho was a genius.  Thought he was gonna help the world.”  And ultimately, Jacobs gives up everything to do right by Supergirl, actions which are definitely not lost on her.

That’s not to say she’s about to follow directly in her cousin’s heroic footsteps, however.  She engages Tycho’s men with little hesitation about hurting them (“Oh God my arm oh God—”), and grows more adept with her powers by the moment.  As elated as she feels about her increasing mastery, you have to wonder how long it’ll be before the intoxication of “doing impossible things without even thinking about it” gets the better of her.

Supergirl #3 – Review

By: Michael Green & Mike Johnson (writers), Mahmud Asrar & Bill Reinhold (artists), Paul Mounts (colorist)

The Story: Supergirl gets her first taste of Earthling villainy—and it’s bitter stuff.

The Review: One thing that always struck me as odd about Supergirl in previous incarnations was her seemingly seamless transition into Earth—specifically American—culture.  The last iteration of Kara Zor-El took to the rebellious party girl stereotype fairly quickly, and except for every now and then expressing a brief melancholy over how “different” she felt on Earth, she seemed like she could’ve just as easily been raised there her whole life.

Her integration into our world looks like it’ll be a lot rougher this time around.  Besides the traumatic circumstances of her arrival, and the less-than-friendly welcome party, she now has to face the obliteration of her world and people, an idea clearly too ghastly to swallow.  Even as she senses her cousin “can only ever tell the truth,” she piles on the denial.

One interesting thing about Kara: despite her youthful appearance, she is still a member of a highly advanced, science-devoted race.  When Superman tells her the fate of Krypton, she immediately bursts into a girlish, “This is all some kind of joke!”  But then she follows with a series of logical rebuttals: “Do you have any proof for any of this?  …What about my family? …If I survived—if this even really happened—they could have survived, too!”

Yet all these counterarguments only partially succeed in keeping her emotions under control, a kind of mature coping mechanism for a relatively immature young woman.  It’s revealing, however, that while she accuses Superman of misleading her, she ventures the hypothesis, “If there’s a chance that Krypton survived…”  The fact she uses the word “survived” in that theory indicates that, deep down, she knows there can be no happy conclusion to that sentence.