Supergirl, Volume 1: Reign Of The Cyborg Super-Men by Steve Orlando

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This book marks the re-launch of Supergirl in a way that makes it's reality a little closer to that of the TV show. The big difference is that Kara is much younger than on television (still a teenager.)

The book begins with the Rebirth story with the DEO shooting Kara at the sun to help recharge her Kryptonian powers. As a condition of that, she has to agree to work for the DEO under the supervision of two married yet childless agents who will be her parents.

However, Cyborg Superman returns, this time with a startling revelation and a promise to fulfill her dreams of bring back Argo City but with a high cost to Earth.

The book gets a lot right. It really captures the way she feels out of place on Earth and how difficult everything is for her to adjust. It'd be like a smart modern teenager being dropped off in an Eighteenth Century school and you really get that sense of how lost and homesick she is. And she really experiences a lot of conflict.

Yet, she remains the same hero, showing kindness to vanquished enemies and never giving up on people, even on villains. The story really captures the kindness and compassion of Supergirl that the TV show portrayed in the first series that made her such a likable character.

I also liked the idea of her foster parents and the way they were portrayed with her mother even being willing to follow her into space as part of the plot. I love the Danvers as just such really likable and interesting characters.

The art in the book is somewhat inconsistent. There are several pages where facial features are (for no apparent reasons) very non-distinct. There may be a style to this, but given that it's on some pages and no on others it makes the art seem occasionally lazy.

The DEO Director isn't Hank Henshaw/Martian Manhunter and what we're given instead is a very generic director who just constantly shouts, gives orders, complaints, and threatens. It's like Maria Hill from Marvel but with nothing interesting about her.

I like Cat Grant's character on the TV show, but I don't think using that TV portrayal as a basis for the comics works well. For one thing, Calista Flockheart manages to make the character likable when with a lesser star, the character could have become insufferably smug. Unfortunately, that's how she comes off in the comic, particularly in her first appearance she chews out Supergirl for stopping high tech armed robber and getting in the way of her brilliant plan to interrogate them and find out everything about their evil organization. It's Cat Grant not Batwoman here. In addition, while it's okay for Cat to give a one or two minute speech every episode on a 40 minute television, that sort of verbosity in a comic book slows things down.

Overall though, I liked the book. The story is solid and relatable and most importantly, the lead and her foster parents are likable. Even though Kara's younger than in the TV show, these first issues captured everything that made Supergirl appealing in Season 1 with it's incredibly kind and caring lead character without the burden of heavy duty politics that came to define the series later on.



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