Broken Frontier

Supergirl goes undercover Never Been Kissed-style in order to help Lois Lane discover why several intelligent teenagers have disappeared. While the supporting characters shine with interesting personalities, the titular heroine’s behavior feels inconsistent.

When Supergirl arrived just in time to destroy some flying mechanical monkeys by throwing a bagel at super speed, this issue felt like it was going to dive into a quirky and fun story. However, Supergirl’s confusing exchanges kill the pacing just after it gets started. She catches the bagel and makes a joke (“Who ordered the one with everything?”), but when Lois makes a joke about bagels and coffee, Supergirl takes her seriously, implying she doesn’t understand typical humor. Given that she’s an alien teenager, that reaction would have been fine – but didn’t she just make a bagel joke of her own? Then again a few pages later Lois tries to make another joke about coffee, but Supergirl still doesn’t get it. The problem here is that DeConnick seems unsure about how clueless or insightful Supergirl ought to be about the ways humans interact. Even worse, Supergirl spends the rest of the issue as a bland Linda Lang, only asking questions in order to move the plot forward.

This issue’s art is as much a mixed bag as the dialog. ChrisCross’s work looks best when focusing on the villains: flying monkeys with glowing eyes and spiked jowls swarm the page to harass a descending cable car, and the texture of the antagonist’s green skin looks as bumpy and gross as a real life toad. With such great work put into the more abstract-looking characters, it is a shame Lois looks the most obscure of all. On the bottom of page 10, one of her eyes looks at Supergirl while the other seems to be eerily rolling back into her skull. Likewise, a few pages later her eyes are wide open as she makes funny faces, but her silly expressions do not match her dialogue, which fails to capitalize on what should have been a humorous moment.

Where the main characters are lacking, the supporting cast manages to fill the pages with flavor and style. A Van Wilder-esque student who walks around campus in his pajamas befriends Linda, and it’s not long before his smarmy poetry-reciting antics have her going back to his room in the middle of the night. As scandalous as that could be, DeConnick keeps things PG and instead uses their time together to feed the tension-inducing mystery that brought them all together. Another intriguing character is the openly gay Starman, who aides Supergirl in saving the cable car. He teases that while she might feel like an outsider, he’s the blue-red alien with a crystal sticking out of his chest. Am I the only one who thinks a more interesting comic would be Starman going to a gay bar looking like that?