Batman #33

This issue of Batman was perfect.

Thank you, Tom King. Thank you, Joëlle Jones. Thank you, Jordie Bellaire.

Every comic book should be this comic book. But, you know, different. Like if it's Superman, it should star Superman and not Batman. But it should be the same in all the other ways!

Batman #33 Rating: My favorite issue of a comic book in quite some time. So much time! The amount of time is inconceivable! At least by cat standards. Those things don't know shit about time.

Supergirl: Being Super: Book Three

Electrical problems are the worst.

DC got the title of this comic book wrong. I'm not interested in the super part of Supergirl. I want to read Supergirl: Being A Girl. I suppose, technically, that's what this comic book is actually about. It's less Supergirl saving people and more Supergirl not saving people. Burn! Jen is dead because Supergirl wasn't being super enough. All that's left is Supergirl being a girl with her friend that is still alive. And by being a total girl, she's attracted the attention of her evil lesbian coach who either wants to explore being a girl with her or wants to experiment on her in a non-sexually aggressive manner. That was the name of my Chem Lab class my freshman year of college: Non-sexually Aggressive Chem Lab. It wasn't as much fun as Try Desperately to Get Laid Racquetball.

It would have been much easier to get laid in racquetball if some of the other students had been my type. You know, indiscriminate.

Supergirl has realized, via her dreams, that she's an alien from another planet. That might mean that I'll stop caring as much about this comic book. I liked the parts where she's just trying to be a regular Earth kid in high school with super powers and explosive masturbation. I don't care for the stories about Kryptonians who long to know more about their previous life. Whenever I see one of those Unsolved Mysteries where a person tries to find original family members from a time they can barely remember, I always think, "Pee-yuke! Why would I want to be reunited with some strangers with whom I'm supposed to feel some kind of bond?!" If anybody ever came forward to say that I was their long lost brother or son, I'd be really uncomfortable with it. They would probably decide I was a rude asshole because I would be all, "So we're only doing this get together once, right? Nothing against you, of course! I just don't need any more time parasites sucking up my life energy." Is that the polite way to say fuck off?

Kara decides there's too much going on in her head to worry about being an alien. Good! Now we can just get back to dealing with school stuff, like hanging out with friends and fighting off the lesbian coach's advances.

Your mom's meatloaf what?!

Dolly and Kara have a rough day listening to everybody talk about how the tragedy affected them. But it affected them even more! So everybody is stupid and dumb for having feelings. What do they know about feelings?! Jen wasn't their best friend so they couldn't know what it means to really hurt! I mean, it's not like Jen was their daughter so Kara and Dolly aren't having the greatest feelings about the subject. So maybe they should shut up and stop whining too because obviously Jen's parents are really, really hurting!

Dolly figures out that Kara has super powers but Kara is all, "No, I'm just being a normal girl. I can't be any more normal than this!" And Dolly is all, "I don't care if you're different." And Kara is all, "Well, look again cause I'm not. Totally normal if you accept the white middle class view of normality which is blonde, blue-eyed, light skinned, heterosexual, and from the middle of the country! Totally normal in that offensive way people use the term normal!"

Later, Kara decides to have a memory about how her mother's parents were total ungrateful shitholes. She saved her grandfather from a burning barn (that he probably set fire while testing his burning cross to be used later) and he was all, "That girl ain't right! Git ridda her!" So that's why she can't tell anybody about her powers, even her best living friend Dolly.

Speaking of Dolly, she tampered with her heart monitor slash tracker that the predatory coach gave to the girls she wants to fuck and discovered it had a LexCorp battery. She thought that was weird for some reason. I guess Lexcorp doesn't market batteries for public consumption and only uses them in their futuristic high-tech gear since they're powered by Apokoliptian energy?

That night, Kara hears a voice whispering "Save me." She flies off to see if it's Jen going through her super villain origin but discovers it's Coach Stone's secret lesbian laboratory. Coach freaks out and hits a panic button which triggers Kara's bracelet which knocks Kara's powers offline. It looks like maybe Coach Stone wasn't a creepy pervert lesbian after all! She was just a scientist working for LexCorps who totally have a permit to kidnap local kids and run tests on them.

Kara trashes the lab and Coach Stone runs off to try to look through Dolly's blinds. The person Coach Stone was experimenting on gets up and thanks Kara for saving him. He's speaking Kryptonian but she can totally understand him. His name is Tan-on and I've never heard of him. Kara remembers her name is Kara Zor-el. I hope this guy isn't her cousin also because they're totally giving each other the fuck eye.

Before Supergirl rushes off on an Earthling killing spree with Tan-on (not that Kara knows that's what's about to happen!), she has to go home and leave a note for her parents. "Mom. Dad. I met a boy from my planet. We are going to fuck and kill people. See you later!" She doesn't tell Dolly where she's going because she's not supposed to tell Dolly anything that would make Dolly realize the whole normal act was a lie. Not that Dolly believes it anyway. But she's pretending to believe it because she's a good friend, unlike Kara who is a jerko friend. You know how many friends I managed to not save from death? Less than Kara! Because I'm a great friend!

The Ranking!
+1! Sometimes I feel it isn't fair to rank open-ended comics with comics written to have a conclusion. Obviously the stories that have a beginning, a middle, and an ending are going to be better executed than the stories that have an early middle, a middle middle, and a later middle bleeding into the next early middle of the next story. That's just common sense!

Supergirl: Being Super: Book Two

This is where that jerk Jen dies because everything always has to be about her.

This issue is called "Hold On!" That probably means that the theme will have something do with holding on! It sounds like I just made the most obvious statement in the world but you probably didn't realize that I mean the holding on in a figurative sense. It's a metaphor for life! This is going to be the literary equivalent of the poster with the kitten falling out of a tree that's supposed to be uplifting but is just a really macabre thing to have in your office. That kitten probably died during that photo shoot!

The issue begins with Jen not being able to hold on after she falls in a giant crack that opened up during an earthquake the way giant cracks never actually open up during earthquakes. Sure, sometimes buildings fall down or bridges break or the ground cracks open enough for a lake to drain out. Maybe. I might be wrong about some of those. But I don't think giant cracks ever actually open up under your feet. I've lived through so many earthquakes having grown up in California that I think I'm the best authority you'll find on how giant cracks don't open up during earthquakes. It's science! I've experienced earthquakes and I've never seen a giant crack. Therefore they never happen. Q.E.D. That means my logic is unassailable.

Kara Danvers almost helps Jen hold on but then Kara's powers short out because she's been masturbating too much. Remember how when Kara's vagina explodes in a FWASH, she releases all of her stored yellow sun energy and then rolls over and falls a sleep for an hour? Well, she's apparently really been going at it a lot lately, being at that age, and so her powers have gotten wonky. Instead of saving the day by holding on to Jen, Kara loses her powers and Jen falls into a chasm to either die or become a super villain. It's the perfect origin story for a super villain! I wonder if her last name was Luthor?

No. Jen's stupid last name was Bard. Maybe she was the daughter of Jason Bard? He's a guy that huge comic book nerds know. He's famous enough that he has an old Who's Who entry! It's all about how lame he is. No, no! Literally! He's got a bum leg!

You're allowed to call people with mobility problems "lame" in comic books. Jane Foster said so.

Kara mourns by eating lots and lots of cereal. After that, she needs to burn off the cereal calories because she's still in high school and she doesn't want to be the fat girl as well as the girl that masturbates constantly. Everybody knows when Kara masturbates because of the loud boom and the flash of light that can be seen on the horizon. Also because she uses her super ventriloquism to yell "I'm coming!"

Just to make sure everybody understood that the "Hold on!" title wasn't just about literally holding on to Jen but also about figuratively holding on to Jen, Kara breaks down while thinking, "How could I not hold on to her?!"

I would probably have scanned a picture by now but I don't want to break the binding of this comic book by shoving it in my scanner. That's almost the exact same excuse for not shoving things up my ass.

At Jen's memorial service, a background person mentions how they haven't found Jen's body. A-ha! A super villain! I fucking knew it!

Oh! And I found a picture that I wanted to scan that was in the right place on the page so that I could scan it without harming the comic book.

I didn't know an egg in an egg cup was a Christian symbol. What does it represent?!

Jen's sister Beat-Rice is an idiot. She doesn't say anything emotional or intelligent. She's just all, "You made macaroni and shit! You were fucking fast but not fast enough, amirite?! Yo, you in heaven, sis? See you later! Beat-Rice out!"

After the memorial, Kara's coach hits on her. Yeesh! That's so inappropriate. At least wait until Kara's showering in the locker room and her best friend isn't dead!

Kara wears black and white checkered Vans. That was important enough to get a paragraph all to itself.

Kara's got a pretty good home life. The kind of home life that Superman had. That's the thing about Superman and Supergirl that makes them special. Not that they're from Krypton and have extraordinary powers. It's that they had great families and grew up without Daddy Issues. It's what makes the current run of Supergirl so awful! In The New 52 (it could have been earlier than The New 52 as well! I don't know every fact in the world!), somebody decided it would be a good idea to make Zor-el into Cyborg Superman. Somebody made the decision to give Supergirl Daddy Issues. Because how dare she be happy with her adopted family and growing up as an Earthling? Some writer is always coming along with another hot take on Superman or Supergirl and how they should be emotionally fucked up about their real parents and their original home. That's why I'm glad the biggest Daddy Issue Kara is dealing with in this comic book (so far!) is that her dad doesn't want to discuss her growing body with her! She thinks he doesn't want to talk about her super powers but I think he just feels weird talking about any of the changes her body is going through. Some dads find that stuff uncomfortable!

Kara and Dolly ditch their parents to meet up at Burger Shack and have some fries and shakes and to hold on to Jen. It's also an opportunity to remind the reader that the weird coach gave Jen, Kara, and Dolly bracelets that track their every movement. Gay! I mean suspicious! We already knew she was gay by the way she tried to take advantage of Kara's sad feelings at the memorial for a quick roll in the lesbian hay.

Kara's mom has a sweet chat with her before putting her to bed so that Kara can dream the only dream she ever has: the moment she was put in a capsule and shot off from Krypton. She doesn't know that's what the dream is about though! At least she didn't know until maybe tonight. She remembers her father and her mother. He mother says, in Kryptonian, "Be sage, Kara Zor-el, my daughter." That's a weird thing to say! "Be sage"?! I don't want to assume that the letterer made a typographical error so I'm going to assume it's canon that those were Alura's last words. "Be sage, Kara Zor-el, my daughter!"

The dream reminds Kara of the pod in the barn with the garish red blanket so she goes out to the barn to masturbate.

FWASH!

Meanwhile, somebody somewhere else has been handcuffed to a machine with Kryptonite handcuffs! It's either the primary or the secondary subject. I think maybe the coach is interested in more than just an underage lesbian hookup!

The Ranking!
+2! This book looks gorgeous and is smart and emotional and funny and other stuff that people who like comic books would enjoy. It doesn't have any decapitations though. So if that's what you're into, you might want to skip this and wait for Damian: Being Sadistic.

Supergirl: Being Super: Book One

Ugh! A comic book about a girl?! Gross!

I'm only pretending to not like comic books with girls in them because I don't want people thinking I'm less of a man for not reading comics full of men with lots of muscles. You know the kind of man I'm talking about! The kind who would rather see the world destroyed than see a woman leading the team to save the day. You know! The kind of man who would rather build a killer magic deck than talk to a woman he knows isn't interested in getting naked with him. Come on! I know you know the kind of man I'm talking about! The kind that always vaguely smells of farts and Arby's. They're the keepers of the male dominated everything and have the fortitude to stick to their guns, no matter how detrimental those guns are definitely going to be to their future sex life. Not that women are only in the world for men to have sex with! What I mean is that if a guy thinks women are only in the world for men to have sex with, that man isn't going to have sex with any of them. It's a self-denying prophecy!

No, but seriously. Did I use that segue correctly? I want everybody to know that I was just joshing in that previous paragraph. Just a little light humor between friends and possibly future Internet lovers. I can't really grasp the reason to feel threatened by female characters taking the lead roles in action movies and science fiction and other previously male-dominated genres. How does it affect a person's life in any way at all? When I was in elementary school, two of my favorite series were the Oz books and Ramona Quimby books. It never even occurred to me that I somehow couldn't or shouldn't identify with Dorothy or Ramona because I was a boy. Obviously I read way more books with male leads in them because there were more of those. I couldn't know what those characters, being female, meant to girls who had a scarcity of female leads in books that didn't get people tittering about periods and boobies. And that's my point. More female leads in fantastic stories is in no way taking anything away from guys. But it is adding value to the world for young girls. The only reason to be an angry asshole about it is that you are probably, inherently, an angry asshole.

Plus I'd rather watch Felicity Jones for two hours than Mark Hamill. Sorry, Mark. That's not being sexist! That's just me being true to my heterosexuality! I'm allowed to discuss my interests even when they align with the patriarchy's agenda! I'm allowed to watch a movie and go, "Le sigh!"

Supergirl's story begins with a page talking about how to begin the story. My high school English teacher would have read this in front of the class and humiliated Mariko for it. He was always all, "Just begin your fucking story! Don't call attention to beginning your story. Just fucking begin it! If you feel you have to mention the beginning in some sense to get going, just cut out the beginning nonsense when you're finished! You fucking idiots!" Then he'd kick a desk or two just to show that he really meant what he was saying. I don't know if he was right or not. I just know I never begin stories by talking about how I'm beginning the story because I'm too scared to.

This is the second page of the story. It's a perfectly acceptable place to start! Although the first page did show a spaceship crashing in a field. Maybe that was needed for anybody who picked this up thinking, "I wonder who Supergirl is and where she came from?!" Of course if they're that ignorant of Superman and Supergirl, the crashing spaceship scenes aren't going to clear anything up for them.

This Book is also called "Where Do I Begin?", so I guess the whole "Where do I start?" question is thematic to the entire piece. I think Mr. Borror might have been okay with the opening of this comic. But just this once!

I've always thought that when people write things about how they don't know what to write because they feel they need to write something, they may as well not be writing anything at all. If all you have to say is, "I don't know what to say!", maybe that's a sign that you should stop thinking of yourself as a writer.

Kara Danvers (Supergirl!) has two friends: the Athlete and the Dyke. I suppose she's the Nerd. They're most of the way to their own Breakfast Club already!

That's not sexist at all! Like I said earlier, people have a right to desire the things they desire without being told they're wrong for desiring them! Jerko Athlete!

Being sexually attracted to a specific group of people doesn't make you sexist against those people. Of course, treating them as if all they have to offer is relief to your aching secret body parts is probably sexist. There are probably other reasons people are sexist but I wouldn't know what they are because my Wisdom score is like 4. I put all of my Attribute Points into Shaming Men Who Play Magic the Gathering. One of the flaws I took to get more attribute points was "Male who plays Magic the Gathering." It wasn't the best decision.

Kara's birthday is coming up. It'll probably be the birthday when she becomes a woman. A super woman! A super woman called Supergirl! Hmm, that probably makes more sense than it seems to. I bet whoever dates Supergirl must feel really awkward telling other people. "Oh, I'm totally talking with this chick named Supergirl. Um, but she's a woman! A grown ass woman! I mean, a teenaged woman but, you know, I mean, she's not like eleven! You know what? We're breaking up. Never mind."

Kara has been wondering where she's from lately because it fits the theme of this story. She knows she arrived on Earth in a pod and that she can fly and that Jimmy in math (Second row back, fourth seat over) makes her belly float and that she's super strong but that's about it. I guess she doesn't even know Silver Banshee yet. Unless Dolly Granger (the Dyke!) is going to become Silver Banshee.

"Moooooooom! Gross!"

The morning of Kara's sixteenth birthday party, she squeezes a Kryptonian zit and almost destroys her house. Now I'm wondering what happened the first time Kal-el had a wet dream. He could have killed somebody in the next room!

Kara's hands also begin to glow and she gets a fever and she feels tired. I think she really is becoming a woman. Don't females go through some kind of menopause at this age? I don't mean the old person menopause where the meno gets put on pause. I mean it's the start of the meno but it could be called menopause as well because you don't just press the pause button to pause a show; you press the pause button to get it going again! I once had that revelation while on LSD and it was, well, a revelation! It wasn't quite as spectacular the next day. I also thought triangles explained everything but I couldn't remember the logic behind it the next day. Taking hallucinogens doesn't make you smarter or more spiritual or wiser. But they sure are entertaining!

Later at the big track meet, an earthquake hits and Dolly almost dies by falling in one of those huge cracks that opens up whenever an earthquake hits. I'm from California so I can confirm that's totally true. I've fallen in like five or six dozen over the years. Comic books really exaggerate them though and make it seem like you fall all the way to hell. Usually you just fall into the sewer and get bitten by a rat or two.

After Kara saves Dolly without exposing her ability to do super feats, she begins looking for her other friend, Jen. Jen is knocked down by the stampeding parents and it looks like she's about to fall in a crack too when the issue ends. It would be just like Jen, the character who knows exactly what she wants from life and the talent to get it, to die so that Kara Danvers can learn a lesson about how random and chaotic everything is and how nobody should ever bother pursuing their dreams because life is a futile attempt to attain any sort of lasting happiness.

Or Kara will, like, save the day and shit. Whatever.

The Ranking!
I'm not going to say Kara and her friends are super adorable in this comic book because that would be sexist and reductive. But I will say, "Oh my god they're so fucking cute with their teenage problems and high school friendships!" That's okay to say, right?