In 2021, DC began a partnership with the webcomic publishing site Webtoon. Their first foray into the Webtoon site was a series that is still ongoing, Batman Wayne Family Adventures. After the success of the series, in 2022 DC would launch 3 additional series; Vixen: NYC, Zatanna and the Ripper, and finally Redhood: Outlaws. All these series have their own continuity, although they do share the majority of their backstory with Earth-0 including origins and general character traits. The focus of today’s entry is on the 4th Webtoon (hence the designation W-4) Red Hood: Outlaws. This series ran for 56 issues from 2022-2023 and would follow Red Hood (Jason Todd) and his band of mercenaries Artemis and Bizarro. This Webtoon has a similar vibe and character line-up to the similarly named print comic from 2016 Red Hood and the Outlaws which was in turn the continuation of the earlier series of the same name that started in 2011. There is nothing truly groundbreaking in the story and it mostly follows a trio of anti-heroes doing general anti-hero things.
Supergirl does (technically) show up in this series, although only briefly in episodes 39 and 49. Both appearances are just of a framed picture that Artemis walks past while she is staying at a women’s only retreat called Valhalla which later turns out to be a bad time. Supergirl herself doesn’t appear aside from these 2 images and nothing is mentioned of the girl of steel. As I mentioned before, however, since this universe is fairly similar to Earth-0 in most regard, we can assume this Supergirl’s origin is the same as her Earth-0 counterpart. The coloring of Supergirl’s costume does change slightly from her first to second appearance, at first her costume is fairly standard blue dress with red and yellow S-symbol, but the second go around has the symbol in black and red and a red skirt instead of blue in a look similar to what Superman would adopt after the Our World’s at War storyline. Because the 2nd costume had a bit more originality to it I chose to use that as the basis for my drawing.
As with all my Supergirl in the Multiverse posts, this is my own artwork. Supergirl is in the center of the image stopping a large green semi-truck. The front end of the truck, as well as the asphalt under her is crumbling. The image is slightly obscured by a stop sign in the fore-ground. The top right has Supergirl’s S-symbol with a “W-4” on it.
A few months ago, as reading through various Supergirl stories, I noticed something quite interesting. Both Action Comics #376 and Superman #376 somewhat serve as the end point of an era of Supergirl stories and it feels fascinating to me that both issues had the same number. There is a similar thing with Amazing Spider-Man #252 being the first appearance of the black Spidey suit and Action 252 being Supergirl’s first appearance. I’ll be taking a look at the stories themselves, as well as how they serve as stepping stones in the girl of steel’s career.
Action Comics #376 (as well as #375 that we’ll be looking at in conjunction) was written by Leo Dorfman, with art by Kurt Schaffenberger, and lettering by Ben Oda. This 2-part story served as Supergirl’s final 2 issues as regular back up feature in Action Comics which she had stayed at for over a decade. The story is titled “The Hated Girl of Steel” which when I first realized this was the title of Supergirl’s last Action Comics backup, I figured it would be a story where Supergirl and her alias Linda Danvers, would be kicked out of Stanhope or something to that effect. So possibly my invented scenario before reading the story played into a bit of my expectations of the story and my thoughts after reading it, but let’s get into it.
I won’t be covering any of the lead stories in any of these comics because none of them relate to Supergirl in any way, so we’ll get right into the backup feature “The Woman Who Hated Supergirl” . This story opens with Linda babysitting the son of one of her Stanhope College professors when Professor Alexander exclaims that she just discovered a red nebula shaped like a hand. Dr. Alexander wants to take a closer look at the nebula in hopes of attending the dedication of the new World Science Center. Soon enough Linda (as Supergirl) is taking her professor across the cosmos in a kitted out bubble observatory and the pair soon make it to the hand nebula.
Out of nowhere, a bright flash of light overcomes the Professor. While everything seems okay after an initial shock, Supergirl still decides to quickly return to earth where Marla Alexander suddenly starts acting odd. She is quickly acknowleged and accepted as a brilliant scientist but begins acting rude and standoffish where before she had been quite friendly. She refuses to make a speech about her nebula findings, she smashes a solar system model, and she even sends her son off to a boarding school. All of this fury seems to be targeted specifically towards Supergirl, hence the title of the story being “The Woman who Hated Supergirl”. It is when Dr. Alexander is in the process of losing her teaching position where Supergirl puts the pieces together. Marla has become blind after her encounter with the red nebula and instead of addressing her new disability she has instead lashed out at everyone around her, and has taken up a personal vendetta against Supergirl.
We now get into #376 proper and the story “The Hated Girl of Steel”. The story wastes no time getting to the title of the book and we quickly see all of Stanhope turned on their former hero. This hatred from the student body is used as a framing device to recap the events of the former issue before we then cut to Supergirl’s vain attempt to restore Marla’s vision with a doctor working in a remote jungle. After this Marla rejects Supergirl’s offer to attend her at the World Science Center and instead goes by herself with a seeing eye dog.
I gotta say this story is not particularly kind to blind people and treats Dr. Alexander’s blindness almost as a fate worse than death in what I can only assume is a sign of the times but it really doesn’t read great. Anyway, the science center is apparently an alien space ship and all the world’s greatest scientists are rocketed away to an alien planet where the aliens cure Marla’s blindness and then attempt to hook up all the scientists to a Brain-Drain machine that would’ve drained the scientist’s brains and rendered them basically robots had it not been for Supergirl bursting onto the scene.
We are informed that the night prior, Supergirl realized that the Science Center was a rocket in disguise and decided to take on a disguise herself. That of Dr. Marla Alexander, so that she could follow the rocket to where it was headed and stop whatever threat was on the other side. The issue ends with Supergirl sending the aliens away with a wrecked brain drain machine, curing Marla’s blindness for real this time, and no mention at all of Supergirl no longer being in this comic.
As I mentioned before, I think I went into this book with unrealistic expectations for what this book would be. All in all, this is a standard Dorfman Supergirl backup story in Action Comics and it tells a decent story. I think my more modern sensibilities expected something more akin to a backdoor pilot sort of story that would help set up the maid of might’s new status quo. That is of course silly because her status quo doesn’t really change for a couple more years and she continues to just be a student at Stanhope until about halfway through her run in Adventure Comics. What we did get however was some dialogue from the Editor in the letters pages. Issue 375 doesn’t directly mention Supergirl jumping ship to Adventure, but there are a couple letter responses where the Editor almost slips up and breaks the news a month early that I thought was quite comical. While my (current) copy of 376 is tragically missing the letters page, Dr Anj (fellow Supergirl blogger) was kind enough to share a scan of the page that I’ve included above. You can see the first response (to Allan Latawiec) explains to the readers where Supergirl is going and who is taking their place.
Hoping forward about 12 years, to Superman #376 we get a 6 page backup story simply titled “Supergirl”. Written by Paul Kupperberg, with Carmine Infantino pencils, Bob Oksner inks, Todd Klein letters, and Ziuko coloring, this story falls much more in line with what I wanted from the Action Comics story, and has a stellar creative team that really presents a compelling story. The story opens in New York with Linda Danvers walking out of her starring role in the soap opera “Sacred Hearts” in a move that seems great for Linda but a rough time for the producers of the show.
Linda, now dressed as Supergirl, flies off to go find her cousin to have a talk, stop a tornado, and let him know about her new base of operations. The pair make a great team and seem to have a certain joy in working together and stopping a natural disaster. Clark does seem to be a bit hesitant to accept his cousin’s decision, noting his own work/life balance, but eventually he comes around noting that it’s hard to believe how much she’s grown since the 15 year-old girl that crash landed all those years ago. We find out that Linda plans to take all the money she made from her television career and re-invest it into returning to college in Chicago.
This is a great set-up to Supergirl’s new status quo and it’s baffling to me that it wasn’t included as part of the Daring New Adventures of Supergirl trades that were released a few years back (also not included on the DC Universe app?!?), but I’m sure if a DC Finest collection of this era of Supergirl were to release it would be included and I will be buying it. My only real problem with this story is that it’s part of the Superman comic, which I don’t think Supergirl was a regular feature in. I feel like this story would’ve made more sense in the Superman Family title which had issue 222 releasing the same month and would’ve made more sense to pivot subscribers of that series (that was ending) to a new series (just beginning) but maybe they thought the Superman title would have a wider audience and thus a wider reach. DC periodically will do similar previews to this for their new #1 issues although in general these are just the first few pages of the new story, but I think there’s a certain charm to the way this story is presented as a totally original step between status quos that I’ve not really seen elsewhere.
While there’s nothing tying these stories together more than mere coincidence and even my reasoning for saying they’re similar is thin to say the least, I still had a good time looking at them. Also I have to once again thank Dr. Anj who has been working on his own Supergirl blog Comic Box Commentary for much longer than I have and I urge you all to check it out for some really great Supergirl content, (he even covered this same backup from Superman #376!)
In a surprising sequence of events, the knowledge of this universe to inclusion into Supergirl in the Multiverse was quite accelerated. For those unaware, this project is fairly well planned in advance and often does not get changed from my initial plans. Season 1 of Supergirl in the Multiverse was clearly defined by the Multiversity Guidebook and somewhere near the end of season 1, I publicly showed my list for the entirety of what universes would be showing up in season 2. However, Earth-332 was not on my radar at all until I was working my way through Supergirl in the Silver Age Omnibus Volume 2 a few months back and instantly fell in love with the story told in Action Comics 332 and 333. So much so I nearly immediately wrote a blog post about it (How Superwoman trained Superboy) and this was just 2 months ago. So if I’m so ahead of my game and have my lists planned out months ahead of time how did it happen that I was able to slot Earth-332 in in the middle of an ongoing year? The short answer is that when I made my list I only accounted for 3 July entries not 4 (an error that can be seen in my list screenshots that I showed in my Season 1 Recap) and when realizing that I had a free week I immediately filled it with one of my new favorites.
I did cover the stories that this universe includes in the aforementioned How Superwoman trained Superboy post, so please check out that post for a more thorough dive into the world. To briefly recap however, this universe explored a universe where Kara Zor-El and Kal-El switched places. Kara was the baby born on Krypton, and rocketed away soon after her birth and moment’s before the planet’s destruction. Whereas Kal was born later on the miraculously saved Argo City that survived the destruction of Krypton by Jor-El’s invention of a protective bubble over the city. In addition to that change, it was also not just Kara that rocketed away when the planet exploded, but the whole Zor-El family who made it to earth and integrated into a small farming town called Smallville as the Zorelles. Carole would grow up to become the hero Superwoman, while working as a private investigator with Jimmy Olsen as her day job. She would later encounter a rocket that originated from the city of Argo containing her cousin Kal-El, who Carole would place in Midvale Orphanage and he would become Superwoman’s secret weapon, Superboy.
As with all my Supergirl in the Multiverse posts, this is my own artwork. Carole Zorelle is walking out the door of her Private investigation practice while ripping her shirt open to reveal she is Superwoman. The door behind her reads “Private Investigators Carole Zorelle James Olsen”. The top right corner has a motif of Superwoman’s S symbol with a 332 on it.
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.
Long term fans of this series might be surprised by the additional Earth-33 entry here as there was also an Earth-33 last August. To most fans, Earth-33 represents the “Real-World”, although that only came to prominence in the New 52 and before the events of Flashpoint there was a different Earth-33. This version only had a couple appearances in the backup feature in Countdown to Adventure and we don’t get much of a look at this universe while Forerunner is there but it does seem to have a magical vibe to it similar to the New-52 Earth-13.
What we do get to see in our brief look at the world, is a techno-magical city with different factions based on the classic Earth-0 heroes like the Star faction, home to sorcerers like Starman and Stargirl, Bat-Mage being the prominent figure of the Bat faction, and of course the Super-faction which is home to Kal El master of Kryptonian Magic. These heroes, along with others, form the League of Shamans and their ranks seem to expand past their core members, we see at least 2 Superman (or Superboy) figures as well as what is generally referred to as Supergirl. While Kal El is named here and he does mention “Kryptonian Magic” it is uncertain Supergirl’s relation to him and whether or not they are from another planet called Krypton or if “Kryptonian Magic” just refers to a certain type of magic of Terran origin.
As with all my Supergirl in the Multiverse posts, this is my own artwork. Supergirl of Earth-33 is stood in the foreground and her outstretched right hand is firing off blue Kryptonian symbols. Behind her is the magical city shown in the Earth-33 appearance.
