Supergirl #4

Their best shots were robot butterflies and a jellified man.

The problem with this comic is that it's just not particularly fun. But it's not horrible like Captain Atom and Green Arrow where I continually curse the writer's parents for ever learning how to copulate. But it's been four issues of Supergirl confused that she's on Earth, not able to understand anyone, and punching robots and guards. I think Supergirl should be fun!

Playing volleyball on the beach with her girlfriends. Slumber parties with the Birds of Prey girls. Making Lois Lane jealous by constantly flirting with Superman. You know, like the movie from 1984!

That was like that, right?

Speaking of the film, I was more entertained by the comment threads over at Supergirl's IMDB page than this comic! I especially liked the guy who complained that they don't serve BLTs at Popeyes and never have. That's the kind of attention to detail I like in my movie critics!


If Supergirl's clothes are here, then that means...!

Even if this outfit is indestructible, how does that make it armor? So a sword can't cut Supergirl in half. But the clothing seems perfectly elastic. I imagine a normal person wearing this and being shot by a bullet would fair pretty poorly. Just because the bullet can't pierce the suit, it doesn't mean the bullet encased in the suit wouldn't still pierce the skin. It's too thin to be redistributing the force across the material to absorb impact, so bones and organs are still going to take major blunt force trauma.

Unless that is exactly what the suit does! Redistributes the energy all across the suit so that no force actually pushes inward toward the body. Those Kryptonianites are geniuses! Now enough of that! Let's turn the page and see Supergirl naked!


Aww. Kryptonian underwear.

I must be bored with this story line. I can't connect to the character and I've just completely begun to objectify her! Perhaps I'm turning into a serious fanboy who only reads the 'girl' comics for the tits and ass!

Supergirl escapes from whatever she's stuck in with the help of one of Simon Tycho's employees. This guy obviously scored very low on the Evil Minions Loyalty Exam. Perhaps Mr. Tycho should add a Boneli Test to future interviews of lackeys and toadies. At least Mr. Tycho has a good exit strategy for employees that don't feel the same way he does:



Mr. Tycho can think of only one way to get Supergirl back under his control. Reveal to her that he has an item of hers in his possession and try to blackmail her into staying on his satellite.


How embarrassing!

Oh wait. Maybe he isn't interested in blackmailing her. He seems to have quite another agenda:


This comic suddenly became much more interesting!

Although he has experimented with it a bit (who hasn't?!):


I'm not sure I *completely* grasp the euphemism.

Actually, what the thing is, is Kryptonian Sunstone. And Supergirl must have missed her Kryptonian Geology class or else she wouldn't worry about his threat. Because according to Action Comics #5, it takes a very special and super powered person to shatter Kryptonian Sunstone.



Turns out, Supergirl isn't really all that worried anyway. She notices a star chart on the back wall that may be the location of Krypton which Simon downloaded while poking the sunstone. She then blasts a hole in the floor which reaches down to the satellite's reactor, grabs the sunstone, and flies off to enjoy a moment alone with her "artifact".


Oh my!

Meanwhile, Supergirl's Lex Luthor, Simon Tycho, nearly died in the explosion of the satellite. He had to be grafted onto the body of the jellified brain man!



But he's happy this way because in the giant Supergirl versus his guards fight, some of her blood splashed on one of his henchman's uniforms. And that was all he truly wanted! Probably to make some race of super beings or to use the DNA of the blood to splice with his own DNA to make himself a super villain! That's probably his ultimate goal!

Oh yeah. And finally:

Chapter 60 of Lyle's Study Guide for the Literal Interpretation of The Bible for Dumb Dumbs

Joseph throws a dinner party for his brothers and even though they don't know he's the brother they threw in a hole and left to die, everybody has a roaring good time! Or at least they were all merry after all the drinking and crocodile dung hors d'oeuvres!

The Second Trip to Egypt.

This is my picture for the Drawing Time section. It's Joseph weeping in his chambers after being reunited with the only brother he actually likes, Benji!

Supergirl #3

What?! What is it? What's so shocking?! Oh yeah, it blew up.

Why is this the cover of this issue? At the end of last issue, Supergirl learned the truth about Krypton. And she learns nothing new in this issue. This is the first page.



This and the second page have the only discussions about Krypton in the entire issue. And no new truths are learned. Supergirl decides not to believe Superman and flies off to find her pod. She still holds some hope that Krypton has not been destroyed. Or, if it has, her family has somehow survived.

Superman doesn't really give her any information about the destruction. It's still a mystery how he knows any of this stuff since he was merely an infant when he was sent from the imploding planet.

She arrives back at the crater to find her pod missing. A hologram of Simon Tycho greets her there. This guy must be her Lex Luthor. He's a trillionaire at 28 so that must mean he's super smart. Because super smart people get rich, right? Or does it just mean he's super ruthless and a gigantic sociopath? That's more apt.

Simon Tycho lives on a space station and he lures Supergirl into it. He attacks her with robot moths and a man made of a brain and nerve-endings encased in man-shaped goo. She beats up everything and makes her way to the pod only to find it leaking some kind of green liquid.



It must be some kind of element that only poisons Kryptonians! That should be the cover of issue #4: THE TRUTH ABOUT KRYPTONITE!

While I was initially intrigued to find out more about Supergirl and how she ended up fleeing Krypton, my interest is really starting to wane. Get to it already! These issues are really quick reads and I'm not finding much of interest to blog about as I read them. The good and the bad comics are easy to write about. The mediocre ones are a bit tougher!

Anyway, this issue ends with Supergirl incapacitated by Simon Tycho aboard his space station.

Supergirl #2

Their costumes are so similar that I'm guessing Superman finds his own graduation attire tucked in his old rocket at some point.

The comic begins with a flashback to three days previous, according to what Supergirl can remember.


This pose is just a bit off the typical female comic book pose which contorts the woman so that you can see her boobs and ass in the same shot. I should probably make an entry collecting those shots!

Supergirl was babysitting her baby cousin, Kal. So however she arrived on Earth, she was suspended in time. Inside a big chunk of rock! I hope her parents shoved her pussy into the Phantom Zone! Maybe it's keeping Krypto company!

Superman can speak Kryptonian, as evidenced in last issue. How he came by this knowledge has yet to be revealed. Maybe he took an online course at Phoenix University.

Superman allows Supergirl to beat him up for a bit since she's confused and frightened. He realizes she is his cousin when she tells him her name. That means that Superman of the present must have all his history and his Fortress of Solitude and whatever else he ends up having so that he can know the things he knows. He probably gets his rocket ship back and learns everything from the Brainiac A.I.



Whoever the Roman Numeral Robots are, they've retrieved something else from the crash site. How they knew what it was so that they can call it their primary target, I can only guess. And my guess is Kryptonite!

They fight for most of the issue and Supergirl finally calms down and gives in when she realizes they are battling around innocent Chinese families. She still doesn't believe that Superman is her cousin. How could she? She really thinks it's only been three days so far. But she does learn that Krypton is gone when she wonders why Superman doesn't go back.



And lastly, we discover that the Roman Numeral Robots were looking for this:


Kara Zor-El's vibrator!

Looks like an information crystal like the kind Superman used in the Christopher Reeve movies. All of my Superman knowledge comes from the series of movies from the 70s and 80s. And from the Atari game.



This comic also felt short due to all the big, extended action panels. If Issue #1 and Issue #2 were combined to make one issue, it would be a pretty good comic book for the value. I guess it's still a good comic book. But I can't help thinking about how much each one costs and the amount of time the average person spends reading the lousy thing! Anyway, that's it for this issue.

Supergirl #1

The only thing I know about Supergirl is that she died in Crisis on Infinite Earths! So unless there happens to be a reason for me to mention Doom Patrol characters (like in Teen Titans!) or old issues of Suicide Squad (like in new issues of Suicide Squad), I probably won't have any historical knowledge to add as I read this.

Also, why does there have to be so many surviving things from Krypton? Isn't it more interesting if Superman is forever alone, the last surviving thing from the planet. Except for Kryptonite, of course!

Although, I guess having Supergirl in Superman's life makes for an interesting love triangle, even if she is his cousin. They would have to be somewhat attracted to each other, right? And I'm sure Krypton didn't have any laws about incest. That's probably why God destroyed their planet!

Ha ha! Dumb people believe stuff like that!

Supergirl comes crashing down to Earth inside of a meteorite. But she doesn't just smash down in Kansas in a big smoking crater like Superman did. Her meteorite hits America and plows right on through, popping up in Siberia. I guess she's lucky that she had just enough momentum to tunnel through the upper hemisphere and stop just after popping out of Siberia's surface.

Lucky or poorly written, that is! It seems to me that a meteorite going that fast (allowing that at its speed it would tunnel through the Earth and not shatter on impact) would cause a gigantic explosion of dirt and dust when it hit the Earth. But then I'm not a scientist! I'm just a caveman! I mean, comic book reader!

She pulls herself from her rock after who knows how many years of interstellar travel looking amazingly fresh and sexy. She believes she's dreaming because the Supergirl costume she's wearing is apparently some sort of graduation gown and she still has a year until she graduates. Now that's a graduation I wouldn't mind attending! Except that it would take place on an exploded planet and that would just be a hassle.

While Supergirl is walking around thinking about the dream she thinks she's dreaming, a bunch of robots attack her!

A moment I really like: Supergirl's arms are being held by the robot's rope things and she's beginning to realize this isn't a dream and it hurts. Tears of fear and pain begin to show in the corners of her eyes just as she notices the yellow sun rising above the horizon. She realizes this isn't Krypton just as the sun powers her and her eyes glow red with heat vision and the tears hisssss away.

Good moment. That's one I'd usually share but, once again (do I have to keep repeating it?), this is a first issue and it's out of DC's Big Book of First Issues which is a giant pain in the ass to scan.

And since I'm not going to scan any of this, I'll just summarize. The rest of the 20 pages are mostly Supergirl fighting with Men in Robot Suits. She shoots them with eye beams, screams her super scream, gets confused by her super hearing, looks through her hand with her X-ray vision and pummels all the robots until just a couple are left standing.

She's speaking Krypton and can't understand the soldiers she rips from the armor. And then Superman appears and says, "Stop." In Kryptonian.

And that's that.

This comic really is just a lot of pages like this:



Except wider. That's as much of the page as I can scan flat while the rest of the book hangs off the side of the scanner! It's just a bunch of pictures of yellow sky, snowy ground, robots and Supergirl.

What's interesting is that the first five pages look completely different, style-wise. They seem like water colours while the rest of the book looks like animation cels. So it looks like the first five pages took too long to do and the artists had to really get down to the business of beating the deadlines!

Not a bad start for the limited amount of story. But this really is more like a small prologue. It's definitely not a $3 story. I understand and I appreciate a well told tale that takes its time. But not at $3 for twenty pages when those twenty pages have a handful of panels with nothing but action happening. As a prologue for $1.50, I'd find this absolutely satisfactory!

I really can't rank this comic until I consume a little more.

Superman #5

Who comes up with these stupid covers?

When we last saw Superman, he was being attacked by a fire being and an ice being and a lizard being that used to be invisible to his Kryptonian eyes but could suddenly be seen by Superman at the end of the comic although the cover makes it look like it's invisible again. *breath* (Yes, I meant 'breath' there and not 'breathe'. As in 'take a breath' but shortened. Which I should have just said since now it's super longer)

I don't usually make a big deal about people's spelling or grammar errors online. I'm not grading the fucking internet! This blog is also informal and mostly stream of consciousness, so I expect errors to crop up. If I see them when going back over an old post, I'll edit the post and correct it. But mostly I don't mind a few errors here and there. The speed of thought and the speed of typing don't make the best of friends. But when I see things in professional works such as comic books, I'll definitely taunt the creators. But mostly the editors because what the fuck are they doing allowing the Smallville Cemetery to be spelled Cemetary?

Oh, sure! We could make excuses for it in the story and not just assume the artist can't spell. Maybe Smallville has a really super smart ironworks guy but he just can't stop spelling cemetery wrong? Things like this happen in real life. There's a marble gravestone in a cemetery in Portland carved with the words, "Our baby is with the angles now". And nobody noticed! So my girlfriend and I refer to it as the Mathematician's Grave.

I just wanted to bring this up because I see breath and breathe used incorrectly quite often. The one I really hate though is 'lose' and 'loose'. I've about thrown in the towel on that one. It's probably about a fifty/fifty chance now that if a programmer of an independent game uses the word 'lose' (as in didn't win), he'll instead use 'loose' (as in not tight). It used to just bother me in forums and amateur websites. But it's starting to leak into places that are being designed and polished. A slick game with otherwise good grammar can still surprise me by suddenly say, "You loose!" Fuck you, you losers! Loosers too, I guess! I made a graphic for these people a long time ago:



Anyway, now it's time to see why Superman set these weird freaky creature things on himself! Unless they were lying to him that he created them.

Everybody rushes to the place where Superman is confronting these things because Superman has been caught up in some fire and ice cyclone. So the police come. And the fire department comes. And the journalists come. And the gawkers come. And they all stand around twiddling their twiddlers.

And Superman just absorbs the entire cyclone into himself and says:


Chicken Pot Pie.

And that's the least confusing thing about this issue. After this, News Reports of his weird behaviour start coming in.


These were dismantled robots he already defeated but had saved for study. He changed his mind.


TITANO!


I could accept a mind-controlled Superman destroying robots and even, possibly, killing a monster like Titano, but normal humans? Something is amiss!

Also, here's that 'monster' Titano just before he was murdered by Superman:


“It would perhaps not be amiss to point out that he had always tried to be a good [GORILLA]. He had tried to do all the things his MAN and his WOMAN, and most of all his [SCIENTIST], had asked or expected of him. He would have died for them, if that had been required. He had never wanted to kill anybody. He had been struck by something, possibly destiny, or fate, or only a degenerative [RADIOACTIVE ELEMENT] called [KRYPTONITE]. Free will was not a factor.”

And finally Superman's rampage ends with him doing this to Billy 'The Real McCoy' McCoy, the 'evil jounalist':


Who hasn't wanted to do this?

Throughout it all, Lois seems convinced that something is wrong. She's come to believe there is a connection between Clark and Superman. She's trying to get in contact with him over the phone but also yelling out his name and saying she knows he can hear her.

And he does hear her. From here:


Why did the artist add a lens flare to this? Can we only imagine images that come through a camera lens now?

So he's been floating in space. Has any of this comic really been Superman? The only time in the plot that the switcheroo could have taken place was in Issue #1 when Superman flies the flaming alien into space to put out its flame. But how did that happen? And why? And who is this other Superman? What the fuck is going on, Perez?!

And I don't ask that question like I'm on pins and needles wondering what next issue will bring. I ask that question because this story has just fallen apart. WTF, Perez? W. T. F?

Superboy #5

So Superboy #5 takes place before Teen Titans #4. Which means I didn't have to read the books out of order. Stupid confusing idiot writers! Teen Titans #4 came out before Superboy #5 so I thought the story within it was chronologically before Superboy #5. I guess I should have read the "Next Issue" text better!



That basically makes this issue filler. So fuck you, Issue #5. You're beneath my attention!

Except for two things that I should probably note for future reference since one of the main reasons I started this blog was to help me remember what the fuck was going on in every title from month to month. So future self, when you're wondering what the hell is going on a few issues down the line, remember these two things:



First, Superboy is working with somebody mysterious. This person now has possession of Gen-13/Doctor Redhead/Caitlin Somethingorother. And the person has the ability to get Superboy in and out of the N.O.W.H.E.R.E. facility without any of the electronic surveillance detecting him.

And second, the super powered teens that Superboy captures are being kept either in Virtual Reality or at an actual farm that the Virtual Reality program was based on. And they're being kept there until this thing called The Culling. When the Culling happens, Rose Wilson will also be transformed into Ravager. So it has something to do with Super Powers granted or taken away or made stronger. My guess is that the weaker super beings' powers will be used to make the stronger metas even more powerful.