I have been away on vacation and so will try to catch up on reviews over the next couple of weeks.
Let's start right off with the Supergirl back-up story from last week's Action Comics #1071.
I struggled a little with the first part to this tale. From the lack of details to Supergirl's hypnotic mind-wipes of her friends, it was a bit of a riddle. Mariko Tamaki's story telling remains a bit dodgy. I hoped that things would pick up.
But this second piece of the story just made me ask more questions. We still don't know much of the details about Supergirl's mission. In fact, she doesn't seem to know much about her mission either. That makes me question just what Superman knew about it before he sent her. If he knew nothing, it is a rough mission that he sending her out alone to do. If he does know more, then he is withholding information. That doesn't feel right either.
But there are other questions about this story that stuck out to me. Things that happen, or don't happen, which make very little internal sense to me. The dreaded 'this happened to move the story along' thought creeped into my mind more than once. And in a short back-up story, that is never good.
Skylar Patridge continues to be the star of this show. With a sort of rough pencil style that seems part Guy Davis and part Bilquis Evelyn, the art is quite captivating. The brief action in this chapter feels fast and violent.
So far, however, this story hasn't grabbed me. On to the details.
You might recall the befuddling opening scene last book with Kara in some Thanagar military station.
Supergirl enters an empty Thanagar space station court room and tells the judge that she is there to escort a prisoner to trial. The judge tells her that the trial is over. As both judge and jury she has found the prisoner guilty.
So Superman's mission - to escort a prisoner to a court - is already wrong.
Supergirl is confused. I am too.
She doesn't seem to know who the prisoner is, what they did, or how they were convicted. Why should she listen to this judge.
Okay, here is the problem. We have already seen that Supergirl's hypnovision is fast. We also have seen it work on Earthborn and Kryptonian (Power Girl). So why not just use it here to gather info. Heck, she could make the judge forget that she even asked the questions.
The problem of setting up an ability as powerful as super-suggestion is that there should be no reason not to use it.
Kara questions why the information isn't being shared. I am wondering too, especially when she has the power now to extract that info. And don't say she wouldn't do that ... she has done it to friends and family already!
Instead, we hear the vague detail that the fate of the universe hangs in the completion of this task.
Do we have any guesses on who the prisoner might be, if it is anyone we know. It can't be a small timer like Byth ...
And armed with her new hypnovision, why not just use it on the prisoner to have them go docilely?
Suddenly an intruder alert goes off.
The judge says there is no military on this station as it is a courtroom not a military base. This is one of those plot points that seems to be there just to up the stakes. This is a facility with prisoners who seem powerful enough to destroy the universe. Are there no guards? Who escorts the prisoner to and from the courtroom?
It looks like it is only Supergirl and this judge on the whole satellite. Does that make any sense? Especially for a culture like the Thanagarians?
It looks like it is only Supergirl and this judge on the whole satellite. Does that make any sense? Especially for a culture like the Thanagarians?
The intruder arrives, a giant spider like being who is there to kill whoever the prisoner is. And this being will kill anyone who stops it from killing the prisoner.
Hmmm ... this thing has 8 eyes. Given this threat of violence, why not use her new hypno-powers on this thing?
See how adding incredible hypno-suggestion powers to Supergirl makes story-telling harder? Why not use it all the time, especially in times of danger?
Instead Supergirl tries to fight it. And doesn't do to well.
Instead Supergirl tries to fight it. And doesn't do to well.
This spider assassin clubs and stabs the judge and bolts off, essentially disappearing.
So while we have learned that prisoner has a universe-threatening power level, we really don't know much else. Who is it? What did they do? Where are they going?
And if Supergirl is in the dark, why not use her suggestion powers to learn all she can, subduing any enemy in the process.
I don't like the hypno-vision to begin with. But once added to the armamentarium and having seen her use it so easily, the writer has to tell or show us why Supergirl wouldn't use it.
Two chapters in. Lots of question. Lots of plot contrivances. The art as of now seems wasted here.
Overall grade: C-
8 comments:
Gosh, this is boring stuff. This week’s follow-up is boring too. The chapters are so boring that the only interesting is the identity of the prisoner. But the writer gives us nothing. The judge has no name, the spider monster has no name… it’s a waste of paper.
Have I mentioned that this is boring?
Yeah, this is pretty bd but it's Tamaki. I think I mentioned last time I Googled them and found out she wasn't new as I assumed. I'd just been disappointed and underwhelmed by everything of theirs I read. It's just boring, which is hard to do unless your suffering under Pre-Crisis editorial fiat.
As to hypno-vision, isn't the character she's dealing with a robot? I think Spider Girl has too many eyes to reliably make contact. But that's just me making up reasons to fill plot holes. Star Trek taught me how to do it so I have a PhD.
And wasn't Thanagar blown up in Green Lantern? Granted, that was a very stupid move considering Thanagar's place in the DC cosmology. Sure, they'll either Xandar the place or hit the rewind switch but it hasn't happened yet so huh? Lazt editing is my guess. And why would Tamaki use Thanagar and none of its hawk iconography? It could be a rookie mistake on the part of a rookie artist but all we get is generic space setting #616? Ugh.
Ugh redux: I've been having to re-sign in everywhere, first on the chromebook I bought for convalescing at my sister's house and now again now that I'm back home. I'd blame it on the interwebs but I don't recall everything the first few weeks so I might have deleted some stuff.
I see your point but why not show me her trying to hypno and it failing?
But this whole thing is rough.
I hated this for all the same reasons. A lot of dialog is Supergirl asking questions, it's got a repetitive rhythm, and Tamaki doubles down on the questions and rhythm in the next issue and has SG kind of dumb. Maybe she's trying to write SG as a Columbo type detective, but it's not working.
I'm not impressed by Patridge's art. It's sketchy and spare, devoid of much detail.
Overall this has not been captivating in any dimension. Give me Andreyko's space arc any day over this!
T.N.
This story is definitely much worse than Waid's main story, and makes me glad that Tamaki didn't get an ongoing series or miniseries after penning last year's Supergirl Special. That's a real shame in its own way, because I felt that her work on Supergirl: Being Super showed she could combine a compelling, distinct take on Kara with a well plotted story for her. What's presented here pretty much negates all the good work she did on that miniseries for me, which is a shame since I long thought a sequel to that series was one of the greater missed opportunities in D.C. had. Now I' convinced it was really a missed disaster.
For what it's worth I think a huge problem with this series is that it was the script for a miniseries or the initial arc of an ongoing series that Tamaki had planned to follow the Supergirl Special. When that got canned, she either pitched this to D.C. as a backup, or - having already seen it - D.C.'s editorial decided to recycle it as a backup. The problem is that in doing so it feels like they just cut it up so that it would fit the available space without regard to narrative pacing from installment to installment. I wouldn't be surprised if when the fourth installment of this comes out next week, the plot will look more coherent because we'll effectively have been able to get a single complete installment that would have played out over the full length of one issue of a miniseries or ongoing series.
To be clear, this is an opinion not a statement of fact. It's possible that Tamaki built this from the ground up as a series of short backup installments, in which case she just has a terrible sense of pacing for stories of that length. Regardless, whether this is failing because it was supposed to be a script for full length issues that got cut up too roughly or if Tamaki just isn't jiving with how to do an original story for the kind of space she gets each week, the story still wouldn't work for me because Kara's characterization is too cold and off putting, the stakes are too vague; and there's no reason to care about any of these characters or what's going on here besides being told point blank that this is incredibly important just because a bunch of people keep saying that.
One last point this week's installment didn't make things any clearer or better. I'll save comments on that for your next post on the topic, but I will say without giving away any spoilers that I think I get what the twist about the prisoner is. If I'm right, it's far less clever and far more annoying than Tamaki probably thinks it is, and is symptomatic of the overall poor approach she's taken to building her narrative.
Yeah allegedly Supergirl's mind control power should allow her to unravel the the mystery in two panels, but mostly its being used to up the creep factor without advancing the plotline. Which is general is the problem with telepathy and mind control powers, the posessor has too much of an edge...it seems like Tamaki has only just now realized this drawback. The answer is of course, to write Supergirl as a somewhat dullwitted character and there Tamaki seems to have succeeded admirably. Three issues in and I don't care about The Judge or the Prisoner, I'm bored and confused and I am not sure the artwork could salvage all this if Neal Adams rose from the dead. You know, good writers WANT to write Supergirl, Gail Simone, Sterling Gates, Mark Waid...all of them have either signaled a desire to write her or have done well by her creatively speaking. And yet time after time, DC goes roaring out into the bushes and inevitably flushes out some hapless stiff to ruin her feature. The record of failure here is nothing short of astonishing. Other than some supporting turns in various super books, where has Supergirl shined in the past five years? Going Once Going Twice? Ya think she is set up to shine here? Doesn't seem that way....JF
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