For the past seven issues of Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow readers have been on a journey that, despite the title bearing Supergirl’s name has been less about Kara Zor-El and more about her companion for the journey, a girl named Ruthye who has accompanied Supergirl on a long, challenging space western hunting across a distant galaxy in pursuit of Krem, the man who murdered Ruthye’s father. From the beginning, the series had some notable strengths, including the brilliant art by Bilquis Evely and exquisite colors from Matheus Lopes, but some narrative flaws in Tom King’s work and with Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow #8 that same balance persists, just wrapped in a final chapter that leaves readers with more questions than answers.
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The issue picks up right where #7 left off with Supergirl battling the brigands who came to rescue Krem—a fight that is going very poorly for Supergirl—and Ruthye is preparing to seize the opportunity to kill Krem. As has been the case throughout this series, though we are seeing Supergirl battle and hearing, through Ruthye, tales of Supergirl’s life and experiences, this story is fundamentally Ruthye’s and that is evident here. Much of the issue is spent with Ruthye monologuing about killing Krem or narrating about the fight that ensues when she decides to enter into a “fair” fight with him before bringing about his end. This is intercut with images from Supergirl’s battle above where she’s aided by Comet, and it all comes together in a climactic moment where Supergirl arrives on the beach as Ruthye is preparing—and failing to take—her final strike.
What happens next feels very anticlimactic in a sense. The purpose of the entire adventure is revealed to have been one long lesson for Ruthye, one manipulated by Supergirl because it was the only way she could keep the younger woman in check in the hope of teaching her a life lesson. While that sounds all well and good, instead of having Ruthye learning the lesson being the crux of things, we see Supergirl prepared to go right on ahead and kill before herself ending up emotionally broken as this chapter of the tale ends. (I’m not going to talk much about the strange, almost-afterthought treatment of Krypto’s predicament from the first issue and the rather tacked on bit about Comet; both are problematic but are more awkward add-ons than genuine issues.)
It’s Supergirl’s sort of breakdown that, for me, brings down any remaining hope I had that we would get a genuine story of growth about this heroine. As was a problem for me in the first issue, King remains beholden to the idea of Kara as an angry, suffering person despite the abundance of recent stories depicting character growth. Here, in this final issue, Kara is more sad and suffering and defeated by her trauma, perhaps exhausted even to the point that it truly feels that her trauma is being exploited. There’s also the issue that everything we’ve read in the series seems to be called into question in the final pages when it’s revealed that Ruthye is something of an unreliable narrator as she speaks of Krem’s ultimate fate in the distant future—and how his fate is depicted leaves me with a great many questions as to what sort of story was really being told.
Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, when taken as a whole, is an ambitious comics story with some genuinely shining moments and even this final issue isn’t without merits. Evely’s work is masterful and there are some bits of narration and dialogue that do make one meditate upon the nature of justice. But after the issue is closed and the story is told, Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow #8 ultimately feels unfinished. In the end, Ruthye is unchanged, it’s not clear what the genuine tale of things was, and while King did manage to build a plane while flying it, the landing still leaves much to be desired.
Published by DC Comics
On February 15, 2022
Written by Tom King
Art by Bilquis Evely
Colors by Matheus Lopes
Letters by Clayton Cowles
Cover by Bilquis Evely and Matheus Lopes
