Supergirl #11 // Review
Clark is missing. Kara wants to go and find him, but there’s a big crisis in one of the smallest cities in the DC Universe and Kara’s got to go and investigate it in Supergirl #11. Writer/artist Sophie Campbell makes a rather serious departure from the lighter side of her run with Kara in one of the most brutal issues of ANY mainstream comic book series this year. Color comes to the page courtesy of Tamra Bonvillain.
Kandor is in ruins. Supergirl has entered the bottle city to find out what’s going on. She’s not in for long before she sees a couple of super-powered monsters attacking a few citizens. She’s able to defeat them and save the lives of the citizens, but she’s concerned: the monsters in question bear a striking resemblance to some of the tech that her former ward Lesla-Lar had been working on. Kara had to let her go so that she could return to her life in the bottle city, but she wasn’t ready for that...and now Lesla and her cousin have become a serious threat to the whole city.
The first ten issues of the series have been a clever and balanced approach to storytelling. Campbell has serialized the adventures of Supergirl in a way that balances inner and interpersonal drama with traditional superhero action. There’s been an open embrace of a full ensemble of very thoughtfully-crafted characters. And in the 11th issue? The heart of the 11th issue is a hell of a lot of hate and resentment that spills-out primarily between two people in a strikingly aggressive 9-page fight sequence. Wow.
Campbell is fairly brilliant at framing the action and the drama in that 9-page fight. Hollywood spends ridiculous sums of money trying to get action sequences right and they rarely do a very good job of it. Campbell does a breathtaking job here. The drama at the heart of the story is carefully crafted. Every blow is felt on the page with an intensely kinetic impact. Campbell keeps alternating between wide shots of the action and tight close-ups of the drama as it rolls across the faces of Kara and her opponent. One of the more memorable fight scenes in mainstream comics in recent memory.
Honestly...this issue makes Scott Snyder look like a total amateur next to Campbell. His DC K.O. event had the potential to be incredibly powerful as heroes battled villains in a big and brutally intense multi-issue brawl. With no real story worth speaking of, the intensity of the fighting and the action could have been ratcheted-up all the way. Instead it was a big muddle. In a single issue of Supergirl, Campbell is able to show sheer intensity and brutality in a single combat than tumbles through much of the length of a single issue. DC K.O. would have been much better than it was if it had been able to capture even a fraction of what Campbell manages in the 11th Supergirl.
