Welcome to Loneliness & Cheeseburgers Presents: Supergirl (Vol. 6), Issue #12 – “Inheritance”! In the previous installment, Kara goes out on a date with Irish Tom that lasts exactly four minutes before she gets accosted and assaulted by the dude who was wearing the shapeshifting suit in Issue #10. As you can imagine, this is over before it starts.

The lesson here is that Supergirl can’t make any friends because she’s a danger to those around her. She leaves Siobhan and Tom in the dust and goes off to figure everything out alone. So we’re sort of back to square one again, resulting in a very lackluster and cliffhanger-free storyline! Gotta love it!

Supergirl (Vol. 6), Issue #12 [October, 2012]
Written by: Michael Green & Mike Johnson
“Inheritance”

Cover: “A mystery awaits at the bottom of the sea… but so does DEATH!” Looks like I’m in for another stupid fuckass suspense story that the New 52 is so good at giving me. Why is Supergirl hanging out in the ocean all of a sudden? I’m not impressed! Can’t she just eat these weird toothy eels? Sushi is underrated in the DC universe.

Where was I? Oh yes, so Kara reminisces about her father taking her to see the city Kandor when she was but a tiny little whelp of a girl. Now she sees it again under a glass dome in Superman’s hidey-hole.

“What about the people trapped inside the city?” Kara asks.

“They are still alive, but in stasis,” Superman responds. “I’m trying to find a way to free them.” OK, how about this, sir: break the fucking glass. Here, I have a hammer right here. Just do it, fucker.

No? Fine. Superman is surprised to see Kara her since Supergirl pretty much kicked his ass that one time. She believes now, probably, maybe, sure why not, that Superman is indeed her baby cousin. You know, because of time warps and exploding planets and other things I don’t remember very well anymore. Kara’s just confused, and she still doesn’t trust Superman, and woe is me and whatnot.

“They’re all pieces of the puzzle I’m still trying to solve,” Kara says sadly. “And you’re another piece of it.”

Yes, that’s very helpful. Thank you, Cillian Murphy.

Superman assures the lass that she doesn’t have to go through any of this alone. Really, honest to God, and for serious. “You can stay here in my arctic fortress,” he says as if that were at all enticing. “You’ll be safe. It’s the closest thing to a piece of Krypton that’s left now.”

Kara looks huffy. This isn’t a piece of Krypton. It’s a piece of shit. “It’s more like… a museum. A faint echo.”

Anyway, enough bellyachin’. Superman said he’d help her, so make with the helping! Superman goes to his magic hologram crystal ball and starts blah-blah-blahing about Kara travelling in a pod in statis and orbitting the yellow sun for about five years, so she got a dose of the sweet, sweet sun equal to how much Superman has been getting filtered through the atmosphere since he was a wee lad. He looks jealous since Kara got to get strong with no effort. Superman had to lift weights.

Kara surmises that someone did this on purpose. Someone wanted her to be strong when she woke up from stasis, but there’s no way to know that for sure. Oh well! Time for bed!

*intermission*

Superman did discover that, although Kara’s pod broke apart upon arrival to Earth, there is a huge chunk that has gone missing. It’s somewhere on the bottom of the ocean next to Malaysian Airlines Flight 370. It might be nothing but pod garbage, OR it might possibly have a wealth of information that answers every single question that you might have! Grab your scuba gear, sister!

Superman wants to help, but Kara is so fucking stubborn about this “doing it alone” business that she tells him to shove off. “Maybe we are family, but I don’t know that for sure, and until I do, I’ll go it alone.” After Superman tells her it’s not safe to go alone, Kara freaks the fuck out at him.

Listen, we could argue who is trying to keep who under control until the cows come home. Now listen to me and do everything I say.

Superman argues that he’s been living here for decades and knows his way around the bottom of the ocean a little bit better than she does! Kara’s ready to fight him again if he doesn’t back off, though. “Just say the word and I’ll show you,” she says placidly.

…

Superman is like “fine, whatever” and goes back to his Hamburger Helper dinner. Soon enough, Supergirl skids across the ocean wondering if she made a big mistake not getting Superman’s help. “What if he’s right? What if I just cause more destruction?” she asks herself. “So what should I do? Stay locked away in his creepy museum?”

She hovers over a spot in the ocean that has a weird, mechanical voice calling her name. Perfect! Time to hold your breath and dive down to fight the Giant Mechanical Squid of Death and Destruction or whatever awaits! Or maybe it’s coming from the chunk of space pod that’s left down there. Or maybe someone dropped a walkie-talkie back in the 1950s.

She dives to the bottom of the ocean and enters an underwater canyon. Soon enough, the weird eel things from the cover art start wrapping themselves around her, snapping and hissing and biting and lookin’ for a fracas. Supergirl stays calm, but this is bullshit so she won’t be able to stay calm forever. “It’s like every lifeform on this planet just wants to attack,” she frowns while one of the eels snaps at her cheek. They start attempting to pull her down, down down, deeper in the water until she goes “fuck this” and tears them up with eyeball fire.

She’s beginning to run out breath when another eel wraps around her neck. This is it, mama! This is the end! GULP! BLUB!

…

And then it isn’t. She wakes up on the floor of the ocean, not needing to breathe, eels all gone. Convenient! She follows the continuing sounds of the mechanical voice…

“SUPERGIRL… COME CLOSER… WE HAVE… SKEE-BALL…”

Around the bend she finds a giant underwater crystal cathedral that certainly doesn’t look a piece of pod debris. Kryptonian phrases keep echoing out of its brilliantly incandescent doorway. All like “COME ON IN! I MADE COOKIES!”

Supergirl recognizes the Kryptonian design, but decides that it’s definitely not from her pod. She ascends the crystal steps that lead to the doorway and sticks her hand through the opaque barrier. Then she walks through it. “Incredible! I could feel it passing through me! Not like a physical sensation… more like… an emotion… a memory… reassuring me… welcoming me home!”

That’s called an orgasm, dear, and you ain’t never had one of those so don’t even try and fake it.

As she maneuvers through the weird crystal structure, she hears the voice now from above. “HALA VAL KARA” and “VA EL-KRYPTON”. Then it starts actually saying things like “Oh good, you’re here! How do you like the place? Isn’t it great? There’s a pool table in the basement!”

Supergirl finds the haunting disembodied voice strikingly familiar. Definitely someone Kryptonian, though. Is Rodney Dangerfield Kryptonian? He had a distinctive voice!

She keeps moving through the halls, following the voice, wondering where she is or what is going on or when the comic book is going to be over.

“Welcome to the heart of the operation, as it were,” says the voice. Supergirl enters the room that looks like one of those cathedrals in Hell. Like, all red with vaguely Satanic imagery and a strange shadowy man standing before her. “Before the punching starts, please hear me out,” the figure says. That’s promising.

“I’ve never wanted to hurt you. I’ve only ever wanted to understand you. Who you are, where you came from, what you can teach us. Thanks to this… incredible place, I’m finally making progress.”

Cosmo Kramer?!

It’s Simon Tycho. He was a baddie in the first story. He stole a drop of her blood and ran a ton of experiments!

This whole storyline should’ve been about him. But it wasn’t. It was about some useless Irish family instead. How’s that for hating your audience?

Final Thoughts

It’s going to be a while until I hit the next Supergirl storyline since it’s tied into the New 52 He’l on Earth event with both New 52 Superman and New 52 Superboy, both of which I hear are terrible! I may never get to it even if I live to 100! And I’ll probably die of stress-induced infarctions at 41, so don’t hold your breath about that anyway.