Supergirl - Woman of Tomorrow #6 // Review
Kara Zor-El has found the villain. She’s ready to defeat him. To do so, she’s going to have to do something kind of miraculous in Supergirl - Woman of Tomorrow #6. Writer Tom King continues a crushingly beautiful story of Supergirl in a brutally poetic re-telling of her origin story that is brought to the stage with dreamy, surrealist visuals brought to the page by artist Bilquis Evely. The brutal fight for survival on the smoking remains of the last city of the planet Krypton might have been told in an overwhelmingly dark narrative somewhere else before. Still, King’s story of Argo City is one of the most bleakly beautiful treatments of the subject matter in recent memory.
Supergirl co-creator Otto Binder didn’t have a terribly good grasp of astrophysics. (He didn’t need to.) Or maybe he did, and he didn’t care. (He didn’t have to.) He was telling a pulpy sci-fi story about a girl who survived the destruction of her own planet on a little scrap of it that somehow managed to hold gravity and atmosphere and some sort of shielding from cosmic radiation as it drifted through interstellar space. In the sixth issue of her current series, a young woman from another planet tells Binder’s story of how a girl named Kara became Supergirl in the most excruciatingly beautiful way as the hero races across the galaxy on horseback.
King’s narrative plays-out entirely in the narrative words of Supergirl’s companion, who looks to get revenge on a murderer. Kara told the girl about her early struggles prior to moving to Earth. The young woman from a rugged, impoverished agrarian culture tells the story of Kara dealing with the massive death and destruction that Kara had experienced at the age of 14. The story of an intergalactic refugee is deeply moving in King’s hands...told as it is through the perspective of a girl with a similarly hearty background. This is very, very moving stuff.
The opening splash page has a young Kara Zor-El sitting on a ragged stairway overlooking the jagged remains of Argo City. It’s the first of a few huge poster images that cascade through the narrative. Elsewhere Supergirl is on a white horse tumbling through a gorgeous sky as the narrative deftly speaks of an entire planet-wide civilization being wiped out. Evely captures the immensity of the tragedy in wide-open landscapes occasionally highlighted by Supergirl on a white horse. It’s unspeakably beautiful in places.
Supergirl’s origin has been covered countless times over the decades. King finds a way to tell it again that adds to it...and adds to the intensity of it immeasurably. Siegel and Shuster had a pretty good idea with Superman. Otto Binder improved on that idea with Supergirl. King finds a way to make that story infinitely more badass in a very appealing and emotionally gripping narrative that’s accompanied by some very, very beautiful artwork that closes out the third quarter of an eight-part series.
