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Mild Mannered Reviews - Supergirl Comics

Supergirl #52

Supergirl #52

Scheduled to arrive in stores: April 21, 2010

Cover date: June 2010

"Last Stand of New Krypton": Part 7 - "Distractions"

Writer: Sterling Gates
Penciller: Ivan Rodriguez
Inker: Ivan Rodriguez

Reviewed by: Jeffrey Bridges

Click to enlarge


General Zod, Ursa and crew, re-enlarged by sunstones, go in search of Brainiac.

Kara and Brainiac 5 search for the heart of Brainiac's ship, bickering the whole time. Brainiac 5 thinks to himself about how the reason for that is that he loved Kara and how hard it was for him when she died.

Gor is torturing Reactron to get information on General Lane's 'Doomsday Plan', when Lex arrives and kills Gor.

Kara is meanwhile poking holes in Brainiac 5's lies, and just as she confronts him, they're found by Brainiac. They escape, find the core, and destroy it. This enables Superman to get on board.

Lex is then re-enlarged and seems very interested in the bottle cities.

3Story - 3: I've said it before and it still holds true... it's almost impossible to rate these middle-of-crossover stories. It's like trying to review chapter 10 of a 15 or 20 chapter book as a piece of writing on its own, when it was intended as part of a whole.

Looking at the whole, it advanced the story on several fronts and things moved forward, which is good. There wasn't much in the way of character, really, but in a crossover like this you can't ding an issue too much for that.

What I CAN do, though, is gripe about how the dialogue in this issue was even worse than the worst of it last issue.

Look at General Zod's first line on page 1. Good lord, it's awful. Why not just give us a block of text to set the scene, rather than have a character TALK LIKE THEY'RE SAYING A BLOCK OF EXPOSITORY TEXT?

It happens again in the first panel of page 7, just to set up who Brainiac 5 is. For anyone who forgot. In the middle of the crossover.

Even IF you felt the need to re-identify the character here (which I argue didn't need to be done), there are far better ways to do it than having characters simply state blocks of exposition in ways that people don't actually talk.

That crap drives me mad. It makes the entire book feel like some goofy tale from the Silver Age.

And the thought boxes for Kara and Brainiac 5 were just as atrocious. Who actually thinks to themselves, 'I'll bide my time, Insert Name Of Person You're Thinking About Here!'

NOBODY, that's who.

Stuff like that makes the entire medium look bad. Comics want to be (and should be) taken seriously as a viable and unique method of storytelling, and then they go write dialogue and thought boxes like that and undermine everything they've worked for, and everything we fans have defended.

When people still have the mentality that comics are for kids, or are somehow lesser than novels, or movies, or television... we stand up for the medium. And then writing like that just makes us look utterly foolish.

Please, guys. I'm begging you. Dialogue is people talking, so please please please write it how people TALK.

I would like to not be able to complain about that anymore.

4Art - 4: There were some odd panels, but on the whole I enjoyed it. Kara looked a lot older, which I think is a good thing. She's not 12 and she shouldn't look it. And the one panel of Superman was really fantastic. That was cool.

4Cover Art - 4: Not bad. Not incredibly exciting or innovative, but it gets the job done.

Mild Mannered Reviews

2010

Note: Month dates are from the issue covers, not the actual date when the comic went on sale.

January 2010

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