Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow #2 Review

 

Your Mission, Should You Choose To Accept It...

Written By: Tom King

Art By: Bilquis Evely

Colors By: Matheus Lopes

Letters By: Clayton Cowles

Cover Art By: Bilquis Evely, Matheus Lopes

Cover Price: $4.99

Release Date: July 20, 2021

Supergirl and Ruthye take a bizarre space-bus ride to find some yellow sun and come to an agreement about whether or not Supergirl will help Ruthye find and kill Krem. Along the way, Ruthye encounters alien seat hogs, multiple ne'er-do-wells who have a bone to pick with Kryptonioans wearing red 'n blue, and the newfound habit of washing your hands after you go to the bathroom.

Was It Good?

I'm not sure.

One of the reasons I was somewhat positive on the first issue, a reason many felt was negative, was the weird (you could argue "blatant") retelling of True Grit with Supergirl in the Rooster Cogburn role. Admittedly, it's so close to True Grit that's almost a ripoff of the story, but I felt the mashup was so unique that it became oddly fascinating.

In other words, King didn't get points for creating an original, compelling story. King got points for creating a bizarrely interesting mashup. Your mileage may vary.

The question going into issue #2 is whether or not King would stick with the True Grit story or go in a completely different direction after the first issue setup. King chose the former, and so we're moving forward with True Grit in Space, and it wears a little thin in issue #2, particularly with the character of Ruthye.

Ruthye is a very verbose and flowery talker. King has constructed a character that takes 50 words to express a thought that could be said in 5. After a while, the extraneous reading gets tedious but that seems to be part of the charming annoyance of the Ruthye character. It's a form of overcompensation. Ruthye lacks in size, strength, and power so her outlet for her pluck and courage is to use big words in big sentences. Like a cat arching its back to seem bigger to predators, Ruthye uses big speech to make herself more authoritative for her age and size. It's sort of annoying, but it sort of works.

Supergirl is the bigger question mark in this series so far. This isn't Supergirl. This is a grizzled, old cowboy in Supergirl's body. A cowboy that would break your arm or cuss up a blue streak without giving it a second thought. In other words, this is definitely not any version of Supergirl you've ever seen before, so you could almost say putting Supergirl in this comic doesn't matter. If anything, Supergirl would make more sense here if you replaced her with somebody else such as Lobo or Guy Gardner.

Does the story make sense? Mostly. The narrative is a little out of order picking up from the end of the last issue. All the consequences of the cliffhanger aren't addressed until the very end of this issue, so it was a little jarring to have the narrative out of order. There's no sense as to why it was done that way other than King felt it would be more dramatic. It didn't work for me because I was distracted by wondering what happened to Krypto and how they got on this space bus when I should have been fully invested in the page before me.

Evely's art is still amazing. She's got a real knack for portraying character expressions with subtle facial angles, smallmouth movements, and eyes that focus in a way that makes you feel like you can tell what the character is feeling. The artwork is brilliant.

Bits and Pieces:

Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow #2 continues the True Grit "homage," adds in some stakes for Kara to accept Ruthye's mission, and it's all weird in an interesting sort of way.

8/10