A few years ago DC added a back-up strip to Action Comics, around the time that Supergirl lost her ongoing title (again). And since then I’ve regularly suggested Supergirl take the spot as a nod to where she started, back in the Silver Age. And now, 694 issues since she departed her solo series in this book, Supergirl is back as Superman’s support.
She’s in the main strip too, which marks the start of Mark Waid’s first ongoing run on Superman, a longtime ambition for the writer. So how does he do?
To the surprise of no one, the answer is: brilliantly. Waid knows his Superman lore, so there are nods to the classics (one character in here dates back to at least Action Comics #489), but he’s not a concrete nostalgist, planting his writing feet into the past and staying there. Nope, Waid’s script are as fresh as any tyro’s, but showing the skill of the veteran he is.
And Waid’s not alone in making a big impression as part of the new creative team. Clayton Henry, who has done great work across DC’s line over the last decade, handles the illustrations, and at once blows me away with a grabber of an image.
The full reveal of the being crawling out of the original Phantom Zone projector is horrific. It’s not one inhabitant of Jor-El’s spectral prison, but – all together now – three.
Speeding from the Fortress to Metropolis, it’s soon in a fierce confrontation with Superman. With the strength of three Kryptonians, and utterly crazed, it gives the Man of Steel such a fight that he’s glad when help arrives.
As Action Comics has gone weekly, I won’t give chapter and verse or I’ll still be writing when Part Two shows up. Suffice to say there’s a lot going on here, from a rarely seen remnant of Krypton to a meditation on the morality of condemning criminals to a nightmare realm. In fact, Waid reconciles the various portrayals of the Phantom Zone, from Silver Age through Bronze Age to today, which made me weirdly happy.
Also, he gives us this Jimmy Olsen!
Oh, the irony! And the gags… and there’s an even better one over the page about the laughing young daredevil’s upcoming birthday… hmm, that would be a nice note on which to end this four-part story. Not that I’m in any hurry to see it done, given how great this opener is.
I don’t know if they’ve worked together previously, but Waid and Henry show immediate creative synergy, the visuals convey the story beats with power and subtlety. Henry’s people look the business, whether we’re talking heroes, villains or regular folk like Lois, who has a pleasingly tender moment with Superman. The fight scene is frenetic, and the Super-Cousins do look proper knackered as the battle goes to an hour. And vitally, Henry is a terrific storyteller.
There’s something special going on with the colour, Matt Herms gives backgrounds a softness reminiscent of coloured pencils; the texture of Jimmy’s jumper, for example, looks like wool. It could be that Henry is laying down some of the grain and Herms is bringing the images to full artistic fruition. Waves, for example, seem to be a Photoshopped photograph. One way or the other, it’s another wonderful collaboration, and the colour mix is effective.
The always exemplary Dave Sharpe gets to include some Kryptonian dialogue… can anyone translate?
Mon-El, who appears on Henry’s gorgeous cover along with baddie the Phantom King, doesn’t show up this time, but I expect he’ll pop up next time, and quickly, given the cliffhanger.
Supergirl’s second appearance in the issue is all mystery. It begins with a dizzyingly obtuse scene set on Thanagar
Then we’re in Metropolis, but aren’t told whether it’s before or after the previous scene. Kara is gifted a spaceship by John Henry Irons, and immediately wipes his mind with her new Hypno Vision, something I only know from solicits. Then, as she’s about to leave Earth, the new trick – the result of events in Absolute Power #4 – gets another outing.
So, Supergirl has a secret mission. She’s walking over her friends and peers because they can’t be trusted. Apparently she’s under orders from Superman, but the optics are the same.
Mariko Tamaki wrote the Supergirl Special last year. It was not my cup of tea, so I was nervous about this. And so far… I’m still nervous. It’s good that Kara’s not an emotional wreck this time, but I don’t like seeing Supergirl not trust her friends/abuse her friends’ trust. Maybe things would read better if we started at the beginning, saw Supergirl’s mission laid out – the title of the serial, according to the cover, is Universe End, which is intriguing. As it is, she’s rock solid in the Superman story, and unknowable here. Hopefully next week’s instalment will shed some light on proceedings.
There were things to like here. Power Girl acting like herself rather than the useless lump she is in her own comic. And this moment of reflection.
And of course, the Hypno Vision, coming out of Absolute Power, could be entirely editorially mandated. So let’s give Tamaki a chance.
And Skylar Patridge’s delicately scratchy art, as in the aforementioned Special, is, pardon the pun, a draw. Patridge is skilful when it comes to conveying emotions, and even when I don’t know what’s going on – one page implies Power Girl also has Hypno Vision – it looks great.
The colours of Marissa Louise – another member of the Special creative team, did that book actually sell? – are very decent. And look, it’s Supergirl Special letterer Becca Carey doing another fine job… maybe this series was meant to appear a year ago?
All in all, I was very pleased with this issue – the Superman story is excellent, the Supergirl tale may yet surprise me. One thing though – editors Paul Kaminski, Brittany Holzherr and Jillian Grant, would you please give Supergirl an above-the-masthead namecheck on the cover? She’s in this comic more than Superman!
Too Dangerous For a Girl 2 
(This is Steve but I suddenly can’t log in)
Wasn’t surprised I loved the lead but was shocked, shocked I tell you, that the back up was okay.
First off, Waid did a decent Jimmy. No new details, no overabundance of things that didn’t work in the past to fix him, nothing like we keep on getting when nostalgia is the sole reason he’s on panel. Jimmy was just daring and committed to doing what needs doing with a balloon that either referenced the Silver Age or promised it still exists.
And I’ll wait for more installments to be for or against the way Kara carries out her mission. I will say it should be mesmerism rather than hypnosis fueling her power (which nothing in the scripts identified BTW). Hypnosis has limits, which Kara lacked. That says mesmerism to me.
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Mesmer-Vision, Steve, that works for me!
You liked the Jimminess of it all! He was rather a hero.
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Nice review. I think I basically agree with your take, but do have some points on the Supergirl backup story. The “hypno vision” Kara has there isn’t really a new power, at least in the sense that it’s not some innate, biologically rooted ability like flight or heat vision. Although it was a bit difficult to tell at first, it’s clear on rereading this that the opening panel is an extreme closeup of her eye, and the circuitry seen in that panel is embedded in some kind of contact lens or implant she’s wearing. She’s basically wearing an ocular version of the neuralyser from Men in Black.
My interpretation of the scene where Power Girl confronts her by extension isn’t that PG was countering her with a similar hypnotic flash. Instead, I think Kara tried to activate the device, but PG spotted that and used super speed to react with a heat vision blast aimed at Kara’s eyes before the device could fully power up. That in turn forced Kara to interrupt the device’s activation so that she could counter with a heat vision blast of her own (which incidentally implies that the device and heat vision aren’t something she can use simultaneously), locking her into a very brief heat vision duel with PG. When she was eventually able to successfully activate the device and wipe PG’s memory while knocking her unconscious, it was because she distracted PG just long enough to break her focus in the heat vision duel and thus give Kara a split second window to activate the device.
Regarding that backup story, it was ok but also rather disappointing. The roughness of Skyler Partridge’s artwork fundamentally doesn’t work for me on an aesthetic level, while the dourness of Kara’s depiction in this is disappointing. It’s better than the outright depressed Kara seen in last year’s Supergirl Special or Tom King’s Woman of Tomorrow, but it’s still far short of the plucky, high spirited portrayal of her that writers such as Waid, PKJ, and Joshua Williamson have delivered in her best modern appearances in comics. Even withing this very issue, Waid’s writing for Kara in the main story struck me as far better and more faithful to the better aspects of her character. While I appreciate that in its own right, it’s not great that the story where she’s a secondary character ended up delivering a better representation of her than the story where she’s the protagonist. I know from the Crush and Lobo series that Tamaki can do more than sullen introspection and alienation, so I really hope that going forward her presentation of Kara offers more than the downbeat and cold demeanor characterization she has in this issue.
Aside from that, it doesn’t seem like it was a good idea to make this story a backup in a weekly series. So little information about the plot or characters gets delivered here that it makes this installment seem almost pointless. This story probably would have worked better as something that could have been told in a 3 or 4 issue monthly miniseries where each installment had a lot more room to further narrative strands and character development than what’s possible to do in the space it currently seems to have been allotted at the back end of Action Comics. Frankly, while I don’t know this for certain, I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s actually what happened here. It seems like this was the script for a 3 to 4 issue monthly miniseries that Tamaki and Partridge had anticipated putting out in the wake of the Supergirl Special. When that flopped though, D.C.’s higher ups probably got cold feet about committing to a mini for them, but still felt that not using the content would be a waste and thus decided to shove it in the back of Action Comics once that title got an ongoing main story that allowed for enough space over multiple issues to fit this in. That might be wrong of course. It could simply be that D.C. always planned to have Tamaki and Partridge do a Supergirl backup for Action Comics once it switched to a weekly format, and in turn this is what the two of them came up once they were given that assignment. Still, the way this thing is structured makes it feel more like a 3 to 4 issue monthly miniseries that got chopped up than a story that was designed to work from the ground up as a series of short weekly installments.
A final point about the backup is that I can’t get why Power Girl thinks Kara would have to approve a trip off world with her. Even if you buy into the idea that PG is more involved with the Superfamily and thus pays more attention to Kara than she would have in the past, it’s bizarre to see her act as if Kara is her subordinate and that she therefore has some kind of ability to veto her choices. It also seems odd that Kara didn’t think she could simply resolve the problem by saying that Clark gave her a solo mission, and that she can’t discuss the details with anybody else. While none of this is as egregious as the more baffling and annoying content in Leah Williams’s series, this is still a weak showing for Power Girl and makes it seem as if Tamaki in her own way doesn’t really get Power Girl’s place in the DCU or her characterization.
Regarding the Waid story, this was quite good by contrast, and I really have no negative comments about it. The only thing I will say is that the Phantom Zone generally works better as a plot device than an actual setting, so I’m a bit wary of any stories that are set there. With that said, Waid’s performance in this first issue in tandem with his previous work featuring Superman and other members of the Superfamily leaves a lot of room for optimism, and definitely provides a strong incentive to keep up with this title regardless of whether Tamaki’s backup ends up succeeding or failing. One thing I do hope given Waid’s strength at writing for Kara and other Superfamily members is that future issues allow for more opportunities to observe his portrayal of the rest of family while he advances the main narrative he’s building with Clark in the Phantom Zone.
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That’s some amazing thinking regarding the Hypno-Mesmer-Vision. Your reading is reasonable, but by gum, Tamaki should have made that clear in the script. Her writing is so sparse, and the artist can only convey so much. It looks for all the word like there’s a basic heat vision battle going on, whereas your ideas really elevate Karen in all this.
And I’m with you on the Phantom Zone, the only time I’ve really liked it as a setting was in the original Phantom Zone mini-series, in part because it was so new. We’ve seen a few fights there in the last decade, but it shouldn’t serve as just another alien landscape. Waid’s attempt to reconcile the various versions of the Zone here have me hoping that by the end of the serial he’ll revert it to a simple ghost realm, which is nightmarish enough, never mind monsters and ghouls everywhere.
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I know that Waid wants to emphasize the “human” aspect of Superman, but him being “frightened” of entering the Phantom Zone is ridiculous. Superman has faced too many unbelievable situations for me to swallow that notion. When did Kandor come back??? Bendis destroyed it and I don’t recall that being undone. Can we undo Jon Kent’s destruction as well? As always, get review.
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Very good question about Kandor. I can happily accept that DC’s continuity is now so stupidly elastic that things can seep in and out of continuity as required; so, Kandor is back, and Rogol-Zaar and Not-Dead Jor-El will never be heard of again. And of course Jon will show up young again!
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I’ve read this issue (and the next one), and I’m all in favor of the Superman lead story. I don’t remember what happened with Kandor after Rogol Zaar destroyed the city, but they were back in time for Absolute Power — the Kandorians took part in issue 2’s defense against the Brainiac Queen. I have a feeling Bendis didn’t leave Kandor destroyed throughout his entire run, but I can’t be sure about that.
I’m enjoying the Supergirl story in the back, but it’s a very different feel to American superhero comics. It feels a little more European to me, like installments of a science fiction serial (think Valerian), where we just travel along and soak up the mystery and enjoy the weird sights until it’s all revealed at the end.
That said, the weird sights in the second issue were disappointing — while that spider creature was certainly creepy, she was pretty much cribbed directly from Vaughan & Staples’s SAGA comic.
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Thanks for at least trying to sort out the Kandor business. Maybe we should call it Shrodinger-El’s Kandor, it exists or doesn’t depending on some box we don’t have access to.
Have you seen the new DC solicitations? Action has no back-up but the price stays at $4.99, worst of all, Mark Waid and Clayton Henry are gone and it’s Superman: Superstars again.
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As I joked in a reply about Alfred’s status, since they stated everything is in continuity, Kandor is both alive and dead. What would help with all this, DC would be doing themselves a favor by having editors stand up to writers who knock off IP’s who haven’t run their course for a one story shock value or propping up antagonists that won’t last for a smidgen of the time the characters/concepts they destroy.
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Yeah, I’ll be dropping Action after Waid’s done. I didn’t expect for him to stick around after this 12-issue run, but losing the backup (but not getting a drop in price) is definitely a shame. And judging by the page count, it looks like the Ridley story is standard-size, too, not longer than usual.
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It’s a ruddy disgrace and no mistake!
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Hey, I asked Alex Jaffe when Kandor came back after Rogol Zaar destroyed it, and he pointed me to Superman/Batman #7 & 8, on sale starting in Feb 2020 — about 16 months later. In a story by Josh Williamson and Nick Derrington, General Zod and Ra’s al Ghul submerge the ruined city in the Lazarus Pit.
I remember reading that story! (Nick Derrington art pulled me in.) But time shuffled things around enough in my head that I thought it’d happened before the Bendis run, reversing some *other* destruction of Kandor.
But anyway, Kandor had been back for quite a while before Waid kicked them into high gear in Absolute Power.
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Great work, Rob. I thought Kandor had been destroyed again since then. Blimey, have I finally seen Kandor wrecked so many times I can no longer keep it straight? I went back and re-skimmed those issues, anyway!
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