Welcome to The Not-So-New 52, your digital Swampflix comic book (adaptation) newsstand! Starting in 2007, DC Comics and Warner Premiere entered the direct-to-home-video market with animated features, mostly in the form of adaptations of well-received event comics or notable arcs. This Swampflix feature takes its name from the 2011 DC relaunch event “The New 52,” and since there are (roughly) fifty-two of these animated features as of the start of 2024, Boomer is watching them in order from the beginning with weekly reviews of each. So, get out your longboxes and mylar sleeves and get ready for weekly doses of grousing, praise, befuddlement, recommendations, and occasional onomatopoeia as we get animated for over fifteen years of not-so-new comic cartoons. 

I love Supergirl. Kara Zor-El is such a favorite character of mine that, even when I sold almost all of my comics half a decade ago, I couldn’t bear to part with the Supergirl issues that I had bought way back when I was a college freshman, the ones written by Jeph Loeb, penciled by Ian Churchill, and inked by Norm Rapmund (among others; for those who are interested in the minutiae, I’m talking about Volume 5). I spent hours practicing my own art by redrawing panels from that comic book run, and was completely fascinated by the comic run’s upending of the Supergirl narrative. Ever since her inception, Kara had always been treated as Clark/Kal/Superman’s younger cousin, who had been born on (essentially) a refugee colony before finding her way to Earth to meet the older relative who had so inspired her; that Kara (in)famously not only died but was retconned out of existence as part of the major 1986 comic event Crisis on Infinite Earths. I’ve never seen this discussed anywhere, but I have a feeling that part of that decision was the fact that the 1984 Supergirl film starring Helen Slater bombed so hard critically and commercially (calling it “not great” is charitable, but for a Supergirl fan like me it’s not without its charms). 

This Kara was a bold and fresh new direction for the character in the new millennium: instead of being the younger of the last two survivors of Krypton, the Kara introduced in 2005 was the older of the pair, at least chronologically, as she was already a teenager when their planet was destroyed. In fact, she had been sent specifically to become the guardian and caretaker for her baby cousin, but because her pod was caught up in a chunk of Kryptonian debris, she remained in suspended animation for several decades, arriving on Earth to meet a Kal who had already grown into an adult and become Superman. Now she was not only one of the last children of Krypton, but she was specifically more of a fish out of water, alienated both from the new world on which she found herself but also from the only person she could have reasonably expected to have an automatic connection to, as he had been raised in a completely different culture. Without a mission, without an anchor, Kara was a brand new character with a brand new angle to explore. Before the launch of her own title, the character was reintroduced in the Superman/Batman storyline “The Supergirl from Krypton,” which itself came on the heels of that same comic’s “Public Enemies” arc, which featured the titular duo having to stop an asteroid of Kryptonite from crashing into the Earth. If that sounds familiar, it should! That comic was adapted into Public Enemies, which we’ve already discussed. That means that we’ve come to the first direct sequel within this project, Superman/Batman: Apocalypse. 

The plot here adheres pretty closely to the source material. The kryptonite asteroid that Lex Luthor spent the previous film/arc underplaying has been destroyed, but not without leaving behind some debris, which includes a Kryptonian pod containing a young woman. She lands in Gotham Bay and is rescued by Batman before being taken under the wing of her cousin, whom she is surprised to learn is an adult and a hero, but he relinquishes custody of her to Wonder Woman and the Amazons when they arrive in Metropolis and insist that Kara is too powerful to live in such a populous location and “offer” to train her on Paradise Island. While there, Kara develops a close friendship with the precognitive blonde Lyla, who is wracked by visions of Clark pulling Kara’s lifeless corpse out of a body of water. Elsewhere, on the planet Apokolips, imperialist dictator Darkseid has decided that the girl who fell to Earth is the perfect candidate to become the new leader of his honor guard after the abdication and defection of his previous lieutenant, Big Barda. He arranges for the kidnapping of Kara from Themyscira, with the crossfire resulting in Lyla’s death, her vision fulfilled as we see it was her body that Superman cradles on the beach after the attack, not Kara’s. The trio of Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman (joined by Big Barda) take the fight to Darkseid in order to retrieve the Girl of Steel and bring her home. 

One of the things that people mock most about the ‘84 Supergirl is that it’s not content to really be a story about Kara Zor-El the way that the preceding Christopher Reeve movies (the good ones, anyway) were stories about Superman. What I mean by that is that Supergirl isn’t just about a fish out of water superhero who happens to be a young woman, it’s about a young woman who occasionally gets involved in magical/superheroing shenanigans. It feels very much like what a board room full of men think young girls would want to see in a movie about a super girl: girls boarding school hooliganism, flying around horses, trying on a bunch of outfits, etc. Instead of Gene Hackman’s Lex Luthor hatching a giant real estate plot that will result in cataclysmic death as collateral, Faye Dunaway’s Serena almost destroys a small town (and its Popeyes) because she’s obsessed with a groundskeeper who goes on a couple of dates with Kara and she saw him first (no offense to the actor, he’s a reasonably attractive man, but not exactly fight-an-alien hot). The problem with Apocalypse is that this film far too closely resembles that earlier film about Supergirl, up to and including the fact that her first interaction with humans is that a couple of blue-collar men make threatening sexual comments and then get their asses handed to them—these movies are twenty-five years apart, and that’s still the best that there is on offer here. Plus, this one has the addition of an extremely typical shopping montage that starts with Kara saying “Teach me everything there is to know about being an Earth girl!” and ends with “I think I’m going to love being an Earth girl!” It’s just so … I hate to use the word “uninspired,” but it really is. By the time the film tries to wring some pathos out of Kara’s concerns about whether her brief time as a villain in Darkseid’s employ was because of some darkness within her, it’s too little, too late; compared to the similar ambiguity about whether her darkness was internal or brought about through outside manipulation that we just saw in Under the Red Hood, this one falls very flat. 

That having been said, this movie is a major improvement over some parts of the previous installment in other ways. Gone are the ugly character designs that made Public Enemies an anti-aesthetic experience, replaced with the beautiful designs seen in Mike Turner’s on-page work, the same art that was so inspirational to me lo these many years ago. Although the relegation of Batman to more of a supporting role (despite what the title of the movie might suggest) means that the positive element of the easy friendship between him and Supes is absent, there’s still a lot to love here. Summer Glau was the adoration object of straight male nerds of the late aughts and early ‘10s, coming in hot off of her roles in Firefly and The Sarah Connor Chronicles, and she does good work here, and the late Andre Braugher is fantastic as Darkseid. And although I normally find my mind wandering during a lot of the action sequences in these movies, this one has several good ones, with the final showstopper battle with Darkseid at the Kent farm in Smallville being a real standout, not just in this movie, but for all of them. It’s brutal, and although it’s much smaller scale than most of the “urban population center” fights that populate this franchise, it has real punch. 

The first time I saw this one, back when it was released, I had no idea that it was a sequel to Public Enemies, a movie that I hadn’t seen, and I appreciated it for no other reason than because my (super)girl was in it. It functions just fine in that regard, even if it is middling in a lot of ways. When Supergirl was reintroduced in comics back in 2005, it had been nineteen years since the character was last seen, which seemed like such a triumphant return after an incredibly long time. It’s now been nineteen years since then, which is a nice piece of symmetry, but I wish that I had more to say about that other than express how much I loved those comics compared to how lukewarm I am on this adaptation. Really only of interest to fans of Kara Zor-El, and even then, it’s not the most interesting story with her that you can find. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond