I’ve been slowly adding Matrix-era issues for download to Comicbooks: Supergirl/Matrix, and I’m now complete. I kept getting distracted by reading them =) The issues for download come to about 500 MB in total.
After reading everything up to the New Titans issues, which I just couldn’t get into, I’ve written up a brand new introduction detailing my thoughts. I was surprised at how much I enjoyed many of the post-Crisis Superman stories, when I read them for Superman and not for Supergirl (there are some real stinkers tho: Superman: Exile, aside from the Matrix storyline, Trial of Superman, Zero Hour, the Blaze-Satanus War, and that wonky vampire storyline). DC’s treatment of her as Matrix is pretty poor overall. She’s a cypher, a dehumanized male fantasy. There are glimmers of potential, but the writers don’t see much past the surface; at the same time the artists tended to render her as a sex object. My favorite storyline was the Reign of the Supermen/Return of Superman, which was really quite good for the most part. Just not for a Supergirl fan! DC managed to develop a number of very interesting new male characters in this storyline. Unfortunately that makes all the more obvious the way they relegated Supergirl to a useless and gender-cliched bit part. One would expect Supergirl to have had a huge part to play while Superman was dead; logically, she should have replaced him. But no, DC just couldn’t see a woman in that position, so they came up with a stupid plot device to artifically keep her out of 99% of the action so they could focus on four Supermen. The scenes with Supergirl and Lex Luthor II were painful to watch, exploitive and insulting to me as a woman. It was a terrible idea to begin with, and they played it out far too long. Every scene with Supergirl and Luthor just screams “male gaze!” and the one-sided focus on the frizzy-haired, poofy-shirted Luthor’s obsession with constraining Supergirl is detrimental to both of them as characters. It would have been a better story with neither of them around.
The turnaround in Supergirl’s portrayal in Peter David’s short story in SHOWCASE ’96 #8 is startling: she exhibits more depth in those ten pages than she did in all her other appearances, excepting perhaps her self-titled miniseries. All it took was a good writer who saw Supergirl as a person foremost, not a male fantasy.
i loved Showcase 96 #8
great story and great artwork. :D
it was a cool prelude to PAD’s Supergirl series.
I just loved your introduction. Thank you, because it was you that introduced me to feminism in comic books, which further led me to learn about gender portrayal in media and in life.
Wow, really? Thank you, I’m flattered!