Supergirl and me

Or I was a Supergirl Fan Before it was Cool

So apparently the premiere of the Supergirl TV show last night was a massive success. I'm so glad because I loved it to bits, and that's usually enough to give anything the kiss of death.

I've been a Supergirl fan since way back. I mean so far back that I remember liking her before I could read. I haven't much liked her in the comics for some time. DC don't seem to know what to do with her and the writers haven't been able to make up their mind, and they've never stuck around for long, so it's been a bit like bronze age Wonder Woman where each new writer seems to be trying to reinvent the character so the first thing they do is dump everything that the previous writers have done, so the result has been disjointed at best.

But then I thought Supergirl's second solo series was kinda dumb, too. With characters like Supergirl you know they are going to outlast any wrongheaded editorial or idiot writer, and eventually you'll get back the character you liked. In this case it's not even a matter of waiting for the comic. That was cancelled six months ago and with the sort of marketing that gets someone fired, DC don't actually have a Supergirl comic being published at a time when she's on a live network TV show and appearing in the animated DC Super Hero Girls.

But I love the show. I mean I enjoy the Flash TV show, but Supergirl is better. And Flash has been my favourite of all the live action superhero shows in the last couple of years. It's somehow managed to escape the grimdark grey misery that has stunk up so much of DC's output in recent years. It's bright and it's fun and OMG it's a successful superhero show with a female lead. And not just female but unequivocally feminist. And what's more, it's being watched by boys. You know, those boys that toy manufacturers are so afraid of being put off by girl cooties that they erase female characters from toys for The Avengers and Guardians of the Galaxy. They are watching a girl show. So hopefully we are at least done with that idiocy.

Assuming Amethyst

After almost thirty years, Amethyst Princess of Gemworld is getting a relaunch. And it looks exactly how I thought it should be; Amethyst reimagined in Magical Girl style that would appeal to all the teenage girls that read manga and watch Smile Precure.

And then there's also a comic. For reasons that elude me, the new comic looks nothing like this and to make sure it will only appeal to the same old comic readers, they've grown Amethyst up and made her all gritty and miserable.

Says writer Christy Marx:

"She's just turning 17 rather than being 13. She has a very different family background, but the same basic things are there. She grew up on Earth with a strange childhood and ends up back in her homeworld which she's never seen before.
I'm taking a more intimate, familial approach to her adversary, who is her homicidal aunt who does not want to share power. I'm going for something dynastic with emotional complexity that will draw people in, and not just a bunch of people swinging swords. I'm trying to avoid a sparkly-crystals-and-pegasuses kind of approach. This is an alien world with blood powers that are related to crystals, but I'm going for a much more holistic approach."

So more adult, blood powers, no sparkly pegasuses (pegasii?). Got that.

So what if I wanted sparkly pegasuses? If Amethyst isn't going to fill that gap in the market, who will? Why do you hate sparkly pegasuses, Christy Marx?!?

Dan Mishkin, co-creator of Amethyst, had this to say:

I also think what they're setting out to do isn't worth doing. My understanding is going to be this is going to be a seventeen-year-old Amy Winston who discovers that she's Amethyst and that she's had a pretty rough life in those seventeen years. You can do that, and because of the rules of the game you can even call it Amethyst. But to say that it's essentially the same as what we did -- I'm sorry, I just don't think that's true, because essentially what we did was a story about being on the cusp of adolescence and discovering what the moral choices of adulthood are going to be. You don't do that at seventeen; you do that at twelve or thirteen.

On the plus side the new version seems to have an outfit that covers more of her body than most comics heroines are allowed. But on the other...

No sparkly pegasuses.



Amethyst can be found in upcoming editions of DC Nation on Cartoon Network. The comic Sword of Sorcery launches in September, along with a Showcase collection of the original series for you to compare it with.

So is Final Crisis over yet or what?

Event overkill in the DC universe

Now I don't for one second think there's some big conspiracy at DC to undermine Final Crisis and make a fool of Grant Morrison; it's just a side effect of company greed out of control.

Final Crisis was presented to us as the big climax to the trilogy, following the awesome Crisis on Infinite Earths and the disposable Ultimate Crisis. The rot set in a year before it even started. Morrison had requested that the New Gods not be used in other comics in the lead up to FC, so that he could build up his reinterpretation of them. So Dan Didio rushed out and commissioned the dreadful Death of the New Gods mini-series, which was not only a bad, bad comic, but directly contravened events in Final Crisis, and gave Morrison a handicap before he'd even started.

So Final Crisis rolls around, and just as what's supposed to be the big event kicks off, DC elects to run several other big stories, each with their own spin-offs. There's Maelstrom, which ties into a bunch of Superman-related titles, there's Kingdom's Come A Bit Early in JSA and friends, there's the build up to next year's big event in all the Green Lantern books, and there's even Morrison's own Batman's dead no he isn't over in the Bat-family.

At first I assumed that at least some of these fitted together in some convoluted way with Final Crisis, but that doesn't seem to be the case, and consequently I can't keep track of what is a spin-off from which event. Especially the ones that are convoluted side-stories to Final Crisis.

The result is that I end up reading less comics, rather than more. And I have no idea whether Final Crisis is even finished yet.

One more yawn

Joey Q has been talking about doing it for at least a year.

The publicity was hinting at it for months.

Every fan has been assuming it for the last six months.

Every blogger has been complaining about what a bad idea it is.

And so the biggest twist in the Spider-Man story One More Day is... that it's exactly what everyone has been expecting all along.

After a year when the level of misdirection at the big two has reached the point where creators lie in interviews and publishers put out misleading solicitations for comics that will never be published, I am a little baffled to find the biggest Spider-Man story of the year to telegraph its big conclusion months before the first issue was even published.

So I'm now left wondering what they are going to do when the next movie rolls around and it features Spidey and Mary Jane as an item, given that last time Marvel bent over backwards so far to identify with it that they put him into his black costume for several issues for no good reason other than it was in the movie.

I'm less wondering how they are going to integrate the new status quo into the overall Marvel continuity that is so tightly clenched that if Thor sneezes in one comic, Daredevil hears it in another, because it's that obsessively tight continuity that puts me off reading any of the individual titles I might be interested in if they weren't going to be suborned into some huge uberstory every other issue.

I hope Joey Q is happy. Because I'm not sure anyone else is.