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Thursday, August 07, 2025

Review: Supergirl - Woman of Tomorrow

 No, I still haven't seen the new Superman movie yet (I'll wait to see it in streaming video), but I read enough James Gunn interviews that when he mentioned that he fast-tracked Supergirl because it had a great script based on Woman of Tomorrow, I checked it out of the library despite my not liking Tom King's work in previous comics.

I still don't like Tom King's work. To be fair, when writing about any of the Super-characters, it's a difficult job since they have so many powers and are rarely in any real danger, even ignoring the meta-narrative that a comic book series can never kill off its title character. What I don't like about his work is that he doesn't have a good understanding of visual story-telling, so his writing has a lot of excessive verbiage even when the illustrations could do a far better job of telling the story than his mediocre writing.

In this particular story, King decides to use the device of having a non-super character narrate the story. The narrator has a particularly verbose style (though I suspect it's because King doesn't have the discipline to write a tight story), and Supergirl somehow takes a liking to her and takes her on several adventures. She does get put in real danger and the setup is stupid (Supergirl visits a planet under a red sun for her birthday so she can feel vulnerable). There are a few interesting situations (a green sun that makes Supergirl vulnerable, kryptonite weapons, etc), and we get to see Krypto and Super-horse (!!).

The device doesn't quite work, and while we get a glimpse of how super Supergirl is, I suspect the movie based on this story will have to be highly modified for it to be anything resembling a "terrific" script. This will be one of those few stories where the movie has got to be better than the book because the book is so bad!


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