Catch more from How It Should Have Ended on YouTube
For the record I don’t hate the song. Maybe I miss the monotony everyone else hears because I don’t get out much these days and have my own music playlist, which I think does include that song. Fair warning.
I’m not going to tell you that Supergirl is one of my top superheroes, but I do really like her when done right. Kara Zor-El, last survivor of a chunk of Krypton that flew off into space and gave science the finger until science pushed back by turning the place into Kryptonite clearly has a tragic history. In a couple of other versions, Argo City or something similar survives in a pocket dimension or something, and Kara has to get home. There’s also the “Matrix” Supergirl, a protoplasmic being created in a pocket dimension post-Crisis On Infinite Earths, when DC decided messing with their “no multiverse” change was less objectionable than not messing with their “no Kryptonians except Kal-El” rule, which might have been the wrong choice, but she certainly has her fans and I like what little I saw of her…until her story went into this weird twist involving angels, demons, a suicidal girl who was part of a two-person cult, and someone who may or may not be God because they really don’t care about Biblical accuracy in the Big Two anymore. There’s a reason I dropped that title pretty early.
One of the defenses I see for the James Gunn version of Kara, and make no mistake that Gunn is seriously influencing this despite not being the screenwriter or director but is promoting the hell out of…himself again mostly, and using Tom King’s Woman Of Tomorrow comic is that this version of Kara, born of the DC plague that is the New 52, is finally addressing watching her people die. The pain has clearly gotten to her and the only direction you can take her is a broken, self-destructive, angry girl who needs to learn to be better. To quote Colonel Potter from M*A*S*H, horse hockey.
The Kara Zor-El I knew pre-Crisis and the original Matrix version of Supergirl both suffered loss. They were also good, caring people who attached themselves to something familiar like family or the alternate universe version of her creator. As I wrote recently, Supergirl and Captain “Shazam” Marvel were seriously altered in the New 52 and that’s the version Tom King turned into someone who shunned her family in favor of going off to get drunk on an alien planet with a lower drinking age in his Supergirl: Woman Of Tomorrow miniseries. King is notorious for “breaking the toys”, making Mister Miracle suicidal, anti-drug hero The Protector into an addict to deal with the stress of his mission in a story where a freaked out Wally West kills a bunch of people at a superhero therapy retreat accidentally then has to die to rectify the situation and create an alternate timeline counterpart, and having Bane trick Catwoman into leaving Batman at the altar because he “needs his pain”, which is clearly just Bane ruining Bruce’s life again. (Bane is the TRUE master of “prep time”.) That’s not even all of it, but this isn’t about King, it’s about his Supergirl story and why I reject the idea that adding trauma to Supergirl’s backstory means making her a self-destructive, rage-filled party bitch.
First, let me show you the trailer.
And this is being distributed by Angel Studios, who I thought would know better given their previous original productions. If you don’t understand the problem, the Critical Drinker (who as you’ll recall swears) explains everything.
Understand that I’m a big “Weird Al” Yankovic fan. There are easily bigger fans, but I do enjoy his parodies and even his original songs that parody song styles. “One More Minute” is one of my favorite Weird Al songs, and it’s about all the personal mutilation he’d rather do to himself than supposedly spend time with his new ex. Being a dark comedy song doesn’t bother me.
Being a dark Christmas song, however, will.
And it’s not parody that bothers me. Just this week I added an Irish drinking song about not giving Guinness to a reindeer to warm them up, or at least Santa’s magic flying reindeer that can talk. You’ll find other parodies in my “BW Yule Log” playlist. I can allow for a bit of silliness. This is supposed to be as much about having fun as honoring our Savior’s birth.
It’s just something about Al’s two Christmas songs, “Christmas At Ground Zero” and especially “The Night Santa Went Crazy” where the accordion legend and I have to part ways. In the continued spirit of “don’t get me wrong”, I’m not even saying you are a bad person if you make it part of your Christmas music playlist. Nothing wrong with the songs and I don’t think Al is trying to attack the holiday or the Christ child or anything extreme like that. It’s just for me, while amusing on their own, they don’t really put me in a festive spirit because of how dark they are. Let’s go over them and I’ll explain.
Our episode novelisation continues. Last time our villain trapped the Doctor, Ian, and the TARDIS in a cave and seemingly killed Barbara. It’s not a spoiler to say they survived of course.
So where’s the drama if we know they make it out? Well, if this was your first read and you never saw the episode, it’s like prequel and flashback stories: learning HOW they survived. If the story is interesting enough, you’ll watch/read it again with a new perspective and maybe catch things you missed the first time. If you’re like me and finally saw the two episodes long after reading the book it’s getting to compare the two, while seeing if the book is still an interesting read on its own apart from the episode, and vice versa. It depends on when you came into either version. A good story shouldn’t be boring just because you know they’re going to survive. Of course they’re going to survive (provided the actor is staying). They’re a main character. It’s how they survive that brings us back each story.
With that, it’s time to check in on our new main character, and see if she can save one of the current ones.
The Clutter Reports (my other site) Atop The Fourth Wall Crisis On Earth Prime Lean Into Artcast Bully Says “Comics Oughta Be Fun” Siskoid’s Blog of Geekery
Cartoon Hero’s Lair SF Debris Four Million Years Later
BW Media Spotlight 