Welcome to Loneliness & Cheeseburgers Presents: Supergirl (Vol. 6), Issue #5 – “Homecoming”! In the previous installment, which was aptly titled “Escape”, Supergirl escapes all right. She shoots laser eyes at the central core of Simon Tycho’s space station and blows it up to smithereens. Tycho’s completely messed up now; they attached what’s left of his already shitty body to the Brain.
Supergirl got away with her sunstone, which may contain a message from her father, but it’s cracked. So now she contemplates just picking a direction in the vast wasteland of outer space and, hopefully, ending up back at her home planet. Which is gone. Which Superman already told her. But she doesn’t trust him. So she’s in a pickle!
There’s a spot of blood on the uniform of one of Tycho’s guards who tried to pick a fight with Supergirl. It’s Supergirl’s blood. Tycho’s gonna do fucked up stuff with that blood.
This is a pretty good story so far! Let’s hope it stays that way.
Supergirl (Vol. 6), Issue #5 [March, 2012]
Written by: Michael Green & Mike Johnson
“Homecoming”
“In the ruins of Argo…a showdown with Reign!” Why, look at me all gobsmacked! A showdown with THEE Reign? In the ruins of Argo, you say! That sounds fantabulous! Ha ha! Listen to me, you smug comic book cover, I don’t know what either of those things are. I’m a BRAND NEW, TENDER, VIRGIN SUPERGIRL reader here, and I cannot be swayed by any promises of Argo or Reign in the pages within. Nice try.
Fragile, precious sunstone in hand, Supergirl blasts like a dangerous planet-destroying cosmic ray straight into the depths of space. “The Kryptonian girl is leaving the small planet on which she crashed. Shall we engage her now?” asks an unseen entity, possibly feminine, judging from the pink and purple text boxes. Supergirl flies alongside Saturn. “No. We follow,” answers a similarly possibly-feminine entity. “Interesting. She is following a course back. Back the way we came.” These two decide to follow her back through “the jump”, and then one of them (REIGN? FROM THE RUINS OF ARGO?) will engage her alone.
Meanwhile, Supergirl is like “I’m totally fucking up right now” as she continues to hold her breath and fly into the wild black yonder. She doesn’t even know if her powers will suddenly go POOF! Gone! Leaving her frozen, oxygen all diffusing out of her bloodstream into the vacuum of space, floating around dead for eternity. Ha! Yeah, don’t think about that. You’ll be fine. Or not, heh. But don’t think about it.
While she continues to have a deep space anxiety attack, her sunstone begins to pulsate and emit a powerful red glow! Is this like when you receive a red envelope that yells at you in Harry Potter? SUPERGIRL! IT’S DINNER TIME! YOU’RE NOT SUPPOSED TO LEAVE OUR SITE IN THE BACKYARD. GET YOUR PASTY ASS BACK HOME BEFORE YOU GET A WHUPPIN’!
Off to P3X-797. Open the iris!
But no, it’s like in the N64 Paper Mario game when you get that stone that blinks in the desert area and leads you to treasure. It’s like that, you guys, that’s what happens. The sunstone blinks and draws her toward one of them Stargates that just happen to be floating around space. But Supergirl is skeptical. It could be a trap! It could be one of them Stargates that leads you to one of those planets where the uncivilized folk hunt the women for sport! Or, perhaps this is all part of Father’s plan… hmm, better not risk it, and-
Oh well! Supergirl passes through the gate without much further hesitation! Well that settles that. No alien savages with spears here, just more space. She notices the stars are all different now, and therefore quickly realizes she has been transported to somewhere completely different in the universe. It would’ve taken Superman about an extra hour to figure that out, the dummy. By then he would’ve been torn apart and consumed by Space Gerbils.
The sunstone continues to tug on the poor flying girl through space, leading her to…SOMEWHERE. She’s hoping home, which is a blown-up planet, so I know it’s not that. The glowing red vibrator is herding her toward a small blue star (“but it can’t be Krypton’s sun. Rao is RED! Wah!!”), specifically a small seemingly-populated asteroid. “Does Father want me to come here? Is this where he and Mother are…?”
They better have dinner ready on the fucking table.
But certainly not! They’re DEAD, Kara! They fucking DIED, little girl! Kaputt! Nothing left! Do you know what this is? This is a large chunk of urban-Krypton that had been ripped apart and sent hurtling through the cosmos. She gets closer and recognizes Argo City, but not the way she remembers it! THAT Argo City was very much populated and still connected to a planet! THIS one is complete and total bullshit!
She zips around the ruins saying “fuck! shit! fuck! shit! fuck!” while pointing out landmarks and trying to make sense of all this cockamamie nonsense. “And what about…HOME?!” she cries and she swoops into her old abode. The house looks untouched; her parents’ bed with a rumpled bedsheet, as if they had just fucked in it and went downstairs to get a post-coital snack. However, they didn’t just fuck in it at all, sorry to say! The whole house is coated in dust, as if no one had been through the rooms for years. (Because they’re all DEAD and also it’s the future).
She invites herself downstairs into Father’s Lab, one of the last places she was before Shit Got Weird. “Feels like I was just here. We were talking about the Trials, how I needed to study…”
She approaches an apparatus that looks uncannily like the claw of an arcade crane game, only inverted. The sunstone continues a-pulsin’. “It’s cracked, but hopefully I can still access what’s on it.” Supergirl tells herself, as if the information in the pointy red crystal will be useful at all. “Take care of yourself, lady.” it’ll say. She might as well throw it in the trash. The Argo Trash!
The sunstone doesn’t react to the, like, answering machine thing she tries to put it in. Supergirl remembers being able to heat herself up by concentrating hard enough, so she tries that to power the sunstone (cassette tape) back up. It works! Huzzah! Excelsior!
A hologram of Kara’s father pops up before her. He looks like an extra-hairy Kirk Douglas. “If you can hear this, it means that my greatest hope has been fulfilled: you are alive.” Oh how sweet and touching! You’re alive and alone! Congrats, you inherited fragments of an exploded world! Hurray, go fuck an alien and divvy up the planet pieces to your kin, kiddo.
He goes on to inform his daughter that he had put her in stasis and placed the BIG RED PENIS in her pod just in case she didn’t get fucked up during stasis and was eventually able to go back the home answering machine and watch this message! Success. Check.
“Perhaps you have already learned the terrible truth. As I record this, Krypton is mere cycles away from its destruction. There is nothing we can do. I am so sorry.” And she does already know this! That one guy on Earth told her, the one dressed up like her. But she gasps anyway.
Don’t you want to just grab the guy by the big, bushy sideburns and plant a wet one right on his kisser? Hubba hubba.
Big Brain Dad had a plan, though, as you can see. Looks like it didn’t work! Everyone’s gone and dead! Maybe it did work, though, for a little while. What are we, about 30 years in the future or something? I forget. It depends upon how old Clark Kent is in this series. 25? 59? Somewhere in between? 74?
Supergirl’s dad thought the plan was too risky to try to include Kara. His hope is that he and her mother had removed her from stasis, and the super kewl protective pod, themselves once they had found a possible new home for Argo. Ha! Nope!
So, if his hopes had been dashed (as he expects anyway), then tough luck, sister. The memory of Argo City lives on in Kara and only Kara. “On this sunstone you will find a full historical record of Krypton, all of my research, and the truth about what happened to–” Bzzt! Disconnected!
Actually, what happens here is that some uninvited guest enters the room where Kara’s father was recording the message. “Who’s there? I gave explicit instructions that– YOU! How did you get in here?! What are you doing?! STOP! YOU CAN’T–” Bzzt! Disconnected!
There goes my last dildo. Sigh.
Actually, not quite yet! Someone blasts this bastard right in the chest with a weapon. She watches him die! Now it’s disconnected! And would you look at all this homework her dad’s making her do now? Historical record of Krypton?! BORING.
The sunstone crumbles into a dormant, darkened pile of useless shards and dust. Kara starts crying and breaking things. And I mean really starts breaking things. It looks like she destroys her father’s lab, she blasts a hole through the house, she starts busting up concrete everywhere, kicking down ruined buildings, her eyes alight with red fire! “Yes, my child, let the universe bear witness to your pain. Grieve the life you knew.” This voice comes from some speech bubbles that are as similarly feminine as the text boxes from earlier! ARE WE GOING TO MEET REIGN IN THE ARGO RUINS?!
Yes!
“My name is Reign. And I’m here to offer you a new life.”
You already know what Reign looks like, she was on the cover. I knew a girl named Rheyn in elementary school. It’s quite a hippy-dippy name. I suspect that this Reign is neither hippy nor dippy. Doesn’t matter, Supergirl is in NO mood for this lady’s offerings.
“DID YOU DO THIS?!” Supergirl screams as she starts reigning blows upon Reign! Just punching the hell out of her, throwing her through walls, kind of the same treatment she gave dear old Superman. Reign’s pretty calm about this pummelling. Maybe it doesn’t actually hurt that much to get pummelled by Supergirl. Maybe she needed to go through her Trials to, like, level up.
KRAKOWW! Bang! Zoom! Straight to Poland!
Reign tells her that she did not do this to her beloved Argo City. In fact, Supergirl is the first to set foot on the ruined city since it started orbiting this forsaken blue star. Reign DOES know that Kara is one of the only survivors of the Kryptonian Kaplooey, and she, like Kara, seeks answers.
Supergirl ain’t listening though. She starts attacking Reign again like some kind of out-of-control angsty teenager, but Reign stops her fist with an open palm. “Enough of this. I come to help you, not to fight you.” Reign tells the girl rather pleasantly. And we’ve already seen this before with Superman. Kara doesn’t care. She moans and groans in Reign’s grip while Reign observes that her distance from the MAGIC YELLOW SUN OF EARTH is weakening her resolve. So cut it the fuck out! You’re not going to win here, lassie. Reign just wants to chit-chat.
“Tell me,” Reign starts, “What do you know of the Worldkillers?” And I remember Superman mentioning them back in Issue #2 after Supergirl threw him through the Great Wall of China! It turns out that Supergirl does know quite a bit: “They were weapons outlawed by the ruling council on Krypton eons ago. All anybody knows is that they were too dangerous to exist.”
What does Reign say to this?:
Dead dad mockery, huh? Nice.
Well you just gone and done it again, haven’t you, Reigny Reign. Reign Wilson. Supergirl launches at her again and starts punching the stuffing out of her face. “WHAT HAPPENED TO ARGO?! WHAT HAPPENED TO MY FAMILY?!” she yells, frothing.
Reign growls like a wild animal and clocks Supergirl upside the chin with the hilt of her giant scythe-y sword. Stunned and knocked to the floor, Supergirl watches as Reign winds up a forward slash. Supergirl stops the blade mid-slash with her bare hand; she crumples the thing like paper with a “SHHRAKK” and completely snaps the blade off near the hilt.
Reign seems impressed that this child just tore apart her big-ass sword, but then she pushes her back down to the ground and connects a series of punches to her jaw. “I was wrong about you. I thought you were ready. I thought you were worthy. But you are not.”
Now Reign lifts the dazed and bloodied girl off the ground by the scruff and gives her a real hardass come to Jesus monologue: “The Worldkillers are real. They are weapons of limitless destruction, yes. But they are not things. They are living beings. They came to Argo on a mission to discover the mystery of their own creation, knowing only that Kryptonians were somehow responsible. But they found Argo as dead as you did.”
“How do I know so much about the Worldkillers?” Reign takes what’s left of her sword and pins Supergirl to the wall by her cape.
“Because I AM one.”
But all that fighting and slaughtering and conquering doesn’t seem to quell the feeling. Maybe I’m just hungry?
Supergirl hangs there like a limp noodle. Reign goes on and on and on and on and on and on and on about having this strange, innate desire to fight and conquer and maim and punish and hurt and disfigure and trounce! But she has no idea why! She lost her memory, or something. She awoke from an “age-old slumber” knowing nothing but her own name and her purpose, and an inkling that all her answers could be found on Krypton.
But, fuck me sideways, Krypton blew up! Reign discovered this floating remnant of Argo City with Daddy’s Under the Dome forcefield broken and a bunch of suffocated losers. Everything Reign had pieced together led her to Earth, the refuge of the final Kryptonians, and she doesn’t think it’s entirely because of the magic yellow sun. There’s something MORE to it! And she’s going to find out what it is, goddamnit.
Reign mistakenly thought Supergirl was a kindred spirit who could help her conquer Earth, but hell, she’ll just do it without this sassy Kryptonian wench. “But there’s something you should know,” Reign continues, “Argo’s orbit around the blue sun is decaying. Soon it will burn up, and all traces of this place will finally disappear.” Eek! Ook! Ope!
At this point, Reign is done with Supergirl. She blasts off toward Earth. “Try to follow me…before you die with all the remains of your home.”
Final Thoughts
Man, Supergirl can’t catch a break. Destroyed home planet. Dead family. Weirdo billionaire sociopaths. Red-headed Worldkillers.
Simon Tycho still has Supergirl’s blood. How will that tie in to whatever the fuck is going on here? Time will tell, Supergirl fans! Time will tell. But it probably won’t.
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