Along with the core Action and Superman titles, there was World's Finest, in which Superman shared top billing with Batman in one of the most mismatched double acts of all time. And, of course, there was Superboy, who also turned up regularly in Adventure, home of my all-time favorite superhero team, the Legion of Super-Heroes.
As well as many, many hundreds of issues of those, my unreasonably large collection of comic books from the '60s through to the '90s contains scores of issues of Superman's Girlfriend Lois Lane and Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen. Yep, those are the official titles. Without good old Supes, Lois and Jimmy's lives clearly had no meaning.
And I also have some Supergirl comics.
Supergirl never really settled down. I can remember three or four times she had her own title but looking it up I see the official count is now up to eight, although somewhat confusingly that includes a limited series. I'd say it ought to be seven.
To be fair to the Maid of Steel, the publishing history of most DC characters probably doesn't look much different. Comics, even more than MMORPGs, suffer from the "I'll never catch up" problem. In games it's levels; in comics it's issues. There's a theory that new readers, seeing the current issue on the stands is #237, are going to put it back and look for something in single figures.
That's one reason even successful long-running series keep rebooting themselves. That and the doomed attempt to establish some kind of coherent continuity, of course. Something anyone other than the company archivist can follow would do. It never works but they keep trying, all the same.
Supergirl, I think it's fair to say, hasn't run through seven (Or eight.) eponymous series because any of them was so successful the high numbers put new readers off. The longest run might have been eighty issues? It's more like the writers and artists and editors and publisher kept trying to nudge her into a position where that might get to be the problem.
I mean, it could happen. She's wearing the suit, right? She's got name recognition. Why wouldn't she be big?
Except she never really has been. Not really big. Not even with a movie and a TV show backing her up. Where Superman is likely one of the most famous fictional characters in the world, up there with Mickey Mouse and Dracula, Supergirl is only famous by association. She's Superman's cousin. She wears the suit, sure, but it's his suit.
And back in the sixties and seventies, when I was reading her adventures, she was a girl too. A girl! I ask you!
For me, the problem with Supergirl comics wasn't that the title character was a girl. FFS, I read pony books when I was ten! It was more that they weren't always very good. (The pony books weren't always up to much, either...) The art in Supergirl stories was generally fine. I never got the impression comic artists of the era had any issues drawing women. If there was a problem there, it might have been they liked drawing them a little too much. Jim Mooney reportedly drew Supergirl naked in all the panels and only put clothes on her afterwards.
No, it was the writers. I'm guessing back in the seventies and eighties, getting the Supergirl gig wasn't seen exactly as a plum job. I certainly don't recall it going to any of the big names of the time. Did Denny O'Neil ever write Supergirl? Or Marv Wolfman? No, it was Cary Bates and Paul Kupperberg. I have a very soft spot for Cary Bates, who had a great run on the Superman titles, but even at the time he wasn't most people's idea of a star writer. I had friends who thought I was nuts for liking him. Paul Kupperberg, I think of as the kind of writer who'd turn up on fill-ins - a pro in the old-fashioned style.
Those are the Supergirl books I remember. Well, I say remember... I remember I bought them and read them. I have no recollection of what was in them. Not a single storyline stuck. Disposable might be the word.
After that, from the late '90s on, the writers' room started to look a little more respectable, with Peter David and Joseph Loeb making an appearance. There's also a host of names I don't recognize because I haven't kept up with the industry in the last thirty years. Maybe some of them are superstars. I wouldn't know.
I do know, though, that there's at least one Supergirl title that has a very high reputation indeed and that's Tom King's Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow. A limited series in eight issues, it was published in the first couple of years of this decade, making it about five years old now. GoodReads has it at 4.39 (Out of 5.) from almost fourteen thousand ratings.
Not everyone loves the book, though. It's controversial, at least in some quarters. I first heard about it from someone who really, really doesn't like it, Anj of Supergirl Comic Box Commentary.
Anj is a proper Supergirl fan, not a part-timer like me. As he says in his bio, "I have been a fan of Supergirl since my early comic days and have followed her in all her incarnations."
He also has a particular view of who Supergirl is and more particularly who she should be. Not to put words into his mouth but she should be a beacon of hope, a shining light, an aspirational role model, kind, thoughtful, generous of spirit and all-round wonderful. Not a lonely, maudlin drunk out on a bender in some backstreet bar on her 21st birthday before throwing up in a bucket the next morning. She certainly shouldn't be found, as she is in one scene Anj especially dislikes, taking a tweenage girl to watch a public execution.
These things do happen in Woman of Tomorrow. I knew that before I read it because I'd already heard the complaints. And those complaints had put me off a little. I also tend to think of Supergirl as quite a sweet, somewhat naive character. Clean-cut, even. It didn't sound like I'd like this version of her, either, so I didn't bother reading it.
Until a few days ago, that is. It was after I'd watched the second trailer for the upcoming Supergirl movie. In a post I wrote about the first trailer (A post that reads now like notes for this one...) I said it looked "very encouraging".
The movie is based on the Tom King story. How closely remains to be seen but I'm guessing it'll be fairly similar, although Lobo isn't in the book and I'll take a bet now that Comet the Super-Horse won't be in the movie. She probably won't swear quite as much either, which'll be a pity. The swearing is a highlight.
Certainly the core elements are all there in the trailers. I can say that now because I have, finally, read the whole eight issues and seen both the trailers. It was the second trailer that eventually got me to the book - that and reading the opening few pages in a copy of the DC Compact version at work, while I was supposed to be working.
The second trailer is a blast. Well, in parts. When it's not bleak, that is. Take a look for yourself.
I watched it and then I read a few pages of the comic and I thought maybe I ought to make up my own mind on whether it was a version of Kara Zor-El I approved of, rather than take anyone else's word for it. So I spent an hour or two reading the whole thing and guess what? It is.
It really is. Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow is a great comic book. The writing is excellent. Top of the range. The artwork, by is just stunning. It's beautiful but also her panel-to-panel flow is exemplary. Great storytelling. The characters are complex, nuanced and very relatable. There are some good laughs and a lot of tear-up moments.
Okay, the story itself is basically True Grit in Space but there's nothing so much wrong with that...
I loved it. I whole-heartedly recommend it. I'd also say that, as I somewhat suspected, most of the complaints seem to me to come from a misreading of what is, if I have any criticisms at all, Tom King's rather elliptical, enigmatic approach to narrative. He leans really hard into the unreliable narrator archetype and I'm not sure that's something comics readers are always all that comfortable with. He also deals quite heavily in irony, which ditto.
My take on his version of Supergirl is that she's a deep thinker, a planner, a strategist and an extremely moral person with exceptionally high standards. She just likes to keep most of that to herself. And she doesn't much mind looking cool while she's doing it. Or not looking cool at all. Either one. She's seen and done too much to care how others think of her and she's young enough to care a whole hell of a lot.
The whole book is like that. Comics do that sort of thing really well, the words and pictures telling the same different story. Better than novels do it, really. Super-hero comics don't always go there, though, and maybe super-hero comic fans aren't always ready to go with them when they try.
The big structural problem with Woman of Tomorrow, though, comes right at the end, on the very last page. I won't spoil the ending even by hinting at what happens because it's a good ending that oughtn't to be spoiled. I don't need to do that to explain what the problem is, anyway.
The book ends with some panels in which a thing happens that appears to negate everything that's taken the whole eight issues to set up and resolve. You seem to get a satisfying ending followed by a coda that turns it on its head and it's unsettling to say the least. I found it so odd and confusing, I had to google to find out what other people thought.
And what they think, some of them, and what I think, is that the problem is being too subtle. In this very last few panels, the writing is slightly too nuanced for its own good and the art slightly less demonstrative than it needs to be. The result is ambiguity, whereas I'm pretty sure the intention was clarity.
I imagine everyone concerned knew exactly what the scenes they'd written and drawn meant so they saw what they expected to see, whereas readers coming to it without the internal thought processes of the writer and artist could only go on what was there in front of them. Happens all the time.
Which is fine, actually. I mean, if they don't get it, screw 'em, right? It's not like art has to explain itself.
Sounds like I'm being ironic but I'm not, not really. Art is held to different standards than entertainment, which is why we keep running into these issues whenever the lines blur. When we read comics or play games or watch movies or TV shows we expect to understand everything and we get cross when we don't. It's reasonable.
Only it's not. Nor fair. Not reasonable or fair of us to have those expectations, that is, because we also expect the best of our entertainment to aspire to being art. We knock it when it settles for less and when it reaches and falls short. But even when it succeeds, we don't always like it.
And that's both reasonable and unreasonable, too. Sometimes things don't make sense because they actually don't make sense. The writer or the director or the actor didn't get it right. We deserve better. Sometimes they don't make sense because we haven't been able to make sense of them. That's when the creators deserve a better audience.
Often, though, we can't tell the difference. Is it us or is it them? Let's all sit down and talk about it for a generation.
That's one of the things that make it all such fun. I hope the Supergirl movie turns out to be as controversial and divisive as the comic on which it's based. If it does, I hope it's for the right reason. But even if it's not, better that then being bland, right?
And a lot of those old Supergirl comics were pretty bland. If we're going to be honest.
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