There is a certain mindset around most of DC’s 2010s era known as the New 52 and it’s not a particularly good mindset. The Supergirl series is one of the major points of contention among fans for why the New 52 initiative was a bad move. Personally I don’t like to make broad generalizations like “every dc comic published between August of 2011 and May of 2016 is awful” and I feel that some of the stories in the New 52 are quite good, even some of the Supergirl stories. Unfortunately, however, Supergirl (Vol. 6) #24 is not so great.
“Death Becomes Her” is presented by Michael Alan Nelson (writer), Diogenes Neves’ (pencils), Marc Deering (inks), Guy Major (colors), and Taylor Esposito (letters). This is part of the time period after Supergirl gets Kryptonite poisoned by H’El and it takes her a really long time to get back to normal. To put it in perspective, H’El on Earth ended in issue 17 of this series which puts Kara at her 7th issue of being sick and not having a solution on how to fix it. This, compounded with the first 13 issues of the series where Kara is only speaking Kryptonian, really makes it feel like this version of the Girl of Steel is having trouble getting started.
This specific issue has Kara, for most of the issue, trapped in a computer simulation on the planet I’Noxia where she is able to witness a dreamstate giving her her hearts desires. Sort of like a Black Mercy if you’re familiar. We also have the running plot of Zor-El (Kara’s not-dead dad) being the Cyborg Superman in New 52 continuity. Although at this specific point he has put his daughter’s consciousness into the aforementioned simulation so that he can re-use her skin cells to regenerate his own body so that he’s not a cyborg monster with amnesia. Please try to keep up, it will only get more confusing.
Also Brainiac is here.
Zor-El, when he is the Cyborg, has no memory of his life before he became the metal monster aside from knowing he is a Kryptonian. So when he was presented with a machine that can take a Kryptonian’s body and science it into re-making his old body he jumps immediately on the solution when seeing Supergirl fly past. Unbeknownst to him at the time, he has just rendered his own daughter without a body. He immediately regrets this decision (probably because of the sideburns situation) and tries to reverse it.
However, Supergirl is trying to break out of the not-Black Mercy and Brainiac is trying to explode the planet or something. A lot of splash pages ensue, and eventually Zor-El is able to go back to No-Memories-Robot-Man, Brainiac is shooed away, and Supergirl has her body back and pops even had the generosity to expunge all the Kryptonite while he was fiddling with it.
Before Zor-El gives himself amnesia again, he is able to request his assistant, Delacore, to impart some caring words to his daughter with the caveat that she cannot know he is the Cyborg. Delacore quite sucessfully does so in a nice bit of dialogue right at the end before Kara runs into some sort of giant space sword/man thing that is apparently part of the next crossover event called “Krypton Returns”.
While I wasn’t particularly fond of the story, I do think the cover is quite striking. One of my favorite parts of the New 52 Supergirl is it introducing me to Mahmud Asrar’s art which I’ve come to greatly appreciate and while he didn’t stay on interior art for very long, he did do quite a lot of the covers including this silhouette style cover giving the book some great shelf appeal.
The only notable ads I saw this time out were 2 ads for novels which feels like something I’ve not seen in a comic before so shout out to Steelheart by Brandon Sanderson and The Eye of Minds by James Dashner. There is also the running feature that I’ve never been particularly interested in called Channel 52. This feature was in all the New 52 comics and was a 2 page strip that served to catch readers up on the other DC titles at the time, this one talked about Wonder Woman becoming the new God of War.
Hope you enjoyed! If you’d like to check out my other Supergirl Surprise entries, you can view them here.
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