Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow
Tom King has written a lot of comics for DC, but he seems to have a particular affinity for the twelve-issue “maxiseries” format. Some of these have been great (“The Sheriff of Babylon,” “Mister Miracle”) One is quite overrated (“The Omega Men”) and another missed the mark (“Strange Adventures”). There’s also one that I’m not going to touch with a ten-foot pole (“Rorschach”). “Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow” is an exception from this format, because… it’s only an eight-issue miniseries rather than a twelve-issue one. If you’re worried that King has abandoned the format, don’t be. That’s because the writer has managed to cram enough dialogue and caption text to make up the difference.
Though Supergirl’s name is in the title of this miniseries, it’s really about one Ruthye Marye Knoll. She lives on a faraway plant with a red sun and her father has just been killed by a man known as Krem of the Yellow Hills. While her family eventually talks itself out of vengeance, it’s still something that Ruthye desperately wants. So she goes off looking for someone who can help her out in this matter.
Who she finds, during one recruiting encounter gone bad, is one Kara Zor-El who has come to this planet to get wasted on her 21st birthday. She’s initially dismissive of Ruthye’s ambitions, for obvious reasons, until she has her own encounter with Krem. Now Supergirl is out for vengeance as well. Or is this just a long-term plan to teach one little girl about the burdens that come with trying to hurt those who have done you wrong?
The eight issues that make up “Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow” tell one overall story, but also tell self-contained tales within themselves as well. While Supergirl and Ruthye track Krem across the cosmos we get stories about them enduring the indignities of commoner-class intergalactic travel, racism among alien races, survival on a planet with a Kryptonite sun, and more. These stories are of varying quality with the alien racism one being obvious and hackneyed, and the Kryptonite sun one being an effective tale of survival against the odds.
They would all be a lot easier to enjoy, however, if it wasn’t for the fact that Ruthye wasn’t so verbose as a protagonist. Even if you’re willing to make accommodations for how verbose teenagers can get, her dialogue here doesn’t feel genuine at all. I realize that we’re talking about the speaking habits of a humanoid from a planet far, far away, but much of what comes out of her mouth reads like an missed attempt at profundity.
This would be bad enough if King didn’t compound it with additional dialogue captions that are just as overwritten in their attempt to provide context to the story. These captions are later revealed to be excerpts from the book that Ruthye wrote about her time with Supergirl and they make it clear that her verbosity did not lessen with age. There are only a couple places where the additional context these captions provide feel worthwhile, with the majority of them simply content to over-explain what we see on the page.
Those couple places, however, are also the best parts of this story. The sixth issue is both a race against a magical orb and King’s retelling of Supergirl’s origin. Unlike her cousin, Kara Zor-El was on Krypton when it exploded. While her part of the planet was able to erect a force field to help it survive, their troubles were only beginning. This helps establish Supergirl as a survivor of tragedy and trauma, someone who has her own indomitable will that was forged not through the kindness of others, but through unimaginable hardship. That gives her not necessarily a more cynical outlook on life, but one that definitely has more moral flexibility to it. If nothing else, I felt like I came away from this miniseries with a better understanding of the character and what sets her apart from her cousin.
Then there’s the ending which strikes just the right amount of ambiguity to be satisfying. There’s a difference between what Ruthye wrote in her book and what actually happened at the end that would’ve been fine to end on. King takes it a step further on the last page by leaving it up to the reader to interpret what really happens there. Was it a murder? Was it just a smack? Was it the symbolic administration of forgiveness? It’s left up to the reader to interpret, but with enough evidence to support multiple interpretations.
All of this is lovingly rendered through the art of Bilquis Evely. She previously provided amazing work on “The Dreaming” where she brought the titular place and its inhabitants to wonderful, beautiful, and occasionally terrifying life on the page. Evely does the same here to worlds that do have the air of fantasy about them, but also a distinct science-fiction bent to them as well. It’s amazing work that shows the artist is also capable of shifting gears at a moment’s notice to go from an epic red-kryptonite fueled space battle between Supergirl and a space dragon, to a quaint, quiet scene of the hero showing Ruthye the importance of washing her hands.
It’s work that elevates the story, even through its most tiresome patches of dialogue and general overwriting. King didn’t have a bad story to tell here, just one that was weighed down by his attempts to give its events extra significance and to make sure that the reader got everything he was talking about. The end result is a story that you really have to put into the work to enjoy. That probably won’t be a problem for fans of King and Evely’s previous work, but everyone else should either consider themselves warned, or just properly challenged.