#like! the whole point is that Batman is the audience and the audience isn't laughing

[bombusbombus]

"batman is the perfect foil to the joker because he never laughs" is soooooo much less interesting and dynamic than "batman laughs all the time, the joker just isn't funny"

[pluckyredhead]

What did Tom King do to Kara?

you don't like woman of tomorrow? thats interesting, from what i can tell that seems to be one of king's least uncontroversial DC works and gets unanimous praise from the fandom + comic readers in general (not that i've read it myself, just from what i've seen)

Combining these two related asks!

I want to start out by saying that ALL of my problems are with the writing - Bilquis Evely's art is breathtaking and I wish it was being used to tell a story that deserves it.

I have two problems with Woman of Tomorrow:

King does the same thing to her that he has done with literally every other character, which is to cherrypick their history to tell the bleakest, most nihilistic, least heroic story possible. It's not super noticeable with Batman because Bruce is kind of always in that zone, but it's very obvious with characters like Wally West (Heroes in Crisis: Therapy Is Bad and Will Kill You), the JLI in Human Target, and Kara. His Kara is a depressed, foulmouthed, murderous drunk who spends the entire book suffering physical and mental torments. I am just so exhausted by the lack of creativity. Dude is a one trick pony and I don't understand why this isn't more widely recognized. (Oh wait, I do, it's because pessimism is so often mistaken for genius, and also he loves a nine panel grid which too many people think immediately makes a comic Deep (TM) instead of just copying Watchmen.)

THE STORY ISN'T EVEN ABOUT HER!!! The main character is Ruthye, the alien girl who hires Supergirl to avenge the death of her father. Ruthye narrates the book. Ruthye drives the plot. Ruthye has the emotional arc. Kara could be replaced by any Super or other strong alien - J'onn, Sodam Yat, fucking LOBO - and the story would be exactly the same. (Because it would be True Grit. It's literally just True Grit But Supergirl Is There.)

Now, there's a place for bleak and even completely pessimistic, nihilistic stories - but Supergirl ain't fucking it. Supergirl was created to give little girls a heroine to look up to who had all the powers of Superman. She is aspirational and inspirational. She is joy.

Woman of Tomorrow is aggressively Not For Little Girls. To me, it radiates a deep contempt for the idea of Supergirl as a happy, kid-friendly character. It drags her through the mud on purpose, and then looks at you like it's making a point, but the point is just "mud exists." Yeah, Tom, I know. WE ALL KNOW.

(In general, King seems to really hate the idea of "nice" girls - look at what he did to Tora in Human Target. There's an issue of WoT that flashes back to Kara's origin and the destruction of Krypton - except it goes all the way back to the Silver Age, which is a generally bright and happy era, and pulls directly from that version of events while also making it as bleak as possible. Like, at one point Kara finds a dead baby on the sidewalk. HE PUT A DEAD BABY IN THE SILVER AGE. HE IGNORED THE FACT THAT THIS ORIGIN IS FOUR REBOOTS OUT OF DATE IN ORDER TO PUT A DEAD BABY IN THE SILVER AGE.)

I wouldn't be nearly as angry about this book if it wasn't capping off 20 years of DC treating Kara like shit, but since she returned in 2003, they have had her try to murder Clark, had her sexually preyed on by Darkseid, implied an incestuous relationship with her father, had her be abused, made her a blood-vomit-spewing Red Lantern (an arc I actually liked because Guy Gardner as Kara's Space Dad has my whole heart, but it's part and parcel of Angry Violent Sexy Kara), had her infected by the fucking Batman Who Laughs, and more. And that's when they even bother to publish her! They refused to give her a 60th anniversary special in 2019 because "she has a TV show," even though Two-Face got a 75th anniversary special a couple years before. Fucking Two-Face!!! Kara didn't even have a regular comic for much of the run of her show, because why court an audience of millions when so many of them are icky women?

Grant Morrison said it recently and said it best (they were talking about "Superman as fascist," but I think it applies to this too):

"Why, I say, oh why, is it so hard to simply serve the concept and write the adventures of a smart, creative and kind-hearted teenage girl with superpowers?

[...]

"To undermine the fundamental appeal of superheroes like Superman and Supergirl by re-casting them as anti-heroes at best or outright monsters - dragging imaginary childhood paragons off their pedestals to reinforce a fairly facile point about the tendency of real world heroes to exhibit feet of clay, struck me and strikes me still as imaginatively lazy.

"Using kids’ adventure heroes to make hackneyed observations about typical human behaviour that does not in fact apply to made up comic book characters strikes me as – I don’t know - whimsical? Dilettantish? A squandering of energy and creativity?"

Supergirl isn't for the edgelords of the world. She isn't a tool for reiterating, yet again, that life is pointless and full of pain. She is intended to inspire little girls, and anyone who doesn't understand that has no business writing her.