Sunday, December 9, 2007

What The #$%^--Supergirl Again?!?!

A twofer for this cover--both ugly AND non-representative!!
Well, last month I had a few questions about the very confusing debut of Kelley Puckett's run on Supergirl.

Well, here we are one month later, and...well, I'm still confused and still have questions (OK, I confess ,they're more like observations phrased Jeopardy-style).

  1. Well, It's obvious that Kelley Puckett isn't paid by the word, isn't it? Between these 2 issues, probably 50 percent of the pages had no dialogue, and another 15 percent had only a single caption or dialogue balloon with fewer than 3 words.

  2. Remember how, during Jeph Loeb and Joe Kelly's runs, we learned that Kara's parents had sent her to Earth to, you know, kill Kal-El? How, depending on which author you believed, she was to destroy him to settle a family grudge or protect the universe from Phantom Zone dwellers? Well, not so much anymore.

Maybe Superboy-Prime punched another universe or something, but without a single word, hint or acknowledgement, that's been wiped out of Supergirl's continuity, apparently. Nope, now it was nothing but love between Zor-El & Jor-El, no mention of the Phantom Zone, no family grudges, just "go to Earth and represent Krypton, and take care of Kal."

Look, I'm glad that the stupid "I was sent here to kill you" nonsense is gone. It was dim, and dimly executed. But if DC is going to pretend to have continuity, shouldn't they feel at least obligated to mention that 2 months ago Supergirl's origin was, well, different? Is it OK for a new writer to take over and say, "everything the last guys did never actually happened!"? And if so, don't the readers deserve at least an occasional caption or something? Nope, because under Dan DiDio DC has "wiki-nuity"--whatever today's author says is what goes, and those in the past, forget them, and to hell with the fans who wonder what's going on.

I don't think it's "continuity porn" to at least maintain a consistent origin/motivation story for your hero. DC wonders why they can't attract more casual readers? How about someone who picked up Supergirl 6 months ago not being able to recognize the character if they picked it up today?

Anyhoo, this issue was, in some ways, almost as confusing as last issue. I'm glad Superman and the Green Lanterns finally figured out you could track the ship visually (like, duh! This from a guy with telescopic vision?!) without all that holding your breath nonsense. And I thought the Krypton stuff was nice, albeit completely contradictory to what the past 2 regimes have said (not counting poor Tony Bedard, the unappreciated middle reliever of DC's bullpen). And the insistence on minimal dialogue means we get no real depth to her conversation with Superman about his mother, which should have been the emotional crux of the issue, and is what I wanted to hear more of.

And we still have no idea what direction Puckett is taking this book...

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