Welcome to Loneliness & Cheeseburgers Presents: Supergirl (Vol. 6), Issue #8 – “Girl in the World”! In the previous storyline, Kara Zor-El crashes to Earth and she doesn’t know why AND she kicks Superman’s butt AND some asshole named Simon Tycho abducts her and runs experiments on her AND she learns her home planet was destroyed AND a Worldkiller named Reign tries to recruit her BUT that doesn’t work SO they fight.

Simon Tycho is now a messed-up CPR dummy, but he was able to attain a drop of Kara’s blood, which he will now use to run some more nefarious experiments. THIS is what I’m interested in, but it hasn’t been addressed yet. I hope we see more of this now.

Onward!

Supergirl (Vol. 6), Issue #8 [June, 2012]
Written by: Michael Green & Mike Johnson
“Girl in the World”

SCREAM OF THE SILVER BANSHEE! That sounds like a problem waiting to happen. I hope Supergirl doesn’t get absorbed by some crazy skeleton dude or something, and… OH SHIT, LOOK OUT!

Anyway… “I did it. I beat the Worldkillers. For now, anyway. I fought them off. I saved this city. I saved the planet. And now the authorities of this world are pointing their weapons in my face.”

You should be happy that that’s all they’re pointing in your face, sweetheart. She laments her position. She didn’t mean to cause trouble! She didn’t mean to eat all the pizza rolls! But here we are, and there’s no going back. She’s too tired to keep fighting. Even under the marvelous yellow sun where her blood turns into Hawaiian Punch, she’s too tired to keep fighting.

The military is there among the ruins of the city to make sure that she doesn’t, in fact, keep fighting. “Stand down, miss! We are taking you into custody!” a particularly boring-looking military man shouts. Supergirl tries to explain herself, but she only speaks Space Russian and no one can understand a goddamn thing she says. She lifts up her hands in the universal symbol for “I ain’t got no gun”, but it’s misinterpreted as “she’s gonna kill us with her energy blasts! Shoot the fuck out of her!”

She’s about to die, but the young Irish woman with the short white hair yells at the military. Supergirl just saved everyone, dumbasses. She blocks Supergirl from the men and assures her, in Kryptonian, much to Supergirl’s surprise, that’s she’ll be safe. The rather boring-looking military guy is like “get away from there, you harpy” and the white-haired woman is like “fuck you”.

No, I’m Mork from Ork. Nanu nanu, bitches.

Now the military wants to take both of them into custody, and it ain’t looking good. Supergirl decides that it’s no longer a good idea to hang around, and starts lifting up into the air with White-Haired Girl in tow. “LOOK OUT!” screams the military guy. “SHE’S MOVING! SHE’S COMING AT US!”

Chaos erupts. Bullets hit Supergirl and bounce off her like… bullets bouncing off a… uh… giant inflatable clown. After holding their fire, Supergirl’s eyes start glowing red hot. After screaming “Leave me alone!”, she rockets into the air holding the woman at 50,000 mph. She’s having a great time flying in the sky! Supergirl wonders what the fuck she’s going to do with her.

Wisely, the woman tells Supergirl that the whole city will be after her. As if we didn’t just experience that shit anyway. They rest on a skyscraper rooftop and start getting to know one another. The woman, after all, did put herself between Supergirl and the military. Can she be trusted? Or is she a skank?

“My name’s Siobhan,” the woman says in Kryptonian. “Shiobhan Smythe. Just arrived from Dublin a few months ago. Yer basic poor wee immigrant looking to start a new life for herself!”

She then explains that she can speak Kryptonian because… it’s like a super-power. She just needs to hear a few words of any language and she can start speaking it like a native! Mandarin, Icelandic, Klingon, Pig Latin, it’s all on the table, baby! And not even just human languages. She demonstrates by speaking to a small group of gathering pigeons, who are goaded to land on both of their waiting index fingers. Far out, man. I love it when diseased birds touch me.

And that one thinks you look like Maria Bamford!

Supergirl is from another planet, which is news to Siobhan. Aliens exist! That’s nuts! Oh yeah, that planet she’s from? It blew up something fierce. Exploded all over town. That’s sad, and now Supergirl is sad. And she wants to leave even Siobhan insists that Supergirl stay with her.

But then a dang helicopter has tracked them both down. “STAY WHERE YOU ARE! YOU ARE UNDER ARREST! ANY ATTEMPT TO FLEE WITH BE MET WITH LETHAL FORCE!”

Well, now, this dadgum makes Supergirl so dadgum mad, it does. Her eyes start glowing red again and she catapults herself toward the copter. “Stop following me! Stop attacking me!” she hollers as she grabs the pilot right out of the vehicle and holds him 10,000 feet above the street. The dude is filling his pants with liters of diarrhea. She looks like she’s actually going to drop the dude, but Siobhan tells her to cut it out. And she does. And then Supergirl grabs Siobhan and they both fly off into the sunset while the helicopter dudes are like “!”

Supergirl doesn’t want to keep running away though. She knows they’ll all keep coming after her. Relentless. Like a Terminator. Or the Luggage from Discworld. So it’s time to find a good hidey hole. Siobhan will help! She knows every hidey hole in town, apparently. She has Supergirl fly to Queens to her apartment, the hidiest hidey hole there ever was.

Siobhan’s apartment looks like dogshit. Trash everywhere. I see underwear, discarded drink cans and food bags, books, probably toxic waste. If she had a kid it would be repossessed. That’s what happens to kids, right? The state repossesses them! Supergirl introduces herself, finally, as Kara. Siobhan thinks that’s a cool name! See, we’re hitting it off splendidly.

For one thing, our bras aren’t stored on a carpet loaded with ketchup and Miller Lite stains.

The TV has a report on Supergirl’s rampage through Manhattan. Siobhan asks if that “S” symbol on her chest means she’s related to Superman. Supergirl says it’s complicated. Siobhan thinks that’s a copout response, but moves on nonetheless. She offers her new clothes, but Supergirl wants to keep her shitty costume on. “It’s all I have left of home. Of my family.”

Whatever floats your boat, Sister. Listen, Siobhan knows what it’s like to lose her family. Her parents are fucking dead too, you know. You insensitive jerk. She’s in America to run from the pain, basically.

Supergirl notices tattoos on Siobhan’s arms. An “S” (for Siobhan) on one arm, and a “B” (for her father) on the other. Supergirl apologizes to her, but Siobhan insists that things are ok. Not every day is sad-sackin’ and dead parents! There’s hot dogs, for one thing! And pussy! Do you like pussy? TIME TO HIT THE TOWN!

Siobhan hands Supergirl a monkey backpack that she can store her costume in and carry it around. Supergirl acquiesces, then, as she gets on some of Siobhan’s clothes, asks where they’re going. Well, lady, Siobhan’s a musician and she’s got a gig!

So buckle up, buttercup. You’re going to watch Siobhan Smythe pluck her guitar and maybe make something that resembles music come out of it.

I play a mixture of polka with death metal, zydeco, children’s nursery rhymes, and Throbbing Gristle-type songs about burning flesh and eating babies.

Kara looks like a filthy hipster as they traverse the crowded streets of New York City at night. She hates the clothes. They don’t feel right. They feel… dirty…

The noise of the city is also hard on Kara’s tender Super Ears. She tries to focus only on Siobhan’s voice, and it sort of works, but fuck this all the same. Eventually, finally, they make it to the venue where everyone’s being loud and noisy and that sucks too. Everything sucks. At least Krypton is quiet right now! Ha!

Siobhan tells Kara that it’s her job to find cute boys in the crowd, even though we both know that Siobhan and Kara will be boning by Issue #10. Siobhan does a couple of mic checks and then launches into some Celtic folk shit that no one wants to hear. It’s not even Celtic punk! It blows!

But the crowd is eating it up, and Kara thinks Siobhan’s voice is one of the most beautiful things she’s ever heard. A young man in the crowd, with his stupid purple-tinted glasses and curly goatee, tries to chat Kara up but she can’t speak a lick of English. Not even “RAAAAPPPE!!”, which might prove useful.

Everything’s fine until, suddenly, the crowd gets weird.

Oh man, the humans are doing their thing again. Their weird, creepy, unhinging-jaws-to-swallow-me-whole thing.

The only other unaffected person is Siobhan, who notices the crowd starting to circle around Kara. Siobhan leaps from the stage, grabs Kara, and helps her shuffle out of there ASAP.

“So many souls… So many delicious souls…” says a creepy disembodied voice in a brown speech bubble. The creepy voice, as Siobhan points out, is from her father. He’s dead, but he’s been after her since. “I’ve been looking for you for so long, Siobhan. Come now… come to your beloved Da… come to Black Banshee!”

Black Banshee looks like second-rate Dracula. His blue visage appears in a billowing cloud of smoke. The crowd still shambles around. Siobhan herself is starting to get twisted up into a harrowing figure. Kara is like “WTF ARE YOU DOING TO MY BFF?” and blasts the visage with her laser eyes. Black Banshee calls this magic “weak”, warns her that befriending his daughter could kill her, then starts squeezing the breath out of her. Then she shimmers in blue flame, feeling a burn like never before. A real cold burn. Like when you accidentally sleep naked on a bed of dry ice.

Black Banshee lets go of his magic and drops Kara to the ground. “I look forward to tasting your sweet soul…” he says, but then he’s interrupted by another terrifying figure…

Siobhan has become the SILVER BANSHEE, and she looks like a skull face, and she’s here to kick some fatherly ass!

And this comic exhausts me.

Final Thoughts

Nice that we spend 20 pages twiddling our thumbs and then they haphazardly throw together the “oh yeah, there needs to be a bad guy” element within 2 pages.

Also, like, oh boy, the Silver Banshee vs. the Black Banshee, who’s gonna win? The answer is NOT THE AUDIENCE.