Riot Girls

Supergirl: Cosmic Adventures in the 8th Grade #1

This is a new all-ages book from DC, and it features the best version of Supergirl we’ve seen in a comic book in ages. A native of Krypton’s moon, Argo, which was transported into another dimension when Krypton exploded, Kara sneaked into a rocket to Earth in a misguided attempt to get back at her parents and didn’t expect to get trapped on Earth with no way home. But Superman decides the best thing for her is to learn to fit in on Earth, so she enrolls in a local school as bespectacled Linda Lee. Of course, it’s one disaster after another — she has no idea how things on Earth work, so she asks lots and lots of embarrassingly stupid questions. Can Supergirl escape back to her homeworld or at least find a way to communicate with her parents again?

Verdict: Thumbs up. This version of Supergirl is pure awesome, and it’s too bad she’s not the one who appears in the regular “Supergirl” comic. I love the art, I love the story, I love the humor. Go pick this one up.

Terra #3

Well, Geo-Force has been taken over by an undead necromancer named Deathcoil, and Terra has to defeat Deathcoil without also harming Geo-Force. She manages this in only a couple of pages, but Geo-Force is still left in bad shape from the possession, so Terra has to take him to her home — a world deep, deep underground called Strata, populated by an advanced race of kinda-sorta squids. And it turns out that Terra, despite her outwardly human appearance, is also one of the Stratans. Gifted at birth with earth-moving powers, she was chosen to live aboveground among humans as a super-ambassador of sorts. Meanwhile, Richard, the engineer-geologist who got turned into a living diamond, takes his girlfriend to see the mystical underground pool where he got his powers. Wanting abilities like his, she jumps into the pool… and of course, it doesn’t turn out the way she hoped. When an angry Richard shows up in Strata looking for revenge, can Terra and Geo-Force handle him?

Verdict: Thumbs up. Wow oh wow, Amanda Conner’s art on this is sooooo cool. And yeah, we gotta give props to Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti for the excellent story, too, as well as Paul Mounts’ coloring, which is just plain dandy.