Review: Supergirl #17

Supergirl #17, or “Girl Vs. Goddess,” by Mike Johnson and Mahmud Asrar, takes place concurrent to Superboy 17. When reading it in release date order, it is chapter 13 of H’el On Earth. The story is a simple one at face value, a single arc depicting an epic battle between Supergirl and Wonder Woman, interrupted only by cameos of the Daily Planet, Justice League, and Superman. One could wax eloquent about the tit for tat of the battle, but that would not be very productive, since like the great battles of comicdom, such as the Hulk / Thing or Wolverine / Sabertooth battles, the story is light on plot and heavy with motivation. Mike Johnson, like a skilled sports analyst, gets at the heart of the contestants, and shows in 22 pages that they believe they not only are fighting for the survival of their worlds, but also that they believe their actions are morally good.

Supergirl misses her home world, Krypton, to the point that she has sold herself on the idea that she is in love with its savior, H’el. Supergirl acts like H’el’s groupie, believing everything he says and doing his bidding as if she is a cult unto herself. In the past few issues, she has had no purpose but his, and it comes to a head in issue 17, when she is enraged at his deception and calls him a user. Johnson cleverly insinuates, however, that Supergirl has deceived herself, that everything she believes she knows to be a lie, by having all of it examined by Wonder Woman’s magical lasso. If this is true, then Supergirl is a nihilist of the simplest sort, one who has “bad faith,”– in the sense that it was used by Jean-Paul Sartre—one who denies her own ability to be true to herself. Not only that, she is doing wrong by being false to herself.

Wonder Woman, on the face of it, is the simplest of the competitors, fighting only for “the very survival of this world.” At first she fights nobly, out of duty: “I take no joy in what comes next,” she says, just as she dominates Supergirl with her lasso for the first of two entanglements. Then Wonder Woman gets into it a little bit. We see her passion as she stands over an immobilized Supergirl and smugly says “…learn from this. We are closely matched in strength, in speed. But not experience. And that is the difference today.” Supergirl, tied up and helpless, hears only, “blah blah blah, I’m better than you.” If this isn’t enough, Wonder Woman bends over to rub it in, taking three paragraphs to justify the existence of her lasso. The main points of this rebuttal to Supergirl’s contention that a lasso is a stupid weapon are: 1) it was made by the god Hephaestus; 2) Superman was not immune to its charms; 3) you can feel the power, now, can’t you Supergirl? Mike Johnson gets at the core of Wonder Woman in a way that would make her creator William Moulton Marston applaud: she prefers a lasso for a weapon not only because it is an outlet for her mercy, but also because it is an outlet for cruelty. And, like a supervillian, she never passes over an opportunity for a monologue.

Every writer up until now has missed the point that while H’el is an ambitious supervillian, aiming at the destruction of the solar system, he is also a “noble nihilist”. He not only believes that it is good for Earth to die so that Krypton might live, but also believes that his actions will zero out their consequences so that Earth will live as well. H’el justifies the annihilation of Sol by making a very good point: if the Earth is destroyed when the Star Chamber fuels the time jump back to Krypton, that destruction will be erased by the jump. Likewise, as when Krypton’s destruction is averted, Kryptonians will never have come to Earth and had to build a star chamber. It is his usual circuitous logic of self-deception, no doubt, but this time he may be on to something. Still, he shouldn’t be surprised that Earth’s defenders can’t afford to buy it, because heroes don’t blithely surrender to death in the here and now on the promise of a theory.

It is a pity that Mike Johnson’s tenure on Supergirl is coming to an end. In the last 17 issues that he authored or co-authored, he has demonstrated a deep knowledge of all the characters that have traversed on his stage. When a character opens their mouth, she or he has the full weight of a soul to back it up, and by finding these characters’ emotional cores, Johnson has been able to stage subtle philosophical moments. We can probably expect DC’s normal preference for more elaborate plotting and complex narratives, and that is a misstep. In simplicity we see people as they are. Buy these stories while you can; they are all on comiXology.