Sunday 3 August 2014

Supergirl #2 - The Death of a City.

Supergirl #2, Death of a City
Crikey! Has it really been a week since I reviewed issue #1 of the maid of might's very own 1970s comic?

That can only mean one thing.

I have to review issue #2!

And I will!

Discovering that her university professor Allan is on the verge of death just as he's about to make a breakthrough in the treatment of sickle cell anaemia, Supergirl takes him into the bottled city of Kandor, in the hope that, there, she can find a cure for whatever it is that's afflicting him.

Inevitably, not all goes to plan and it's not long before the pair find themselves kidnapped by a giant bird.

Still, our heroine is never one to give up and it's not much longer than that before she's located the coffin of a Kandorian scientist who conveniently has the cure for all known ailments, clutched in his dead hands.

Supergirl #2, Desert of Burning Hands
Sadly, it's only after she's administered Allan with the cure for everything that Supergirl realises it tends to make its recipient grow at an alarming rate.

Thus it is that he's now growing uncontrollably, is too big to get out of the bottle and is in imminent danger of crushing the entire city to death.

Supergirl #2, Supergirl inflates KandorThat's when Supergirl comes up with a solution that has to be one of the stupidest that even she's ever contrived, as, having exited it, she super-heats the bottle to make it malleable and then inflates it with her super-breath, so she can pull Alan out of it before it's too late.

Now, I don't like to poke holes in things but how on Earth do the people of Kandor possibly survive this mega-exposure to furnace-like heat and the massive pressure of her super-breath?

Supergirl #2, giant bird
That's, of course, assuming that they do survive.

In fact, we never see them again from that point on in the story. So perhaps they don't survive. Perhaps Supergirl's just killed the lot of them and we're being spared the distressing truth by writer Cary Bates and penciller Art Saaf.

The truth is that, Supergirl's homicidal methodology aside, it's a slight tale. You can't help feeling the main strip's suffering from the fact it's having to share the comic with a Zatanna back-up tale, meaning space constraints are forcing the main story to be on the flimsy side.

Oh well, we do at least get to see Supergirl fighting giant octopuses - and what more could a man or woman want in life?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

So Supergirl Sunday is now a weekly feature? Nice one, Steve.

Haven't read this one, but a slight story wouldn't put me off much; plot and stuff like that isn't really what makes 70s Supergirl comics enjoyable. Ok, its not the Fourth World but hey - theres trees that look like hands.
For some reason, as a kid I was always intrigued by the bottled city of Kandor.... if its in the story, that's enough to justify it for me.

Normally, I'd suggest anyone worried about plausibility or logic probably shouldn't be reading Supergirl in the first place, but yeah - immolating the population of Kandor is a ridiculous idea too far....

-sean

Anonymous said...

When you name the issue/story The Death Of A City and then try to be ambiguous about what happened to it.......well, someone isn't paying attention.

And you do know how you make a super heated bottle expand? You just put your lips together and blow!!!

The Prowler (keeping it real since 1985, well, with a break from 89-93 and then again from 99-04).