Supergirl #3 (DC) – Koff koff. This is Lutz, suddenly transferred to the main body of the blog from the comments section. Who went on record saying that, after Animal Man, Supergirl was the only series from the DC reboot that still grabbed his interest. So he had something at stake here reading this.

I was half-expecting the thing to crash-land anyway, since the first two issues have just been prolonged fight scenes and my liking for them depended on the lack of drama, of a deeper purpose, no winners or losers, just a state of general pissed-offness at being thrown into this world. She saw no way to express herself except through sweet violence.

But something has to happen at some point, and as it turned out this was the point, and over the first half dozen pages my heart sank deeply. Awful dialogue (why can’t they just keep stuff in the original Kryptonian), even awfuller posing and subtly inconsistent art, culminating in one panel that in its overloaded oiliness cries for an Alex Ross guest spot: behind Supercousin’s shoulder a panorama of his heroics, catching a burning passenger plane, blowing out a burning mansion, and, worst of all, fullbreastedly taking shots from an anonymous hand at close range, pumping his fist, receiving the bullets that can’t harm him with a look of religious ardor. Ugh.

I gave up on the series there and then and did not even notice how it happened that two jarring transitions later this was an awesome comic again. It helped that the villain is a kind of hi-end scrap merchant who collects whatever strands in privatized space around Earth (where no nation can afford space travel anymore), to make a nice profit. His methods to test the worth of his new bounty are beautifully eccentric: heated metal butterflies and, even better, The Brain, in a body of jellyfish flesh clothed around a skeleton of neural pathways. The brain sucks up everything thrown at him and doesn’t let go again (so it’s no relation to mine), and the battle between the two is the highpoint of the issue, five marvelous pages.

Storywise that’s actually a very clever development, since Supergirl’s reaction to the shock of waking up on another world without a clue as to what it all means—to hit everything that talks to her—now is exactly the trait of character demanded from her, a figure in a sort of video game situation. Lots of potential here, and artist Mahmud Asrar has sort of promised more consistently great art after next issue, but I’m not going to trust this beyond the page in front of me anymore.

(Lutz blogs here courtesy of his pod.)