Thursday, May 18, 2006

The final Loebotomy/Cir-El's Last Stand

I stopped commenting on Jeph Loeb's work in Superman/Batman some months ago. Time was he could be at least relied on to do something to fire me up with a good rant, but the final storyline of the series was so lame and so much one more dip into his tired old bag of tricks that there was nothing of interest to say. I hadn't even looked at the last couple of issues.

And then I heard he had brought back Cir-El. My delight at the prospect of seeing the lost Supergirl appear in a DC comic, even just for a cameo, was tempered by a degree of anger toward big Jeph. In all the Supergirl stories he had written to date, any mention of Cir-El and Linda was significantly absent, even where it beggered belief that someone among those present never brought up any previous wearers of the cape.

So why now? Especially given that even though neither even appeared for two panels in Infinite Crisis so that they could get their heads ripped off or something, the word has come down from on high that neither are now in continuity.

Why? Because Jeph wanted to fill his last big Bats/Supes story with all the possible versions of his main characters as he could think of, and that included all the available Supergirls.

In fact Cir-El and Linda get three lines apiece (one each of which is "Ouch"), no characterisation or even explanation of how they got there or where they came from. But then given the characterisation of what appears to be some kind of moronic analogue of silver-age Supergirl from Earth-Stupid, I don't really mind so much.

Oh, and one last thing. I know you had a lot of them to stuff into these issues, McGuinness, but if you are going to do fan favourite cameos, you might take the trouble to get the costumes correct.

And that's my last bit of bile for Jeph Loeb. He's off to ruin some comics I don't read so I'll leave it to the Marvel fans to take up the venom.

2 comments:

Marc Burkhardt said...

I don't understand why Silver-Age Kara is portrayed as an airhead. Modern writers don't know how to deal with "nice" unless they make fun of it, apparently.

The same thing happens to the Marvel Family.

Anonymous said...

Unfortunately, I figured such would happen with all the "Supergirls". Once you bring 'em all in, you have to shaft them all so the "one true" Supergirl can BE the "one true" Supergirl. Oh, except for Power Girl, but she's "different enough".

And now, after all has been said and done in the "Crisis" and 52, who knows if Matrix/Linda and Cir-El existed to begin with? Yes, removing them takes away the "crap" stories DC ed wants to get rid of, but it leaves holes.

And it's not very fair to their fans. But it seems 'fair' doesn't matter much these days (if it ever did to begin with?).

"Nice" girls being portrayed as complete airheads isn't much of a new thing. SA-Kara, Mary Marvel, Bat-Girl/Flamebird..there's probably more I can name, but they aren't coming to mind.