Published on June 15th, 2020
This week brings the first issue of writer Tom King's Supergirl 8 issue mini-series. Tom King was famously fired from writing Batman awhile back, so it's kind of amusing to see that he's currently writing 4 books at DC, one of them a Batman book. I guess he wasn't good enough to write the flagship title but he's still good enough to stay at the company? He is one of the more "famous" comic book writers these days. Most of this is due to his Vision mini-series at Marvel, which everyone loved. Now he's kind of a love him or hate him writer, and the ones that hate him love to proclaim their hatred in every corner of the internet. Why he's writing a new Supergirl title and why it even exists is kind of beyond me. Is there a Supergirl movie coming out soon? There was a Supergirl TV show on the CW. It was so popular I'm not entirely even sure if it's still on. And while I have read a lot of Superman comic books over the years, I can't remember ever reading a Supergirl comic or even seeing her in a comic. Who is she? I thought Krypton blew up, everyone died. Why do comic book writers always have people from the Krypton days popping up all of a sudden (Bendis did this with his first big villain of his forgettable run)? I looked up Supergirl on Wikipedia and learned that she was introduced in 1959. She was killed off in 1985 in the Crisis on Infinite Earths event, which I never read. Shocking, really, that she was killed off 35 years ago but is somehow in a new comic book.
Tom King's idea for this book, Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, is a strange one. It's basically what if Supergirl took a time machine to Conan times. A young peasant girl in a Medieval type world sees her father killed by a brute and she seeks vengeance. Eventually she comes across Supergirl celebrating her 21st birthday in a tavern and tries to get Supergirl to help her kill Krem, the villanious brute that killed her father. By the end of this issue, Krem has stolen Supergirl's ship and taken off to who knows where. So this book is completely separate, at least so far, from the current DC world. I'm kind of wondering why Tom King didn't just want to write a current, typical, Supergirl in Metropolis fighting a villain type of a story. Why do a weird, Medieval set thing? And why have the main character be a peasant girl and not even Supergirl? Another aspect that is a little bit disappointing is that King has made Supergirl a hero with "problems." King loves this trope for some reason; the troubled hero. Supergirl gets introduced by being drunk and then hungover and puking into a bucket. Nice. And she says "fuck" a lot even if they can't print it. While this book at least held by interest, and the art by Bilquis Evely is nice, I think I'd have rather seen King try to write a straightforward, classic, hero vs. villain story in a metropolis in modern times. Supergirl isn't that famous...so why put her in strange, unfamiliar waters out of the gate? **1/2
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