A Girl And Her Dog

I did it! I went to the cinema to see the Supergirl movie. The first time I've been to the cinema since before the pandemic and even back then it wasn't like I was going often. Maybe once a year, if that.

It wasn't always that way. I used to see a lot of movies on the big screen. Well, on a screen bigger than a TV at least. Screens in the '70s could be tiny. There might actually be TVs bigger than that now.

When I was at university it's probably not too much of an exaggeration to say I went several times a week. That was because I was at Cambridge, a collegiate university, and every one of the 30+ colleges had its own Film Society, most of which showed a film pretty much every week during term. I saw a lot of classic films and subtitled foreign movies that way and I saw some of the big, new releases (Like The Empire Strikes Back and Superman.) at the actual cinema in town, too.

After I graduated and moved back home, all through the 'eighties I lived in the middle of a big city with at least three arthouse cinemas and a couple of commercial cinemas all in easy walking distance. I saw a lot of films all through that decade. 

By the '90s I'd moved. I didn't have a cinema I could easily walk to any more. My cinema-going was slowing down but I still used to get to the pictures maybe six or eight times a year. By the turn of the century that was down to two or three and by the time Covid shut the cinemas I was already going a whole year between visits.

So, yes, it certainly takes something special to get me to make the effort, these days. Why Supergirl? And was it worth it? 

First question: I guess Supergirl because I've always liked her and also because I didn't make the effort for Superman last year. I felt I owed it her. Plus the trailers made it look hella fun.

As for the second, Hell, yes! I loved it! No, I fucking loved it! It was everything I hoped it would be and more. The movie, that is. The cinema experience itself? Ehh... that was okay.

But then, what can you expect when you see a movie at half-past nine in the morning? I was literally the only person in the screening. It was in an out-of-town multiplex with a dozen or more screens and my showing was in one of the smaller rooms. Still big enough for about 130 people though. Or it would have, if anyone other than me had wanted to see Supergirl right after breakfast on a Thursday. 

I'm quite a proponent of the value of seeing a movie as part of an audience. I know it has its downsides but you don't need an evolutionary biologist to point out the synergies of a shared experience. There's also the Big Screen Effect, where the more of your field of view the image occupies, the harder your brain finds it to separate the image from reality, which is great for immersion. 

Whether it's worth leaving your house to watch a movie alone, on a screen that's not really all that big, well that's another question. I just didn't want to have to wait six months for the DVD to come out. Although I will be buying that DVD. This is a movie I'll be watching more than once.

So much for the experience. What about the movie? So I liked it. Big deal. Why did I like it? (Might be some mild spoilers in this part but nothing very specific. Probably safe to carry on.)

For a start it's a good movie as a movie, which is very definitely not something you can say about all superhero films. Probably not about most of them. Supergirl has a coherent, linear plot. It starts at the beginning and goes through to the end with precious few diversions. 

There are some well-judged flashbacks that add depth and nuance to the narrative and illuminate certain things about the central character and that's it. None of the usual darting about from place to place and time to time you usually get in comic-book movies. Also it's quite a small cast which helps to keep things focused.

The movie's an adaptation of Tom King's Woman of Tomorrow, a strong story in itself, but the movie script cuts a lot of the sometimes over-complicated to-and-fro of the comic. It condenses the action from a few weeks to just three days. The ending, which we'll get to, is very different. I think Woman of Tomorrow may be a better story but sticking closely to it would make for a much worse film. 

That's one of the big, BIG problems with superhero movies in general. Comics have so much more time to tell their stories and so much more freedom to be completely confusing about it and get away with it. Comics fans are nothing if not tolerant of cruft. They relish it, for the most part. The kind of excruciating detail that has comic fans arguing deep into the night just about kills any movie stupid enough to include even a small fraction of it. 

Supergirl keeps things tight. The plot is a revenge arc yoked to two coming of age stories and the writers and director wisely recognize that's plenty. Even so, they still manage to throw in an origin story and make it feel like a natural progression. Origin stories wreck far too many superhero movies. If you're going to do it, this is how. Really, really good work.

Continuity is another bane of superhero franchises. James Gunn has been tasked with rebooting the DC Cinematic Universe so of course this film has to dovetail with the recent Superman movie, something it does perfectly. David Corenswet, an excellent Superman, appears just as often as he needs to and there's just enough cross-fertilization to bang home the message of his own recent movie, that Superman needs to be a force not just for good but for restraint and tolerance.

Supergirl is a force for good and also a bit of a wild card. There's an argument to be made that she's tolerant and restrained, alright: just of the wrong things.

As her mother, Lara, tells her just before she dies and Supergirl leaves doomed Argo City in a pod with her puppy, she needs to be good but she doesn't need to be nice. And she's not nice. But she's more than just good. As Ruthye tells her late on, she's kind. Kind and good does it for me. Screw nice.

I know some Supergirl fans won't like it. Supergirl's been nice all her life. Too bloody nice if you ask me. 

Well, some Supergirls have. This is the other big, BIG problem with superhero movies. Any superhero a mainstream audience recognizes will already have been a dozen different people in the comics before they even get to the screen. And like Swifties, comic fans always have their favorite eras. 

I've known Supergirl since I was about five years old. I have a couple of favorite eras myself but I think this is my favorite now. Milly Alcock is a superb Kara. She looks the part but that's easy. Any blonde can wear the suit. But as she says to Ruthye "It's just a suit". 

Except it's the suit. Not anyone can wear the suit. She can. Magnificently, she spends almost the whole movie not wearing it. She strides about looking seriously cool as fuck in a duster coat. Then, when she puts on the suit, it's like the sun coming up. And you know what happens when the sun comes up. Well, you will if you watch this movie.

Many, many things about the writing and the acting worked for me. I love Kara's pub crawling bad girl act. I love that it isn't an act and yet it so obviously is. Also isn't it interesting she calls it a pub crawl not a bar crawl?

I think the way the movie goes through a whole sequence of adventures with Supergirl winning fights without her powers is genius. She isn't just a badass because the yellow sun made her one. She was born badass is my guess. And if she wasn't, hardship and trauma made her one. I bet on both.

Her relationship with Krypto is just wonderful but so is the relationship she builds with Ruthye, the thirteen year-old orphan who just watched her whole family getting slaughtered and plans on doing something about it. Of course, that relationship also relies on Ruthye and Eve Ridley is stone solid in the part. They're mirror images, through a shattered mirror. 

It should be said that I'm a sucker for these kinds of stories. People doing the right thing, even when it's not the easy thing, just makes me happy. And also makes me cry. I cried a lot during Supergirl. At one point I actually sobbed. I was glad I was the only one there. 

I tend to cry a lot at movies, though, especially when anyone does something unselfish or noble or when something happy happens. Sad things tend not to do it for me or not to the same degree. I didn't tear up when Krypto got shot but I did when Supergirl told him "See Buddy? I told you I'd be back" at the end.

I laughed a lot, too. Out loud. There are some great lines. I think I missed a couple when Lobo and Supergirl were exchanging quips mid-fight. Fights are loud in cinema-sound. Jason Momoa as Lobo is... well, he's Lobo. He doesn't get to do a lot else but then when was Lobo ever anything but Lobo?

While I'm praising the plot and the writing I'll also mention a couple of things that absolutely don't ring true and yet ring completely true in comic book terms. Kara shouldn't win some of the fights she wins without her powers. Ruthye absolutely shouldn't win her one fight. They're both fighting way out of their weight class. But they win and they should win.

They win because they're heroes. Heroines. Whatever. They win because comic book stories are myth. If you don't get that you're probably watching the wrong movie.

And then there's the ending. This hasn't been too spoilery so far but here's a big one. I'll stick something under this paragraph in the edit so there's a break and you can leave if you want.

 So. At the end, Kara kills Krem. Krem's the main villain. He has no actual personality, no backstory, no arc. He's evil. That's it. Oh, and nasty. The two aren't always the same. 

Having a villain so straightforwardly villainous and unredeemable simplifies things. I was sitting there wondering just how they were going to resolve the storyline without killing the bastard when Supergirl killed the bastard. She ran him through the neck with Ruthye's sword after talking Ruthye out of doing the exact same thing. Oh, and first she stabbed him somewhere else because of what he did to Krypto. "That's for my dog".

In the source material, Supergirl does not kill Krem. She sends him to the Phantom Zone where he serves three hundred years. At the end of Woman of Tomorrow, he's released as a very old man. And he's learned right from wrong. It took him three centuries but he's done it. Rehabilitation worked. 

He apologizes to Ruthye, also very old by now because living three hundred years will do that to you. She clubs him with her stick and then hits him a few more times when he's down. But she doesn't kill him. She, too, has learned something in three hundred years. 

That's a good ending for the comic. It would be a terrible ending for the movie. We're supposed to wait three hundred years for catharsis and then it's an old woman clubbing an old man while Supergirl stands by and watches? I don't think so.

All this Phantom Zone stuff, anyway - and the damn place has a history as complicated as Ancient Rome - just doesn't play on screen. It barely plays in the comics, frankly. Calling the authorities isn't going to fly. Who they'd even be in this scenario, god only knows. Clearly Krem and his crew are doing whatever they want already. If there was an authority capable of stopping them or holding them, wouldn't they be doing it already?

I'm 100% against capital punishment in real life but this isn't real life. It's myth. Krem has to die. There's just no other ending that's going to work.

I know some fans agree with that but think it shouldn't have been down to Kara to do the killing. Lobo's right there. He's up on a ridge, watching it all go down. Lobo, as Supergirl warns Ruthye when they meet him in a bar, killed his entire planet. If you want some killing done, he's your boy. 

Except if Supergirl lets Lobo do this one instead of doing it herself, it doesn't define her as somehow above the act, it devalues her as too weak to do the difficult thing herself. Plus Lobo already saved her from what looked like (But obviously wouldn't have been, somehow.) certain death. How many times is he going to fix things for her? 

The two  or the three moments in the whole movie I didn't like all make Supergirl look briefly like she's not in control but at least in those she's mostly just unlucky. If Lobo swooped down on his big bike and killed Krem for her, it would make her look weak and indecisive. 

Supergirl is neither of those things. She's angry and bitter and sad and good and kind and strong and brave and irresponsible and responsible and human all the way through. And she needs to kill Krem, so she does. She's good. She does the right thing and, in that situation, that's it.

It's possibly the most responsible thing she does in the whole movie, ironically. And then she goes home and tells her cousin she's grown up. 

Except she doesn't tell him what she's done. Superman wouldn't have done it and he wouldn't get why she did. Best he never knows. She doesn't tell him she's grown up either. Not in those words. She doesn't have to. That, he knows and we know. He can see it. We can see it. He can hear it. We can hear it.

Coming of age story, remember?

I could go on, at much greater length. Sometimes I wish I was back at college so I could write a dissertation on something that fires me up like this instead of bloody William Blake. I like Blake but I never wanted to write five thousand words about him. I'd happily write five thousand words about Supergirl. 

I won't though. I'll just say the music is great and so are the special effects, the fights and the mise-en-scène. A lot of the scenes are lit really dark but I always could see what was going on. It's a mood piece so it works.

I won't say it's a masterpiece. It's not that. It's a great movie though and not just a great superhero movie. It has the feel of those bleak, existential seventies films I grew up with; Five Easy Pieces, Brewster McCloud, Dog Day Afternoon. Like that. Except in space and with lots of people punching each other up into the air.

It was nice to be back in the cinema. I'm glad I took the trouble.  Maybe I'll go again. 

Shark: Got. Bee: Got. Supergirl: Want

Hey! I did something I said I was going to do! That makes a nice change.

This morning I downloaded and installed DCUO again. The client's a svelte 38GB, positively slimline by today's standards. Still took about an hour. Daybreak doesn't have the pipes, I guess. 

It's always interesting, coming back to an MMORPG you haven't played for a while. Since I have a blog (Oh, you noticed!) I can often check back to see when I last played something. Chances are I blogged about it and those chances are especially high when it's DCUO .

A long time ago, I fell into a pattern with the game. I haven't played it seriously since... well, ever. But not even half-seriously for years. What I have done, fairly consistently, is keep an eye on the freebies Digital Ink hands out, so I can log in when there's a good pet or a base decoration or maybe a cape I want. Then I patch up, log in and grab it.

The thing about that is, there's often a long enough gap between freebies that enough has changed in the meantime to make coming back slightly disorienting. (Disorientating? Never know which of those is right.)

Since I was last there, which was towards the end of August last year according to the record, the whole UI seems to have undergone an overhaul. It looks like a new font to me, a lot thinner and tighter. Some of the menus seem easier to follow. And the conversations with NPCs are now shown in social media style, extremely similarly to how they appear in Bagel in Neverness To Everness. Everyone got to be modern, don't they?

It's an improvement all round, although that's not saying a lot. I love DCUO, even though I only ever futz around there, but boy, is it showing its age. Visually, that is. Especially the faces and the animations. They weren't great fifteen years ago and they have not aged well. And yes, before you ask, for once I have the graphics jacked up about as far as they'll go. 

If you look at my character up there, Nini Mo her name is, (Why, I'll explain in a moment. In a Sidebar. I really like sidebars now. So much better than footnotes. I can do footnotes, you know. It's just way too much trouble and footnotes are intrinsically more disruptive than having the information in the body of the post. I'm not writing a sodding dissertation! Also, I could have put this in a sidebar, now I come to think of it...) you'll see it looks like she's wearing a mask. She is not. That's her face. 

Most characters, player or NPC, look like they're wearing kabuki masks to me. And nothing in anyone's features ever moves, It's like we're all playing china dolls.

Sidebar: Nini Mo, since no-one asked, is named after Flora Fyrdraaca's idol and role model. She's "the Coyote Queen, greatest ranger ever" and Flora thinks she's just a character in a book until they meet. Flora, as all regular readers ought to know, since I must have name-checked her here almost as many times as Lana del Rey, is the titular heroine of the trilogy by the frustratingly inactive Ysabeau S Wilce. Write a book, Ysabeau!

All her old books are either out of print or will be soon, by the way. Prices are rising. If you haven't taken the hint the last ten times I dropped it, now's the time. You can get them on Kindle...

Once I'd sorted myself out and figured out how to use the refreshed controls, I had a chat with Supergirl, who inevitably had a job for me. The DCUO superverse is a weird place like that. You can be the absolute newest hero on the block, barely able to handle a street mugging without referring to the Hero Handbook, and you'll still get a call from some megastar telling you your powers somehow fit the exact requirements needed to face down some intergalactic overlord or other.

In this case it's some arch-villain going by the extremely unimpressive name of Kryb. I assume she's in the comics but I have never heard of her. Then again, I didn't know we had Blue Lanterns and there was one of those standing right next to the Girl of Steel. 

Sidebar: I just checked and there are now eleven colors of Lantern in the DC Universe! Eleven!  Green, Red, Orange, Yellow, Blue , Indigo, Violet, Black, Grey, White and Ultraviolet.

Kryb has been doing unspeakable experiments on children. No details (Or "deets" as Supergirl extremely unconvincingly puts it. Would Kara ever say "deets"? No, she would not.) but I'm betting it involves turning them into some kind of monsters so she can weaponize them. It's almost always that. 

Kryb has the Blue Lantern's niece. (She has a name but I've already forgotten it. The Blue Lantern that is. Not sure about the niece. I mean, I'm sure she has a name, just not that we get to know it yet.) I assume we'd be going after Kryb regardless but the family connection adds a little frisson.

Niece or no niece, (Now there's a game show...) I had absolutely no plans on doing the new chapter but it takes place in a version of Argo City that's somehow on the floor of the ocean and I wanted to see if we had underwater content now. We never had any before. 

And we don't have any now, either. I guess Argo's in a bubble. But then, Argo's always in a bubble . In space, underwater, what's the diff?

Anyway, I got sucked into all of that and ended up spending the morning kicking Kryptonian robot ass, which is less fun than it sounds but still some fun. I was in a group for a while, too, which always seems to happen in DCUO. It's about the last game I play where I get group invites. No-one ever says much and I generally don't know what's going on but it's easier to accept than refuse so I join. 

I don't know how to play my character and Nini Mo's not even level 30 yet, which as I always say is Basic Tutorial Level in the game, so I don't contribute much but no-one ever seems to care. I think it's just one of those "If we're grouped we all share credit" things. The xp certainly flowed. I dinged 29.

People came and went and I died a bunch of times because don't know what I'm doing and eventually I was on my own again. I kept going. Supergirl whistled up Krypto, which led to my character making a sarcastic comment that I found quite amusing. You're bringing your dog in now?

Well, yes, of course she is because the superdog is the superstar these days. Except Krypto in DCUO is Original Krypto, the short-haired kind-of-a-Labrador, not the super-cute tousled terrier from the movies.

Come to that, DCUO Supergirl isn't the one from the movies, either. Or the TV show. Or, as far as I can tell, the comics.

As a DC fan, albeit an out-of-date one, I rarely recognize any of the heroes in DCUO as the same people I know from the comics or the TV and movie spin-offs. They look like them but they don't talk like them. Or act like them. 

Or sound like them, if you have a particular voice actor in mind. All the voice acting in the game is generic and always has been. Competent but unconvincing. Then again, you try being convincing, reading some of that dialog.

So that was all fun but by the time we reached the underboss, Annihilus...  no, wait, not him... Atrocitus, that's it... I'd had enough. I'd have had to stop and relearn my skills for him and I didn't feel like it. Instead, I warped out to my base and started hanging some posters. Base building is the real endgame.

Before all of that, though, I popped into Metropolis to visit the Pride Parade and pick up my free flying shark. They've made an effort for the event as usual. Lots of balloons, flags, music, dancing...

I was curious to see which heroes were staffing the thing this year. Ha! I say "heroes"... Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy were there, of course. And Aqualad. I cannot get used to the American pronunciation of his name, by the way. Him and Aquaman. That long first "a" is just weird. 

Batwoman was there, too. And a few others I've forgotten. I'm guessing all of them have some established gender identity in the comics but I'm out of that loop. When I start my DC Universe Infinite subscription, maybe I'll get caught up.

The shark is as great, as I knew it would be and I also got a bee. Haven't flown that one yet but it looks good in the preview. I'm guessing it's from last year. I must have missed it.

 

That was more than I'd planned on doing so I felt pretty pleased with myself. About the only other thing I might do for this Chapter is try to pick up Supergirl as an Ally. 

To get her for free I'd have to log in just about every day for a a month and actually do something so that's not going to happen but there's a peculiar system in DCUO, where you can chip away at the monthly Chapter rewards by doing a little every day or you can just buy them for Daybreak Cash. The price is on a sliding scale. The Buyout is 4K DBC but one session this morning knocked 200DBC off the total and it only took a few minutes to get the update. 

You can do that once a day while the event runs. After you trigger it each day, it makes no difference how long you keep on doing the content, you won't get any more credit. There's a 24 hour time gate so grinding isn't an option.

I think that's good? Hard to tell. It's a tax on impatience, basically, which I'm fine with. Then again, I would be. I have a lot more DBC than I know what to do with. I might just buy Supergirl's loyalty for cash money.

And that's about all I have to say about it for now. DCUO: it's always there and I always have fun whenever I play. For an hour or two. Then I've had enough for a month. 

Still, I might drop in a few more times before the event comes to an end,. Drive the price down a little but also fly around a little, show off my shark and my bee. 

If you got 'em, flaunt 'em, right?

Last Year's Movies Today! Superman (2025)

This was going to be a Grab Bag post but the first item ran away with me so now it's just a review of a movie that came out a year ago. And not even a proper review at that. 

It's the Superman movie I'm talking about. I posted about it several times in 2025 but I'm too lazy to go back and find the posts and link them. No-one would click through anyway, so what would be the point? I mean, hell, what are the Labels for, if not for anyone to find stuff, if they're interested? Not to mention the very efficient search function. Anyone ever use that? No. Thought  not.

Ahem. So, Superman...

I said before the movie came out last summer that I'd probably go see it at the cinema. I was hyped for it after the excellent trailers. Well, that didn't happen.

So then I said I'd put the DVD on my Birthday/Christmas wishlist. I did and I got it and I still didn't watch it because apparently owning a movie on DVD is exactly the same, psychologically at least, as watching it. 

Either before or after I got my own hard copy, the movie turned up on one of the streaming services I subscribe to and I didn't even watch it then. Often I do end up streaming things I own on DVD, sometimes things I've owned for years and never gotten around to watching, because it's just easier that way, isn't it? But I didn't stream Superman. 

We got to 2026 and I still hadn't seen it and all the Supergirl trailers started rolling up and they looked even better than the Superman ones and we got closer and closer to the release date (Which is June 26, I just checked. I knew it was this month.) and I made a "firm decision" to go see that one in the cinema, for real this time, which made me think I probably ought to get around to watching the first one, since they kind of fit together somehow.

And I probably still wouldn't have done anything about it, had Redbeard not felt the need to post about the rotunda at the Cincinnati Museum Center and to include in that post a clip of a scene from the Superman movie and that was what finally tipped me over the edge. 

Sidebar: Material to my decision to watch the movie, I should say that, following the  death of my mother earlier this year at the age of 93, we've acquired a very good 4K Sony TV. I was left "the chattels" in my mother's will, one of which this was. "Chattels" means literally everything in the house except the house itself, which has to be sold and the proceeds split 50/50 with my step-brother, although now we're getting into too much detail for a post about the Superman movie, I think. My mother came up with the chattels thing because a few years back, when her sister died at the age of, I think, 91, she left my mother her chattels, none of which my mother wanted or kept, except for a copper bedpan, which is now in our house but which I believe may have come from my aunt originally. Why we have it? That you'd need to ask Mrs Bhagpuss.

I seem to have drifted a long way from the Superman movie. I only mentioned the TV because the arrival of an actually good set in this house for the first time in at least twenty-five years has led directly to me going downstairs and sitting on the sofa for the specific purpose of watching things. (We live almost entirely upstairs for what are, I'm sure, perfectly good reasons, if I could remember them.). That's how I came to watch The Burroughs, the first seven episodes at least, and having watched the final episode on the laptop I can say with certainty that it does, in fact, make a big difference, watching it on a big screen, after all, something I never really believed before.

Not that I watched The Burroughs in in 4K. It was in HD on the TV and the laptop because you have to pay Netflix more money for 4K and I never have yet and don't have any plans to start. HD seems like more than enough detail to me, anyway, at least on a screen as good as this one. Probably on a better laptop than mine it would, too.

And that's eight paragraphs without a single word about the movie itself so here's my tl:dr for the rest of the post in case you're feeling like you've already put in the work:

It was great! I loved it! Four stars (Out of five). Maybe not a classic but definitely a must-see. As good as I was hoping and better than I expected. Best Superman movie I've seen and I haven't seen them all. 

Which is a bit surprising, really, even to me. Why haven't I seen them all?

Let me think. I saw the first, with Christopher Reeve, on release at the cinema. The best thing about it was that it was Superman! In the cinema! Hard to imagine what a total novelty that was at the time. 

I saw the second in the cinema too but the third and fourth only on TV. They went downhill a bit but they were not untrue to some of the comics. Just mostly not true to the good ones. 

Then there was a big gap until Superman Returns, which I'm pretty sure I've never seen anywhere, so I should probably do something about that, and next there was Man of Steel, for which I returned to the cinema to catch it on release although why I thought it was worth the effort escapes me now. Clearly I didn't think enough of it to bother with the follow-up, the awkwardly-titled Batman Vs Superman: Dawn of Justice which I may or may not own on DVD ( I genuinely don't know if I do or not.) but have definitely never watched. Is it technically even  a Superman movie, though? I mean Batman's name comes first...

So, I've seen six of the eight Superman movies and the latest one is the best by a wide margin. Best for a DC fan, that is. Maybe not for a general audience. Probably can't beat the first one for that. 

Or maybe you even need to be a long-time fan for this one. I know the Snyder movies were fan favorites with some fans but then I believe there's a cadre with a much deeper belief in Zack Snyder's vision for the franchise than I've ever had. I bet every one of them is at least a couple of decades younger than me, too. 

Apart from having a coherent plot for a change and the acting being excellent throughout, neither of which can be said about all, or even most, of its predecessors, Superman (2025) is the one that feels most like the comics to me. It feels like it was made by a fan for other fans without ever resorting to actual fan service. 

One of the very best things about it is the way James Gunn gets all the backstory out of the way in a few lines of text over the opening sequence. As a lifelong superhero comics reader, I am so fed up of every superhero movie feeling it has to start by explaining who the leads are, how they got their powers, what their powers are - all that basic stuff that surely to God anyone who cared enough to buy a ticket already knows. I mean, if you watch a sports movie, they don't generally begin by telling you how the game got started and explaining all the rules...

If that's good, though, the way the movie pretty much never stops to explain who anyone is is even better. It's just so refreshing. All the nods and winks to the at least half a century of comics' history are there, in profusion, for anyone who wants them but if you don't know, you don't need to know and neither the writers nor the director is going to tell you.

As a longtime fan of the Daily Planet newsroom as much as I am of Superman, I was stoked to see not just Lois, Jimmy and Perry but also Steve Lombard and Cat Grant. And they were just working there, saying things people say when they work in an office together. Just so good to see and hear.

There was one more Planet staffer I didn't pick up on, too, although I thought maybe I remembered him from the Eliot S Maggin days. I just looked him up and it was Ron Troupe, a character who actually wasn't introduced until the early '90s, by when i think Maggin had moved on and just around when I was slowly drifting out of the fandom myself. But I do remember Ron now I'm reminded and I did know I knew him when I watched the movie, even if I couldn't quite remember who he was, so that's exactly the kind of rich textuality I'm talking about.

It's always interesting to watch the various interpretations of Lois and Jimmy. Lois Lane seems to be an almost indestructible character. I've seen more versions of her than I can remember and I can't think of a bad one. She's always well-cast, all the actors who play her look like the woman in the comics and she's almost always written as a competent, skilled, professional with a sharp wit and a fast mind. It must be a popular part to get, I'd think. This Lois, though, also felt likeable, which is by no means one of the character's core traits. Some Loises have been stinkers. I prefer a softer Lois to a harder one but I'd have to admit the hard ones are probably closer to the four-color archetype.

Speaking of colors, what is with it Jimmy's hair? Why is it almost never ginger in the movies the way it always is on the page? I mean, Lois and Clark never go blond, do they? So why does Jimmy so often have nondescript brownish hair on screen? Or at least that's what I was thinking this time, until that scene near the end, when they all run up to the roof of the Planet building so Lois can fly them away in Mr Terrific's ship (Don't ask...) and the sun hits Jimmy's hair and you can clearly see the auburn tint. So he is a redhead after all!

Jimmy doesn't have a big role but he still manages to give a really good impression of the kind of bumptious, chance-taking personality that got him his own comic all those years. He sees trouble and he runs straight at it. And in this case the trouble is Lex Luthor's girlfriend, Eve Teschmacher (A great call-back to the first run of movies.) who, impossibly and yet somehow inevitably, turns out to be seeing Jimmy on the side, something that would totally happen in Jimmy's comic, if nowhere else in the universe. 

Gunn appears to know these characters and their history so much better than most Hollywood people who've had the use of them in the past. They said he'd be a safe pair of hands and on this evidence, they were right.

Talking of Lex... this is probably the most evil version I've seen on screen. Usually he has at least one redeeming feature. Sometimes he's positively sympathetic. Not here. Here, he's a sociopathic, sadistic megalomanic with a very, very thin skin and absolutely no tolerance for personal criticism. Putting this Lex up there on screen is making a statement. He's code for... well, we all know what and who he's code for, I'm sure. When Krypto throws him around like a chew-toy at the end, I bet half the audience is cheering. I was laughing too hard or I would have been, too.

Obviously, Krypto is great. He steals every scene he's in. How much of it is dog acting and how much CGI is hard to say and also I could not care less. I just want more of his antics. Looking forward to much more Krypto in Supergirl. As she says in her cameo at the very end, he is her dog, after all. 

And finally, in what appears to have turned into a round-up of the characters rather than an actual review, there's The Justice Gang (Not their real name...) That was an unexpected pleasure, especially since it's three characters I either know little about or wish I didn't.

Hawkgirl is severely underused but she really makes the most of her few scenes. Her deadpan tone and expression are devastatingly effective. The bit where she demonstrates just exactly how much not like Superman she is was sheer joy, even if I knew it was coming from the moment the fool she was carrying opened his mouth to taunt her.

Mr Terrific, a character I've barely even noticed in the comics, was so central to the plot he could have demanded co-star billing. Again, he was deadpan as hell and it worked beautifully. The movie as a whole does a great job of balancing action, pathos and humor, which I guess is James Gunn's super-power. I know it's not going to work for everyone but it's right on the money for me.

And finally, Guy Gardner. I would have said it was impossible to put a version of that character on screen that would both be true to the original but wouldn't alienate most  of the audience - but they did it. Just about. 

They have softened him up some. The movie Guy is a lot less stupid, arrogant and abrasive than the one in the comics I read. He comes across as blunt and abrupt, a bit like Batman probably would if he wasn't so keen on presenting as cool and mysterious although, unlike Batman, he does have a noticeable sense of humor, albeit not a very sophisticated one. On the plus side, this Guy did seem like he was at least competent and willing to compromise, two things no-one ever accused the Guy Gardner in the comics of being.

Anyway, so, I liked it. A lot. And apparently I have nothing meaningful to say about it beyond that. So I'll stop. Let's come back in a few weeks and do this all over again. For Supergirl next time.

Free Comic Day At DCUO

I don't really play DCUO any more. It's arguable whether I ever did, really. I leveled to the extremely low cap of 30 a couple of times, which is tantamount to boasting about having completed the tutorial in any other MMO. And even that was many years ago. In recent times, about all I've done is log in when there's some new freebie to collect or if something's going on that I think might make a blog post.

And that's kind of what's happening today. Only this time I don't even need to log in! 

As you may have noticed (If you've been paying attention to anything I've been saying.) there's a new Supergirl movie out this summer. Next month, in fact. June 26 to be precise. I posted about it here and here which, since I'm talking about it again today, makes this three months in a row. DC should be paying me!

It's not so much the movie this time as the opportunity it represents. Digital Ink, the Daybreak sub-studio responsible for DCUO has, unsurprisingly, thrown itself headlong onto what it hopes is going to be the Summer Supergirl Bandwagon. If I had to bet, I'd guess the movie will be an artistic success but a commercial failure but until it comes out, its success or lack thereof is conveniently unsullied by either reviews or box office receipts so why not make the most of it while it lasts?.

There is, naturally, an in-game event based around the movie. There's even a (Not very good...) trailer, which you can watch below, although if I were you, I probably wouldn't bother.

I've completely lost track of how these things work in DCUO any more. There used to be Chapters and then there was some kind of multi-part story set up and now I don't know what they're doing. It must be well over a year since I last logged in and a lot longer than that since I played for more than half an hour before I got bored and logged out again.

Of late, I haven't even bothered to go in and get my free stuff. There's always free stuff but if you're not playing, what are you going to do with it? And I got a bit annoyed when I bought a new Hideout and instead of ending up with two, it lost me the one I already had. Which I never got back. Not that I'm bitter... 

I tried to redecorate the new one but my heart was never in it. Anyway, enough of that. For this summer's Supergirl event there's a freebie you don't have to log in to enjoy. And it's a good one, too. If you like Supergirl and superhero comics, that is. Which, obviously, I do.

To cut to the chase (In the skies above Metropolis, likely as not.) DCUO is "giving away" six issues of Supergirl's comic to promote the new Children of Krypton: Shadows Over Argo event. 

I say "giving away" but it's more like "Giving you a lend of" as we used to say when I was at school. And when I say "comics", I imagine no-one really believes they're going to send you half a dozen printed copies through the mail. No, what they're giving you is limited-duration access to selected digital issues through the DC Universe Infinite portal. You do have to sign up and register an account at DCUI but it just asks for your age and an email and password but it only takes like thirty seconds.

The most interesting part of all this for me was learning that DCUI is now available in the UK. Has been since 2022, in fact. I completely missed the Bat Signal on that one. 

Several times, back in the twenty-teens, I tried to sign up for the service and was repeatedly rebuffed. I wanted to give them my money but they wouldn't take it. I kept checking back to see if they'd expanded into my region and they hadn't but then, some time during the pandemic I think it must have been, I happened upon a website that gave me free access to what seems like every comic ever published and I forgot all about DCUI. 

The six Supergirl comics you can read for nothing right now.

I've used that website, sporadically, whenever there's been something I particularly wanted to read.  I assume it's some sort of pirate operation so won't link it here but really I have no clue what it is. At no point has anyone ever asked for any money or indeed any personal details, You don't even need to provide an email address. It's as easy to access as Wikipedi and as public, which seems a bit of an odd way to do piracy.

Still, I prefer not to pirate if there's a legal alternative. FFS, I don't even like playing pirate-themed games! Pirates of any and all kinds are the antithesis of cool as far as I'm concerned. Bad pirates! Pirates bad!

The upshot of which is that, having been alerted by the DCUO promotion to the fact that DC is now willing to take my money, I will very soon be giving it to them, not least because the monthly subscription is an extremely cost-effective £6.99. For reasons that are anything but rational (Or indeed sane.) I feel it would be foolish to give them that money before I've read my six free issues, so I'll probably start subbing next month. I fancy the idea of reading comics on my tablet in my lunch hour at work. You can download them and read offline with the DC offer so I won't even have to contend with our crappy wi-fi.. 

The one thing that's putting me of a bit is that, having read one of the issues on the DCUI platform this morning, the experience doesn't seem to be anything like as good as it is with the pirate version. I was only saying to someone at work this week that I now find reading comics on a screen considerably more immersive than reading them on paper but that certainly wasn't true of the one I read on DCUI today. I hope there are better ways to display and turn the pages hidden in the UI somewhere because the default option felt really clunky.

The six free issues are mostly very recent, including the first in the current run that's been so highly rated by Anj at Supergirl Comic Box Commentary. Anj's reviews are so incredibly thorough that you could just read them and not bother with the comics at all. I have to skip most of what he says about anything I have any intention of reading. The word "spoiler" doesn't seem to feature in his vocabulary.

340 more Supergirl comics you could read for just £6.99 a month. 

Having read that one, I can confirm it's excellent but also probably of more interest to long-time fans of the character than casual readers. I guess that's likely true of most of the others but I would recommend anyone with more than a passing interest, especially if they have any plans to see the movie, to take the opportunity to read the free copy of  Issue #1 of Tom King's Woman of Tomorrow, the full graphic novel version of which I wrote about at some length in one of the posts I linked earlier.

Ah, yes. Issue #1 and only Issue #1 for free. That's worth noting because of course the hope is that, having had a taste, you'll crave more and be willing to pay for it next time. Remind me again what profession uses that sales model?

I was curious (Read: suspicious.) that the free Supergirl comics were just the regular free tasters on offer over at DCUI. Well, I was once I remembered that, when I was checking the platform out all those years ago, giving away free issues was a thing there. So I went there directly to check, using a different browser, and they're not. 

Not the same, I mean. There are six free comics anyone can read over there, just not the same six. And none of them feature Supergirl, which seems odd now I come to think of it. Why would they miss a chance at cross-promotion? Free Supergirl comics coming to all in June, I'll bet.

Thinking about that, it occurred to me to wonder just who it is that can access this offer. I got an email but whether that's because I'm a Daybreak All Access customer or because I have a history of playing DCUO so Digital Ink has me email address I couldn't say. Well, I probably could, if I dug into it a bit but I have better things to do with my Saturday afternoon. It's not like I'm a journalist!

In that spirit, I offer the information, for what it's worth, "as seen." If you play DCUO or have played it, maybe you can read six Supergirl comics for free, too. Or maybe not. If you care enough, I imagine you'll go find out, now I've brought it to your attention. 

And if it turns out you can't... well, there are other ways. 

Stress On Super, Not On Girl

I couldn't truthfully claim that Supergirl has ever been one of my very favorite characters but, growing up, I was a huge Superman fan and my affection and interest extended to all of the Man of Steel's sprawling family. If a comic had any connection to the mythos, I was there for it. 

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!

Relax. I'm not going to try to stand up that fatuous and fatally flawed argument that super-hero comics are only for boys, not when my personal experience completely abnegates any such spurious, sexist claptrap. The most fervent fans I've known have been female. But I will say that, again back in the sixties and seventies, not all boys were as comfortable with their gender identity as they are now. To be seen reading a comic starring a girl wasn't something they'd all have felt comfortable doing. A female super-hero was a hard sell to young boys and until maybe the 90s, boys were the target market.

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 Bilquis Evely, 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. 

It's an editing problem, fundamentally. Someone should have said "They're going to misunderstand this, guys. You need to make it just a tad more obvious what's going on..."

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.

Is The Bag Half Empty Or Half Full? I think We All Know The Answer To That One...

I was going pull out a Grab Bag today but I used one of the grabs yesterday and made a whole post out of it, so now I only have two left. Two grabs do not a bag make, I fear. Still, I don't have anything else so let's make the best of it. Maybe something will come to me as I go along.

Kickstarter Doesn't Work For MMORPGs

Oh, yeah? Go tell that to Artix Entertainment.

As you may know, Artix is the developer behind the AdventureQuest franchise. I've been playing their most recent MMORPG, AdventureQuest 3D, on and off since open beta back in 2016. 

I still play, on occasion. Steam tells me the last time I logged in was just before the end of January. Yes, this year. 

I will almost certainly play some more AQ3D at some point, most likely when I see they've added something new that interests me. And they will because Artix Entertainment is quite possibly the most pro-active of all MMO studios when it comes to adding new content. They drop new content weekly, without fail, and have been doing so, consistently, for the entirety of their existence, at least as far as I can tell.

That's the kind of behavior that generates loyalty, something that's very clear from the response to the company's new Kickstarter. With 31 days still to run, the project has already racked up over a million dollars in pledges from more than thirteen thousand backers. 

Guess how much they were asking for? 

A dollar. One single buck. Talk about over-achievers!

I guess that's one way to ensure your Kickstarter at least doesn't fail. So, what do they want all that money for, anyway? A new game? 

Not exactly. They already have two successful MMORPGs. They don't need another. What they do need, apparently, is one that will run well and look good on phones, tablets and Steam.

Wait, though... Didn't I just say I played AQ3D on Steam already? I sure did. But the Kickstarter isn't for the newer MMORPG. It's for the older one. The original. The browser-based one you can only play on PC, through the in-house Artix Game Launcher.

The Kickstarter is to convert the entire game, AdventureQuest Worlds, into AdventureQuest:Worlds Infinity, remaking virtually everything and ensuring full cross-play and backwards compatibility with existing accounts. So, why go to all that bother for an old game when you have a new one? 

I guess if you still have 8000 people playing every day, despite the game being ancient and only available through a narrow channel, it might seem worth it. Especially if you can get those people to pay for the conversion. Actually, more than just those people by the look of it.

Here's the thing. Artix has established a reputation that allows them to leverage player trust to an extent matched by few other developers working in the genre. They say what they're going to do and then they do it. They also listen to feedback and act on it when it makes sense to do so. 

As Project: Gorgon proved, if you just keep doing what you said you'd do and avoid ripping anybody off, people will give you money and play your game. And the longer you keep doing it, the longer they'll stick around. It's odd how few developers seem to get that, isn't it? You wouldn't think it would be that hard to understand.

I've never played AQW and I don't plan on pledging the Kickstarter. I'll be adding it to my Steam library when it arrives, though, you can bet on that. And unlike most Kickstarters for MMOs, you can also bet on it really happening. 

It's A Bird! It's A Plane! It's... Supergirl!

 

Observant users of the Blog Roll off to the right may have noticed a few non-gaming entries creeping in over the years. One such is Supergirl Comic Commentary, a blog by Anj. 

I'm not a huge Supergirl fan like he is but I grew up with Kara, like I grew up with the rest of her family. I read her stories but it was mostly Superman and Superboy that had my attention back when I was in short trousers. (Don't get me started on grown men in shorts or we'll be here all day. It's an abomination, that's all I'm saying..)

I always liked her well enough though, especially when she appeared in my favorite Superhero series of all time, The Legion of Superheroes. Over the decades she's been indifferently served by too many writers and artists to remember, as have most DC superheroes. 

It's the curse of the long-running character. For all the endless droning on about "continuity" and "canon", no-one survives the endless revamps and new directions entirely unscathed. I've learned to tune out the changes I don't like. You have to or you'd go insane, as an hour in the bar of any comic convention will demonstrate all too convincingly.

The Girl of Steel's screen career has been similarly variegated. The 1984 movie featuring Helen Slater was not well-received or reviewed. Worse, it lost money. 

It was thirty years before Supergirl got her own tv series. It began in 2015 and ran for six seasons with Melissa Benoist in the title role. I watched every episode and bought most of the seasons on DVD, so I must have liked it. It wasn't an awful lot like the Supergirl I remember, though.

Nevertheless, it may be the relative success of that show, along with an influential, high-profile limited-run comic, Tom King's Woman of Tomorrow, that's led to this year's tent-pole release in the DCMU schedule, the very simply named Supergirl, starring Milly Alcock. And in an attempt to drum up interest and media coverage, DC have gender-swapped this year's Superman Day.

Come on! Don't pretend you never heard of Superman Day! Superman Day is on April 18 as everyone knows. Look, I wrote about it in 2024.  

Only this year it isn't. April 18 is Supergirl Day instead. Not sure why they can't have a day each but there you go. Alright, I do know, really. It's just crass to point out the commerciality.

To be fair, if you scroll down that long, long page of events and special issues I just linked, you'll see it turns into a promo for Superman after a while. He's getting his share and I'm sure he won't begrudge his little cousin taking the lead for one year.

I'm not planing on celebrating the day myself but I might log into DCUO if there any freebies to be had, which I'm sure there will be. I might also pick up a copy of Woman of Tomorrow. We have it at work in the excellent and attractive new DC Compact format, which I highly recommend as a great alternative to the more expensive and generally too glossy graphic novels. 

And I will definitely be watching the movie when it arrives in June. The trailer looks very encouraging. I doubt I'll get to see it at the cinema, though. I'll wait for the DVD. I can shelve it next to the TV series.

Finish With A Song

I mean, it worked for Morecambe and Wise...

Sorry Anyway - Rosa Walton

Rosa Walton is, of course, one half of Lets Eat Grandma. Didn't need to tell you that. Sorry, anyway.

The duo is on a break just now and Rosa's pal, Jenny Hollingworth, has been releasing material under the name Jenny on Holiday, some of which has appeared on this very blog. Big surprise!

They both have solo albums either out or coming soon. Jenny released hers, Quicksand Heart, in January and Rosa's, Tell Me It's A Dream, is out on June 5. 

Expect further examples of both right here.

Staring At The Sun - Supergirl Season 6

Last night I watched the final episode of the final season of Supergirl. Only three years late. 

For some reason, even though the first five seasons all streamed on Prime in the UK, the sixth, which was slightly delayed by the pandemic and came out in 2021, did not. If it was on another service at the time, which is the usual reason for an unexplained disappearance, I either couldn't find it or didn't want to pay for it. 

I waited for it to come out on DVD and added it to my Christmas list so someone would buy it for me, which they duly did. I imagine my logic was that if I was going to have to pay to watch it I might as well pay to own it and if I was going to do that I might as well have it in a hard copy with a pretty box so I could enjoy looking at it on my shelf rather than as an invisible, intangible, digital file, tucked away somewhere on a hard drive.

And then I followed my usual pattern of not watching it until it did eventually turn up on a streaming service I was paying for anyway. I believe that's at least the fourth or fifth time that's happened and I'm sure it won't be the last. 

In this case, the show finally surfaced on Netflix but only the US version, which is what I've been watching exclusively since I started using a VPN back in the spring. Even then, I didn't start watching it right away. Much though I loved the first four seasons, the fifth wasn't great and I'd lost a little steam with it, plus I had a bunch of other shows to watch that seemed more urgent at the time.

I got through all of those. Supergirl Season Six floated to the top of the watchlist and I started on it a few weeks ago. When I'm watching shows these days I try to stick to a steady tick of one episode per evening, which I find to be the perfect cadence; short enough that I remember exactly what happened in the last episode but not so fast they all blur into one.

Season 6 is twenty episodes so it took me three weeks, give or take. It's been a long three weeks...

I wanted to write this post a week ago. I was so frustrated and annoyed in the middle of the season I felt the need to vent. Had I given in to my irritation and posted, the first line would probably have been something like "Season 6 of "Supergirl" has to be the worst season of any super-hero show I have ever watched!" 

It still may be, although I realize that's a pretty low bar. Having reached the end, though, I do now have a little more perspective, helped to a considerable degree not just by having seen the thing through - and it does pick up after a mid-season slump - but by having read a whole bunch of reviews and discussions afterwards. 

Immediately afterwards, that is. Like, seconds after the final credits ran. I never read commentary or reviews while I'm in the middle of watching something unless it's on the specific episode I've just seen but I frequently dive straight in after the series ends. It's a way to decompress emotionally from that awkward, unpleasant sensation of loss that follows the ending of the para-relationship between the viewer and the viewed, when it sometimes feels like the last day of school, when you know you'll probably never see most of these people again and it feels like you'll really miss them.

Or not, in some cases. I was at a point with The Flash by the end of Season Three when I fervently hoped I'd never have to see any of them again, which is why I stopped watching the show. I'm very happy to say that I don't feel Season 6 of Supergirl soured the good relationships I had with nearly all of the characters up to then. It's more that it made me sorry for the way they'd been let down by some excruciatingly bad writing.

So off I went to the echo chamber of the internet, fully expecting to see my disappointment and disdain faithfully reflected in a clutch of one and two star reviews and angry, impassioned rants... and I didn't really find much of that at all. 

I mean, there was some. I read a couple of low-scoring reviews that made many of the same negative points I would have - the platitudinous vacuity of the dialog, the incoherence of the plot, its derivative and trite structure, the complete breaking of faith with the personalities of most of the characters as established in previous seasons and so on and so on. I read a very good, thoughtful, Reddit thread in which almost everyone thought the Season was terrible but still managed to keep their cool as they explained why it sucked so badly.

Mostly, though, to my complete astonishment, I saw high-scoring reviews and high praise. A lot of people really liked the final season and almost everyone, even those who didn't like anything much else, loved the final episode, a long, emotional wrap-up of the kind we all often complain cancelled series need but don't get.

All of which I found very helpful indeed. Hardly any of it made me think the Season was any better than I'd realized but it did do an awful lot to remind me that most of the meaning happens in the head not on the screen. 

At this point I ought to make a couple of things clear. I am and have always been one hundred per cent on-side with the political attitude of the show. It's been described variously as "leftist", "liberal" and "woke", all of which I take as strong positives. That's what the show has been pretty much from the start and neither the political or social intent or content form any part of my objection to Season 6.

The execution though... Oh, boy...

There are two specific problems with the way the politics are presented in Season 6. The first and most important is the language used. 

Language is in constant flux and all media struggles to capture that pace of change so the risk always exists that what appears on screen or on the page will feel dated or stilted or inauthentic merely through the passage of time - sometimes even small increments of time. Many shows and books and movies are also produced with a specific audience in mind, sometimes by people who would see themselves as part of that demographic, sometimes by outsiders wishing to access or exploit it.

All of this means that it's very easy to look at something and think "No-one speaks like that!" when actually what you mean is "No-one I know speaks like that!" Watching Season 6 I frequently found myself thinking "No-one speaks like that!" pretty much any time anyone opened their mouth. Having read some other opinions and thought about it, I'm slightly worried now that maybe, yes, some people do speak like that after all.

Not exactly like that, of course. The way just about everyone speaks most of the time sounds like the social equivalent of business jargon or, worse still, the kind of New Age cant I associate with the early '90s. Hardly a sentence goes by without a buzz word or an appropriated phrase from some discipline or other. It's hard to listen to even when you agree with the sentiment, which is the second problem.

There's a tipping-point in any discussion, where the sheer determination of one side to get their point across begins to undermine what's being said. My go-to example there is always Richard Dawkins, whose sheer arrogance in expressing his profound contempt for religious belief has probably filled more church pews than Desmond Tutu's affability ever will.

This isn't that bad (Nothing could be.) but it's relentless and wearing. At times - far too many times - it didn't feel like watching a TV show about super-heroes so much as it being cornered at a party and lectured at by a particularly humorless bunch of zealots. It's not just that it's the absolute worst way to convert someone who doesn't already agree with you, it's that it's the best way to make those who do, reconsider their position in case it might mean anyone thinks that's how they come across, too.

Oner thing it also made me wonder, especially in that finale, which I did not warm to in quite the way most viewers seem to have done, is whether a show about DC super-heroes is really the best platform for transmitting these kinds of ideas. 

It should be. There are some huge synergies, particularly with the Superman family side of the house, which has always iconified fairness, equality and progressive thinking. Unfortunately, the ultimate take-away from the final season appears to be that Supergirl feels her role as protector of those unable to protect themselves is not just unnecessary but unwarranted and possibly pernicious. 

The world can do better if she gets out of the way and allows people to help themselves seems to be the message although the messaging in the entire season is so compromised, inconsistent and fractured, it's impossible to know for sure what the intended meaning might be. I think we're supposed to feel proud of Kara for the growth she's achieved by the end but, in common with many commenters, including plenty who liked the whole thing a lot more than I did, all I felt for Supegirl as the credits rolled was sorry.

Sorry she'd been so badly served by her writers, not just in this season but throughout the show. And sorry for Melissa Benoist, the actor whose superb portrayal of Supergirl now has to be seen as the quintessential version of the character, that she was never allowed to fully explore the potential of the role. Or win any good fights.

Seriously, why make a show about a super-hero and then have that super-hero lose most of her battles? She almost only ever wins when she has help. It's been a trope of the entire series and no amount of pretty talk about friendship and having each other's backs makes up for the fact that Supergirl is supposed to be one of the most powerful beings on the planet and yet constantly needs saving like the heroine of a silent movie. She needs to be the prime motivator and key to success in at least 50% of her battles before the one-for-all, all-for-one ethic kicks in.

But then, Supergirl, like all the DC/CW shows, has never been primarily a super-hero show. They're all soap operas at heart, just soaps that happen to have people with powers at the center. I think the best ones, like Stargirl, succeeed by keeping the scale intimate and human rather than universal or, as is now so unfortunately the norm, multiversal.

Season 6 of Supergirl became quite blatant in its desperation to prevent the major characters, heroes and villains, from using more than the small fraction of their powers that would allow the fragile plot to just about hold together. The Big Bad of the season, Nixly, is a 5th Dimensional imp with godlike magic powers that can do just about anything... so Brainiac 5 somehow whips up a wrist-cuff that completely nullifies them and cannot be removed by any means. 

And it never is. It just stays there, incomprehensibly immune to all forms of science or magic. Nixly is still wearing it when the show ends. It's utterly unbelievable as anything other than a deus ex machina to further the plot.

Supergirl, the other supposedly unstoppable force, spends several episodes in the Phantom Zone, where she has no powers at all, and a couple in high-school, before she'd come into her full powers, where she's played as her younger self by a different actress. 

In most of the rest of the episodes she's riven by doubt and indecision and rarely gets to cut loose. Mostly she flies about looking for things. When she lands she usually gets knocked about a lot. I don't recall if she ever actually hits anything or anyone. She certainly doesn't make a habit of it.

Melissa Benoist was pregnant and/or had a newborn child for much of the filming, which explains why she's barely in some episodes but it doesn't explain why she does so little when she is there. Don't get me started on the terrible use of powers in the show in general, though. Absolutely no-one does what you'd expect them to do with the abilities they're supposed to have. They nearly all end up shooting different colored force-beams out of their hands or eyes or just touching their temples and staring really hard. 

All of which (And there's so much more I could say along the same lines... Lena Luthor's a witch, now?) makes it sound like I hated the show. I did not. I love the show and now I've had time to reflect, I don't even hate that final season. At least it made me think about how good the show used to be. I own almost all the seasons on DVD and now I want to go back to the beginning and start over. 

As I said, Melissa Benoist is about the best possible Supergirl and the rest of the cast are all excellent, especially Callista Flockhart, who makes an absolutely scene-stealing return as Cat Grant in the finale, reminding us all just how pivotal she was to the show in the early seasons and why it was never quite as strong again once she left.

I liked Peta Sergeant as Nixly quite a bit, too. Her expressions are delicious. Her mouth seems to be trying to crawl off her face sometimes. Her phrasing is very odd, too, which really adds to the other-dimensional feel of the character. Jon Cryer reprises his amusing, wry take on Lex Luthor enjoyably, too, although whoever came up with the concept of Lex genuinely falling in love needs to go have a lie down.

But then, is Lex really in love or has he just convinced himself he is? The one saving grace of the writing in Season 6 is that, for all the bluster and didacticism, all the preaching and pontificating, all the moral certainty that frequently verges uncomfortably on smugness, it keeps on asking interesting questions.

Are the Super Friends justified in taking unsanctioned, unilateral action to safeguard the people even when it's against the specific direction of the peoples' democratically elected representatives? Does love trump duty? Is responsibility greater to those you know than to those you don't? These and many more moral and ethical concerns get raised, discussed and largely left unanswered, which is entirely in keeping with the argument put forward by Kelly to Alex that she shouldn't try to fix her problems, just be there with her as she lives through them. 

Which brings me back to whether this ought to be a super-hero show at all. If Supergirl isn't in the business of fixing people's problems, then what is she for? The finale ends with her asking herself the same question and I don't believe we ever get an answer.

I suspect next time someone decides to make a Supergirl show - and there will be a next time - it will involve a good deal less introspection and a lot more action. I think this iteration took the interior view about as far as it could reasonably have gone - and then some.

I'll look forward to that next vision of the Maid of Might (Bet they won't be bringing that back.), should it ever come. Meanwhile, I'll happily re-watch this one. I just might stop at the end of Season Five next time, though.