Supergirl

*This transcript is produced using transcription software and reviewed for quality. Despite our best efforts, some passages may be incomplete or contain errors due to audio quality or software limitations.*

Matthew
Superman sees the best in movies, but here on Superhero Ethics, we see the truth. It is myself, Matthew, and Jessica Plummer, returning guest, comic book knowledge extraordinaire, published author of short stories and soon to be published author of many more cool things, which we’ll be discussing during this podcast, but mostly a huge super fan of all things super. We are of course here to talk about Supergirl 2026. One part of the internet will tell you that this movie is terrible, terrible, terrible because it was woke and feminist garbage, blah, blah, blah, blah. Another part of the internet will tell you, one that I have much more justification for, to be clear, but still, that this is the best movie ever, and if you don’t like it, it’s because you’re misogynistic and terrible. Actually, there’s some room for nuance, and so we’re going to be talking about that. We’re going to be talking about what we loved, what maybe didn’t work so well, why we think choices were made, and the ethical choices that were made both within the movie and outside of it. So, Jessica, say hello and give us a little bit about your background with this character Supergirl.

Jessica
Supergirl is actually my favorite superhero. I literally wrote my undergraduate thesis about her. I love her. I’ve been a fan, I mean, showing my age here, but when I wrote that thesis, that was over twenty years ago now. I had to do the math for a bit. I was apprehensive about this movie, but also excited, and I have a lot to say about it.

Matthew
Well, that’s so great to hear. I think one of the things that has been an interesting part of this conversation that’s happening about the movie is that right now we have a couple of very different images of Supergirl. For many people, obviously, if you’re comic book readers, you’ll know her from the comics. I think she’s a character who appears in the Justice League and the Superman animated shows from the late 80s and early 90s, mid-90s, and certainly shown up in some movies. I think for a lot of folks, probably the primary way people know her is through the CW show that ran for many seasons, which a lot of us, myself included, had a lot of really positive things to say about. It gets into some problems like a lot of parts of the Arrowverse, but is generally probably a lot better than it’s remembered. Tell us though about your understanding of who the character of Kara is.

Jessica
Kara is an interesting character because, unlike Superman, she doesn’t have that continuity across the entirety of her existence. Kara did not exist in the comics, or Kara, as the TV show decided to pronounce it, and the movie follows suit. Which I like, since I’ve been pronouncing it Kara for so much longer. She did not exist between 1987 and 2003, I believe, because there weren’t allowed to be other Kryptonians. There was a different version of Supergirl in the middle there. I’m not going to get into it, it’s very lengthy and complicated. So she doesn’t have one version of herself. The original version of Supergirl, who first appeared in 1959, is very much in line with how we perceive Superman. She’s very wholesome and optimistic, truth, justice, and the American way, kind of a goody two shoes, very sweet and perky. I really do love that version very much. That’s the version that I imprinted on, even though, again, she didn’t exist by the time I was old enough to read. That’s very much the version of the character that we see in the CW show. They were really drawing from that well, and I think they did a phenomenal job of it. Then in the early to mid-2000s, when they brought the character back, they really steered into this edgy, angry bad girl to contrast her with Superman, which I wouldn’t exactly say this movie is doing, but it has a little bit of that DNA.

Matthew
And it’s not her. A lot of hope.

Jessica
No, no. I have a lot of thoughts about how the movie presented her as a character and how I appreciated it so much more than this 2000s take on her, which was really like, the reason she was a bad girl was because it was sexy, and maybe she’d have sex with you, forty-five-year-old guy reading this comic, even though she’s only sixteen. Here’s a drawing of her thong. It was very, you get it.

Matthew
I referenced some of the awful parts of the internet that have been talking about this movie and being very critical of it. That has certainly been a big part of it. The, oh my god, she has shorts on, and frankly, while I’ve been –

Jessica
The shorts. This is not the first time there has been a shorts controversy. There was a point in like 2008 where the artist who was drawing the Supergirl comic book, Jamal Igle, who drew a wonderful Supergirl, did a fantastic job. He made it clear that she had little, you know, cheerleader or tennis shorts on under her skirt. The internet lost its mind. How could you ruin Supergirl? I need to be able to see this underage girl’s panties or I’ll die.

Matthew
The number of levels of ridiculousness of this, because I’m not even of the mindset of, let the pretty girl beat me up and she becomes even prettier. But even I can recognize, Millie Alcock is utterly beautiful, and when she’s kicking people in those boots and that skirt and those shorts, I don’t care that the shorts are there, it’s still hot AF. So people are dumb. But I wanted you to use that to frame the first question, which is, especially for you as someone who writes about this stuff professionally and has done this in a lot of different venues, what is it like in this particular environment where we have this group of incel, idiot, right-wing culture warriors who are just going to hate on anything that seems at all woke? Millie Alcock is pretty proudly, well, I mean, she’s talked about how she could see this character as being bisexual. This character’s sexuality is not in any way a part of this movie, to be clear, but she’s said other things like that, and people have gone, just utterly, completely unreasonable, things. Millie Alcock’s also a feminist, I think she’s non-binary, or may actually go by they, I’m not sure, but I know that has been connected to her being non-binary. So there’s that part of the internet that’s just lost its mind, and then I think a much more reasonable, but still a little bit, makes conversation harder. As I said, there is a portion of the internet that is now incredibly defensive of her and this movie, again for a very reasonable understanding, but has now started in with, if you are criticizing this at all, you’re a right-wing chud, etc. I’m kind of curious, for you, as someone who is just in these various worlds, what is it like trying to talk about this movie with all that noise happening?

Jessica
It’s incredibly frustrating, and it’s the same thing we’ve seen every single time there’s a movie in the action or geek space that’s not about a, I was going to say straight white man, but we haven’t had one of these movies about a queer white man, so let’s just say, about a white man. You see this, the same, if not worse, when it’s male characters of color and female characters of color, forget it. The way people lose their minds. And what makes me particularly frustrated is that it’s not the chuds themselves, even though they’re very noisy, you can ignore them. You don’t have to be in the space with the chuds. It’s the way that their perspective on things is sort of validated. I can’t think of a specific example of this, which makes for a bad anecdote, but I feel like we’ve all seen those side-by-side comparisons of, such and such movie starring white dudes does great at the box office, the movie costs a hundred million dollars to make and it made a hundred fifty million. Such and such movie about people of color or women disappoints at the box office, and it costs a hundred million dollars to make and it made a hundred fifty million. It’s not just the chuds. There is this absurd expectation from Hollywood that if it is not the most successful movie ever made, it’s an abject failure. And even if it is one of the most successful movies ever made, that will not be replicated. Look at Black Panther. I know we had a sequel, I know Chadwick Boseman passed, there are other factors, but Marvel didn’t double down on that and put out lots more character movies with characters of color. Wonder Woman was considered the best movie of the DC EU by basically everyone. We didn’t like the second one, it was terrible, but we didn’t get all these female-led films that we should have had. Even when these movies are successful, Hollywood refuses to continue to produce them and frames it as if it’s somehow a failure.

Matthew
And it’s a double bind, because not only does Hollywood refuse that, but I think, and I’m going to lay down a gauntlet here, and I’m not blaming this person specifically, but I think one of the things that has most encouraged the most terrible fans, in particular comic book movie fandom, but also in Star Wars and most geek things, was the release of the Snyder Cut. So much of that, and again, I have my problem with Zack Snyder, I don’t think he’s a right-wing incel, he’s not one of these people. But the people who got on board with that were very much that, and the sense of, every time I bring up, why are you still yelling about The Last Jedi? This was ten years ago. They’ll immediately say, because of the Snyder Cut. Because the Snyder Cut proves that if we bash these things enough, they’ll listen to us. They’ll stop making the woke crap, etc. It’s hard, because then it means that I get why people are saying, no, this movie was great, it was ten out of ten, because that’s the battlefield that for some stupid reason Hollywood has decided we’re fighting in.

Jessica
It’s funny that you said The Last Jedi, because I agree with you, but I’d say it’s two things that really fostered this. One, it’s the Snyder Cut, and two, and I apologize for the angry emails you’re going to get, it’s the downplaying of Finn and the elevating of Kylo Ren in that Star Wars trilogy because of a racist backlash against having Finn be a main character, and instead elevating a genocidal neo-Nazi to romantic hero.

Matthew
Yep, no, totally agree with that. And Rose Tico, who was a very popular part of the second movie, being totally abandoned for the third. For me, I think one of the things that makes me most realize how much, I think one of the best reviews of this movie that I’ve seen, and I think this is kind of where you and I are both coming from, we’ll get into that in a second, is that both this portrayal of the character by Millie Alcock and the character herself deserved much better than she was given by the producers of this movie and the studio’s attention to this movie. To me, the thing that most underlines that is, we’re just talking about, for ten years we’ve been seeing these horrible attacks on people of color, on women, on anyone who dares be at all woke, in any of these spaces, or be connected to movies that they’re calling woke just because it’s not straight white cis men specifically. The headline was that Warner Brothers admits that they were surprised at the trolling and abuse of Millie Alcock because they believed the culture had evolved past that sort of stuff.

Jessica
And on what evidence?

Matthew
Like, Star Wars and Star Trek have both, much too late, but have started getting to the point where they have things ready to roll out to smack down those fans and to say you’re not representing us. Ewan McGregor did a big publicity campaign when this happened, during the release of the Kenobi show, saying, all you people attacking the Black actress who’s playing one of the inquisitors, you missed the point entirely. There was a lot done to protect the actors from that, to give them coaches to help them work through their social media getting attacked. So them just saying that, not having any preparation for this, as though this wasn’t going to happen, as though we hadn’t seen it coming for six months, since she was chosen. So, saying all that about the context of the movie, Jessica, what did you think of the movie?

Jessica
I thought it was pretty good. I’d give it a B. I had a good time.

Matthew
I think I agree with you about exactly what kind of movie this was. I’m probably just less fond of this kind of movie at this point. Because I feel like this is exactly at the level of a mediocre MCU movie. Perfectly fine, I’m not super excited to rewatch it, but good. Things about the plot don’t make too much sense, fair enough. For me, the combination of, I did have a lot of hopes and expectations because I really liked the character and loved the portrayal of her just for those few minutes in Superman. And where I think the movie most fails is on the ethical decision-making of the characters and the ethical points it was trying to make, which is obviously –

Jessica
Isn’t that something you think about? Is that a thing that you kind of think about when it comes to being superheroes?

Matthew
If there’s a movie that I really like, even though the costumes are terrible, and I’m talking to my friend who’s a costume designer, she’s probably going to be like, yeah, I agree with you about the overall quality of the movie, but I couldn’t like it as much as you did because the costumes were garbage.

Jessica
And I think I’m coming from the opposite direction that you are, where you had high expectations. I had very low expectations, because this movie is based very directly on a comic book that I really can’t hang with, that was not for me. I was quite relieved at the changes that were made in the tone and substance in that transition from comic to movie, and it put a better taste in my mouth than I think it would have if I was just coming in cold.

Matthew
I can totally see that. I think, yeah, because for me especially, I got the little bit of the party girl aspect, but I definitely was going in with that Melissa Benoist idea of Supergirl as the hope, the shiny, all that. The more I think about it, the more I think part of why that worked so well in the Arrowverse is because there wasn’t a Superman. Superman kind of appears from time to time in that universe, but didn’t have his own show until Superman and Lois, which I think is far and away the best of the CW shows, but I do think that having two beacons of hope like that at the same time can be harder to swallow. So let’s talk about the actual story, because I walked away describing this as Jessica Jones in True Grit. Do you think that’s kind of accurate? And how much would that description be more applicable or less applicable to the comic book than to the movie?

Jessica
It’s completely applicable to the movie. I would take the Jessica Jones part out of the comic to a certain extent. I don’t think anybody would go straight to Jessica Jones reading the comic, because Jessica Jones has a lot of humor to her, there’s a lot of sarcasm, she’s pretty self-aware of what a wreck she is, and that’s part of what makes her so likable. The comic is straight up True Grit in space, no doubt about it. Everybody immediately pegs it as such, and it’s not a secret.

Matthew
That’s a great story. I’ve got no problem ripping off that story.

Jessica
I feel some way about the degree of comfort that we seem to have with ripping off things that are not in the public domain across the board, but that’s a larger conversation that’s going to get me in a lot of trouble, so let’s strike that from the record. The comic, the tone of it, is very bleak. This movie is a comedy in a lot of ways, there’s a lot of humor to it, it’s funny. Supergirl as a character is funny, there’s tons of jokes, there are characters who are purely there for comic relief. None of that is in the comic. The comic is absolutely bleak and nihilistic, and the destruction of Argo City is much more brutal and really kind of pushes your face into the death and suffering of the Kryptonian people. Even though Jessica Jones is a character who’s very obviously marked by trauma, she has humor.

Matthew
That’s what I described, you know, this as Kara Jones, because to me her performance felt very much like the DC version of Jessica Jones, in that she seems to everyone like a funny drunk or a funny mean drunk, and really it’s because she’s carrying around so much trauma and guilt and sadness and all that. I’ll start by saying that was definitely to me a bit of a fake-out from the end of the Superman movie, but one I really appreciated, because for me, as someone who doesn’t know the comic, doesn’t know all that, I took her as a party girl at the end of the first Superman movie, and I thought that would have been a fun story as well. Then to quickly show me, oh no, no, no, guess what, we’re challenging your assumptions. You see a girl who likes to go get drunk, and you think, yeah, she’s a party girl, she wants to hook up with people in bars, she wants to dance on the roof. Actually, no, this is a trauma drunk, who will have fun sometimes, but is not what you’re thinking of. It’s much more Jessica Jones than Paris Hilton. That’s actually a really fun way to challenge the assumptions.

Jessica
I will argue with one point of that. Her hooking up with people in bars, she never does that. And that’s actually I think really important, because one of the other things that –

Matthew
Oh, and to be clear, I was saying that’s what I thought was being –

Jessica
That was the assumption.

Matthew
Got it, got it, got it. End of Superman made me think Paris Hilton, not Jessica Jones, is what I was saying.

Jessica
Very fair, very fair. One of the things, a couple of the things, that I really appreciated about the character’s portrayal here, and in general the portrayal of female characters, there were some gender issues, which we’ll talk about, but they weren’t Kara related. One of those was, again like Jessica Jones, this girl is filthy. She looks like she smells, like she hasn’t washed her hair maybe since Argo blew up. I guess it didn’t blow up, it just turned to cancer. She just looks dirty and stinky, and she’s wearing makeup, she’s starring in a movie, but she does not look like she’s wearing makeup. It’s no-makeup makeup, which is a little different than Jessica Jones, who looks like she put makeup on four days ago and has been sleeping in it ever since. But it’s that same, she looks like a believable person who’s a real wreck. Even at the end, when she puts on the Supergirl costume and she’s all heroic, her hair is still dirty. I loved that, because at no point did I feel like this character was being constructed for the male gaze. Before, you were saying she looks great when she’s kicking ass, and she does, because Millie Alcock is a beautiful person and she’s badass and she looks awesome, but at no point is the camera like, ooh, let’s get a little cheeky shot up her skirt, let’s linger on her boobs. None of that. She’s presented physically the same way David Corenswet would be, or even a little less, because in that movie they spend a lot of time being like, do you remember, he’s beautiful, do you want to look at him again, he’s so beautiful, and they don’t do that with Millie. And then the other thing is they don’t do that with any female character, which, given that one subplot, I really appreciated. For example, thirteen-year-old Ruthie is never sexualized, which is a low bar, but I’m so glad they cleared it.

Matthew
No, especially, and we’ll talk in a minute about the sexual trafficking that’s added into this movie, and I have a lot of issues with how that’s done. But at least it reminded me a lot actually of the conversation we had in our Birds of Prey episode, where you pointed out something that I was kind of aware of but really needed you to draw home, how much, when either of those scenes happen, the bad guy in that both treats Harley Quinn terribly and also literally strips naked a woman at the bar, in both cases the camera pans away and focuses on the internal feelings of the woman about the abuse she’s dealing with, not, oh, isn’t it terrible that he ripped off her shirt, but look, let’s be titillated by the view of her chest. You compare this to, and I like a lot of what Joss Whedon did with a lot of the characters, but I can recite from memory every aspect of what Black Widow’s costume looks like on her backside, because he showed me that shot every single time she walked into a room. I don’t have that with this movie, and I’m pretty happy I don’t, because it wouldn’t fit the character in any shape or form.

Jessica
Women are being abused and sexually exploited in this movie. We know that because the movie tells us, but not because it makes the camera or the audience complicit in that abuse, and that is so important.

Matthew
Right, exactly. Let’s go talk about that plot line, because, low-hanging fruit, you didn’t try to make it titillating that women were being shown going through this horrible sex trafficking thing. I wasn’t thrilled they put it in the movie, and from what we’ve talked about, my sense is you’re kind of feeling the same way. How did you feel about it being included?

Jessica
First of all, I’ll say, we mentioned that the plot is True Grit, I would say this movie is like forty percent True Grit, thirty percent Star Wars, the cantina scene, over and over, there’s like five cantina scenes, which is fine, I like the cantina scene. And the remaining thirty percent is ripping off Mad Max: Fury Road, but not really getting why that movie is so good, and just using the word brides and dressing them in off-white and being like, nailed in, and it’s like, oh no, you didn’t. One of my objections to it is it does feel a little bit like this is a girl movie, so we need to put a girl problem in the girl movie so Kara can do a feminism about it, which is not a good feeling, that’s gross. I don’t know that that’s what the decision-making was, but that’s the way it comes off.

Matthew
I remember once going to a panel, this was at WisCon, so you might remember this as well, but I went to a panel on Black Panther where someone was talking about why it was so important this was a Black-made movie, and she said one way you know is that no one ever calls Black Panther a slur. That if it was a white-made movie, there’d be some scene where someone is racist to him in a way. I feel like that was what was in my mind as I was thinking about this plot. Because exactly what you just said, Kara has to do a feminism about it. And my understanding is that’s somewhat the case, that a lot of it was, and I’m saying this based on a podcast I was listening to by people who are very much in the industry, and I don’t remember honestly if they said this was from interviews with the writer and director or just their own assumptions, so take this with a grain of salt. But that they were seriously toning down the darkness and the grittiness and the terribleness of the, not the bandits, what are they called –

Jessica
Brigands.

Matthew
Brigands, thank you, which is way too cool a name to be used on this group. But they still needed to have something that made it terrible enough that we’d be okay with the question not being, does this guy deserve to die, but should a young girl kill him. To me, it’s the most low-hanging fruit. The idea of, killing her family would have been enough. He doesn’t have to be this epic sword maker. Killing her family and killing other people, we’ll get to the ethics of revenge and killing, but it felt very much like male producers looking at a women’s movie and saying, okay, if we’re not going to be as dark as the comic, we need to make him super anti-feminist, how do we do that, we introduce sexual assault in some way.

Jessica
This is definitely a new element for the movie, and one thing I’ll point out, the comic was written by Tom King, and he was one of the writers on the movie.

Matthew
And he’s the writer of the graphic novel, right?

Jessica
He’s the writer of the original comic, yes. The art in the comic is by Bilquis Evely, and she’s wonderful, my issues with the comic have nothing to do with her art, she’s stupendous. One of the planets in the movie, the one where all the sex trafficking happens, is actually named after her, it’s called Bilquis, which I thought was very sweet. The subtext of what’s happening on that planet aside, there’s also a lounge singer, that’s nice. I’ll say, I know we’re going to talk about the needle drop, but the Girl from Ipanema needle drop was actually great.

Matthew
That was fantastic. I want to know more about how humans are a part of this world and how that song got there, but in the moment I didn’t care.

Jessica
It’s the DC universe, you’ve got Green Lanterns, you’ve got Space Cabbie, he drives a cab in space, there are ways. But back to the serious stuff. There are a lot of elements in this movie that feel like they were dropped in and don’t gel. This is one of them, because, aside from the general feeling that I put this in here because it’s a movie about a girl, and I don’t like that, I have two main issues with it. One is, and they’re related, it’s not a consistent through line, when the brides are not on screen, the movie doesn’t care about them or remember that they exist, they just get discarded.

Matthew
Specifically, it’s never something that Kara mentions. Supergirl never brings it up as, I started this for my dog, but now I need to save those women.

Jessica
Well, and that’s the other half of it. I was talking to my friend Rebecca Goldberg, who I do a Superman podcast with, and she phrased it perfectly, that the movie’s priorities are: number one, a dog, number two, the murder of Ruthie’s entire family, number three, active widespread sex trafficking. The thing about storytelling is stakes should be personal to your hero. I don’t have a problem with Krypto being Kara’s main motivation, there’s no issue with that, but the fact that she never seems to incorporate the sex trafficking into something she cares about, she’s going to save lives if they’re right in front of her, but it never becomes part of her motivation for stopping these guys or for killing Krem at the end. I’m glad the sexual violence isn’t depicted on screen, I’m glad none of the women in this movie were sexualized, I’m glad that when Krem is in that cell threatening Ruthie, he never does so in a sexual way, because believe me, I was bracing myself for it. But I don’t think the people who made this movie were capable of the gravitas that subject deserved, and so I don’t think it should have been in there. Quite frankly, because they didn’t treat it with that gravitas or connect it through, you could have replaced it with anything, like they’re stealing a shipment of toasters and we need to save the space toasters, it could have been anything.

Matthew
And to me, that felt like it cheapened the issue itself. I’m not going to look at this movie and go, thank God someone’s talking about the real world issue of trafficking. But also, narrowing it down just to the storytelling part, what it seems like they’re trying to do is say, Kara’s a person who starts out caring about her own stuff, she’s being threatened, her dog’s being threatened, her situation’s threatened, she’ll fight, but she’s not going to fight on behalf of others. Step two is she’ll fight on behalf of this one girl who she has a personal connection to and sees as the younger version of herself that didn’t get to be. Step three is she’ll fight on behalf of the stranger, and that’s where you become the superhero, when you say those women are locked up, that’s not okay, I’m going to fight on behalf of them. The fact that we never get that makes her deciding to go back to Metropolis and put on the suit feel like, to me, this was kind of a movie written by committee, where it was like they said, we’re going to insert A, which means we have to have B, and we’re going to insert F, which means we have to have G, and then later they forgot that they needed B because of A, so they cut out B and they cut out G, and then A and F are just sitting there going, what the hell are you doing in this movie?

Jessica
They’re plugging things in and taking things out, but they’re never watching it through to ask, is this coherent? The arc that you’re describing is a perfectly reasonable arc, but that’s also not even where she begins the movie, because she steps up to protect Ruthie the second she recognizes she’s in danger. She has no hesitation or regret about it. She’s drunk, but she’s not resistant to it, because the thing I liked about the character is it’s very ingrained in her to protect others, to stand up to bullies, and to be kind and good. But it did mean that that particular arc you’re describing couldn’t occur. I don’t even necessarily mind that she doesn’t really have an arc and doesn’t really grow as a character, because she’s a comic book character and they’re pretty static, and I think Hollywood has had trouble adapting those kinds of characters to movies where you feel like you need that growth, and we wind up with things like Iron Man 2, where we’re doing a weird nerfing of our characters’ emotional growth so we can do it again. But yeah, I don’t mind that she didn’t have an arc, but I do mind that the movie so often felt, like you said, written by committee and very choppy, because they couldn’t maintain consistency about the subplots.

Matthew
And I agree with that. I am okay with more comic book movies not having an arc, I think most comic book movies think they need to have the trilogy, which is origin story, questioning the mission, and then ending the mission. Part of why I love Batman Returns is, this is the second of the Tim Burton movies going way back into our childhood before a lot of our listeners were born, check it out, it’s a great movie, “Get in the duck” is one of the best lines in cinema history.

Jessica
But it can also be deadly if you eat it.

Matthew
Batman is completely static in that movie, he’s not the main character, he’s just sort of the POV character, everything happens around him. But putting that disagreement aside, I think for me, you’re right, there isn’t an arc, but there is a face turn. There’s a moment in this movie where she says, okay, I’m going to go back to Metropolis. Because those threads were never connected, I never really get why. I want to ask about the comic book, because what I heard on a podcast, you can tell me if you agree or not, is that in the comic book it actually becomes clear by the end that when she’s telling Ruthie her main motivation is to save her dog, it’s actually Krypto, super dog, he’s going to be fine, and that the issue was never really that she needed to get the antidote, it was that she wanted to protect Ruthie. In the movie, that doesn’t come through at all, it really comes across like she really does need to save Krypto. Is that something you understood from the comic book, or is that someone going on a flight of fancy?

Jessica
It’s certainly not in the movie, because we have all those flashbacks of her thinking about Krypto, so it’s pretty explicit that that remains her motivation throughout. I’ll be perfectly honest, I don’t remember the comic well enough to say, I read it in single issues as it was coming out, which was like 2022, 2023, I don’t even remember. I’ve seen other people talking about that, so I’m inclined to say sure, but I don’t remember.

Matthew
I guess it just makes this movie kind of ethically incoherent, because if they put that in, it sort of shows what you’re talking about, that she remembers her parents’ teaching even when she’s drunk, even when she’s self-indulgent, she’s going to step up and help others. Whereas what I got from this movie was that she’s forgotten what her parents told her because of the trauma, and because she’s kind of rejected that because of the trauma, but that this helps her remember it. It felt like such a wasted story beat, because in the first Superman movie, the David Corenswet Superman movie, we have this incredible plot of him realizing, no, Jor-El wanted you to go be a conqueror, your mother wanted you to have a harem and spread your seed quite literally throughout the human population, and you rejected that. Now Kara comes from people who had a much better approach to this. That seems to set up a great dynamic between the two, but they seemed a lot more interested in showing Argo City falling apart instead of actually giving us any of that.

Jessica
Side note, it’s extremely funny that Kara’s parents are like good, normal people, and at one point Zor-El’s like, so, I know my brother had a weird theory about his baby, but let’s not talk about that. What was going on? I think it’s very funny to me if Krypton’s culture was very normal, and it was just specifically Jor-El and Lara who were uncomfortable.

Matthew
I feel like it’s as if they originally had like eight story ideas, and instead of picking two and following through, they picked six and just didn’t do anything with them.

Jessica
Yeah, and before, you said it seemed like they wanted it to be Kara’s guided by remembering what her parents said, but you got that she forgot what her parents said, and I think both of those things are in the movie, and they’re not consistent, just like so many things. Which is tied together by this really very coherent performance by Millie Alcock, thankfully. I’ll also say, this doesn’t really have to do with the ethics of the movie, but since we’re talking about it, I did actually think that the destruction of Argo sequence was really well done and quite moving, and I am someone who’s on record many, many times as not caring about Krypton, let’s move on, I don’t care, it’s gone, let’s talk about Metropolis. But it’s so much more significant to Kara’s story than it is to Clark’s, and I thought this movie did a really good job highlighting how different her tragedy is from his. His is still a tragedy, even leaving aside the part where his parents were evil. Never knowing your birth culture is a tragedy, never knowing your birth family is a tragedy, I don’t mean to downplay that, they just have different stories, and I appreciated this movie taking the time to highlight that.

Matthew
This is a clearly much, much lower level of trauma, but it’s what I connect to. My parents got divorced when I was fourteen, and I was keenly aware of the dynamics between them, and it was very painful to watch it happen in real time. But I also have ten, twelve years of happy memories of us as a family. One of my best friends, their parents divorced when he was like nine months old.

Jessica
And so we’ve had that conversation.

Matthew
Yeah, the conversation of not comparing trauma, but realizing we are both children of divorce, and that can be traumatic. To be clear, staying in bad marriages can be much more traumatic for kids, I’m not saying it’s not, but we realized we have very different experiences, because part of his trauma was that he had no memory of a family together. I think it may also just be that I had kind of imprinted on the DC Arrowverse’s take on it, where none of the Argo City stuff is in the Arrowverse, but instead this idea that she was actually supposed to go there and take care of him, and because her ship gets damaged and all this, it gets reversed. So I was kind of like, wait, but where’s that part of it?

Jessica
The version that’s in this movie is the older version, it’s the original version of her origin, and they played it perfectly straight, which is hilarious, which is that when Krypton blew up, there was just a chunk with a whole city on it, and it was in a bubble, and it was fine until it became Kryptonite and everybody died. But for like thirty years, it was fine, no worries, which is very funny and very silly. That’s the original Silver Age origin. Then when they brought Kara back in the mid-2000s, they introduced the much more logical version, where she’s the older cousin, it just took her longer to get to Krypton, and she was in suspended animation while Clark grew up, which is why the ages got reversed. In the Woman of Tomorrow comic, which is what this movie is based on, Tom King is really only drawing on her very first appearance, he doesn’t factor in any other comic with her, so that’s the origin he uses, and it’s lifted very directly into this movie, except it’s bleaker in the comic. At one point she’s walking through the destroyed Argo City and she just finds a dead baby. So, when I say this comic is bleak.

Matthew
Yeah, and I think I do agree it was very beautifully done. Again, because I hadn’t seen it in other settings, and I’m always interested in the practical, I was looking at it going, thirty years? There’s no farmland, it makes no sense.

Jessica
Well, and I’m glad we’re talking about it, because when I came out of it, I was like, this is going to confuse people, because there was a TV show for like eight years with the modern origin, and if you pick up a comic book now, it’s going to have the modern origin.

Matthew
Fair enough, fair enough. So let’s talk about what I thought was, after Alcock, the second-best performance in this movie, and completely out of place in this movie, which is, I am really excited to see Deadpool as a biker. By which, of course, I’m talking about Lobo, played by Jason Momoa. He’s hilarious, he’s charming, he’s a bad boy, but in a sexy way. It feels almost like closing in on the demigod character from Moana that the Rock plays, in terms of the ego and all that. He’s introduced as comic relief in what’s supposed to be the emotional center of the movie, when we’re first learning about the sex trafficking, when Ruthie is really facing, does she want revenge, when Supergirl is facing, should she have stopped Ruthie from getting revenge. It felt so out of place and kind of draining of the essence of that moment. What did you think of Lobo in this movie?

Jessica
I have no idea why he was there. From what I’ve heard, Tom King did want to use him in the comic, and DC said no for whatever reason, which I always think is really funny, because it’s like, he’s not in a regular book, so was he busy? Why can’t you use him? But they said no. It seems like Tom King was like, well, then I’m going to put him in my story treatment for the movie, and James Gunn was like, hell yeah, I’m a nerd, I love Lobo, we should get Jason Momoa to play him. And Jason Momoa came in on a skateboard with an electric guitar and was like, yeah, bruh. At no point did any of them go, what should he do in the movie? Because you’re right, he has no purpose. With the sex trafficking plot line, you could change that to something else, but you could not take Lobo out, you could literally cut every shot of Lobo in this movie and the story would not change. He has no effect on the plot in any way, shape, or form. It felt like he was there for cameo, it felt like he was there for the same reason Superman was there, so we could be like, hey, it’s that guy. But most people don’t know who Lobo is, so it’s like he’s there to say his catchphrases, but people don’t know what those are, and he only said one of the three anyway. He has three terms that he uses, calling people bastiches, which he did say. Saying “frag” instead of the f-word, which is also kind of a video game thing, he did not say that. And “feetal’s gitz” or something is another one of his curses, which he did not say. It just felt like he was there, like Kramer in an episode of Seinfeld, he walks in and the studio audience applauds.

Matthew
I hope it was just even for those dumb reasons, because I have unfortunately a much more unfortunate understanding. I’ve dived too deep into the hate of this, and one thing I kept seeing was guys saying, oh my god, this movie was so terrible, I only went because Lobo was in it, and it was just awful. I do think that part of it was the, how do we get guys to go see a Supergirl movie, let’s put Jason Momoa in it, let’s put Lobo in it, that aspect.

Jessica
Maybe, I don’t think Lobo’s that popular. You called him the Deadpool of this movie, and you’re not wrong in the sense of gleefully amoral, murdering left and right, pretty much indestructible, very genre savvy, they’re both parody characters. But he’s nowhere close to the level of popularity of Deadpool. Deadpool has like five comics coming out of Marvel right now. Lobo, I think he might have a comic now because there’s a movie, but in general he doesn’t typically have a book or appear regularly. So you could be right, but if it were me, and I was like the liaison to the chuds at DC Entertainment, and they were like, how do we get men to see this movie, I wouldn’t put Lobo in it, I’d put Hal Jordan in it, I’d have a cameo from one of the Green Lanterns to lead into the show.

Matthew
See, that’s the thing. I’m thinking that a lot of the audience they’re talking about isn’t really comic book fans, they’re just people who want to yell about these things, because I imagine Jason Momoa is the draw, not the specific character.

Jessica
Okay, okay, fair.

Matthew
But again, I also might be too conspiracy-minded, and might just be giving these chuds too much credit. But yeah, I think it’s a fun character, I don’t think that character can carry a movie unless you give me some things.

Jessica
If that character appears on two or three episodes of the Lanterns show, sign me up, I am so there for that, he’d be fantastic. I thought he was fine, I actually expected a little bit more, I’m not a Lobo gal, but I think he can be very funny. I did think what I personally thought was the funniest moment in the movie is when Kara does the ditz’s voice to get information out of him, that was so perfect. I was like, maybe my standards were too high, I think he could be a little funnier, a little more badass, look a little cooler. I saw somebody pointing out that his motorcycle goes on the ground, and I was like, yeah, it’s a space motorcycle, why is it on the ground? These are small quibbles, but I’m thinking about that one Justice League Unlimited episode where they all think Superman’s dead, but he’s actually lost in the far future with Vandal Savage. That plotline is hilarious, but in the present day, they’re at his funeral, and Lobo shows up and he’s like, hey, I hear you got a spot on the League, well, now you got the main man, and they’re like, oh no. That’s what I wanted, that Deadpool energy. I didn’t dislike any of his scenes, and it was one of those things where I could tell Jason Momoa was having so much fun that I was like, you keep going, honey, you’re having a great time, you don’t want to ruin somebody’s fun. But I expected it to go a little harder. If he’s in the Green Lantern show, that would be delightful.

Matthew
I have no experience with the character, so this was starting from zero for me. So let’s get to what I think is really the ethical heart of this movie, or at least what it claims to be, but then it keeps veering off, which is revenge. This movie has, I think, a very interesting take on it that I don’t think it realizes the ethical importance of. I left very frustrated, because, you and I have talked about this before, it’s a thing across movies, do superheroes kill. I’ve often complained that especially characters like Daredevil blur the lines, because in the midst of a fight it’s impossible to declare you’re never going to use lethal force, because anything can be lethal force if it’s just the right angle and the right part of the skull, and you’re hitting people in the skull with metal pipes, that’s my catchline. But to me, that’s still distinctly different from, I have defeated this enemy, they are not a danger to anyone in this moment, I have the potential to not allow them to be a danger to anyone else, and I am going to murder them in this moment.

Jessica
In cold blood.

Matthew
Right, exactly. And revenge is a motivation to do that, but it is, to me, part of that question. I feel like for most of the movie it links those two together as one question, because she wants to do it for revenge, but what Kara is saying is no, that kind of killing is wrong, it’s going to destroy you. Then at the end, Kara kills him after convincing Ruthie not to do it. Before I go on my rant, what did you think about that?

Jessica
If you had asked me before I saw this movie, if you had told me this movie ends with Supergirl killing a man in cold blood, I would have been very upset. Upon seeing the movie, the execution, no pun intended, didn’t really bother me, it wasn’t a deal breaker for me, but I agree with you that the lead-up to it was so totally incoherent that it didn’t work. It didn’t work for different reasons than it not working in Man of Steel. In Man of Steel, it didn’t work because Superman would not make that decision, and you haven’t convinced me that he would. Whereas here it was just like, what are you even trying to say, it was incoherent.

Matthew
And it’s almost like, if I understand you correctly, tell me if this is an accurate paraphrase, you’re saying you would not have been okay with Kara making a moral decision of that weight, and the movie said, meh, it’s not actually a weighty decision, don’t worry about it.

Jessica
But it only said that sometimes. Sometimes the movie was like, killing is wrong, and sometimes the movie was like, revenge specifically is wrong. Those are not, like you said, the same thing, and Kara’s opinions about killing changed depending on what the scene needed. I was talking about this with my friend Becky Allen, who’s been on the show before, we saw the movie together and were discussing it afterward, and they were like, yeah, Kara’s motive for not letting Ruthie kill Krem is that it’s not the end of the movie yet, so it’s not time for him to die, and that’s the only consistent one.

Matthew
Well, I actually did take a more consistent one out of it, but again, I feel like the movie didn’t do it enough, which is the, I am broken and jaded, I have lost my innocence, and so if I kill him, it won’t hurt me further, I don’t want you to become like me, and so I’m going to protect you and steer you away from the path that I’m on. I’ve seen that done very well, and I’m going to reference a show that I think is very beloved but obviously has a lot of problems, especially as we learn more about the author, but in Buffy, in season five, there’s this plot, forgive me for spoilers for a show that’s twenty years old.

Jessica
I’ll admit I’ve actually never watched season five, but that’s my fault.

Matthew
I’m going to spoil you, I apologize.

Jessica
It’s still on, what?

Matthew
You’re going to, there’s this main antagonist, this demigoddess, basically, named Glory, who’s immortal and unstoppable. But for whatever reason, she switches back and forth between her and this human doctor who’s just a decent guy. I think his name is Ben, I don’t remember, but he has no idea that he’s the living embodiment of this goddess. They realize that if they kill this human guy, who’s not bad, not evil, not in any way responsible for what’s happening, it would be cold-blooded murder, it would be wrong, but it would stop her. Buffy is aware of this, and Buffy is like, I cannot do this. We see Giles basically knock him out, and then the last thing we see is him putting a gloved hand to choke this guy out, cut off his airway, he can’t breathe. He basically says, Buffy is too good a person to do this, but I’m not. This is also the season where we’ve seen a lot of his backstory as Ripper and things like that. To me, if that’s what they were really trying to go for, that sounds fantastic. But also, if what you’re doing is, that moment then is her accepting, I can’t ever be a hero, the best I can hope for is to be an anti-hero, in which case, why the hell does she go back to Metropolis at the end?

Jessica
And that’s what I’m saying, that it’s not consistent. Real quick, first of all, rest in peace Anthony Head, great guy, great actor.

Matthew
And Michelle Trachtenberg, who played Dawn.

Jessica
I went to middle school with her. The other thing I was going to say is there’s a similar moment in season two of The Punisher, where the teen girl that he’s taken on has to shoot somebody in self-defense, and she starts crying, she says, I killed him, I killed him, and Frank goes, no, you didn’t, and shoots him. The guy’s still alive, and shoots him, and says, I killed him.

Matthew
The guy is very clearly about to die, but he’s like –

Jessica
It’s like a perfect, that’s how Frank takes care of people. But yeah, like that’s what they were trying to do, but I have a couple of issues with that. First of all, I was really worried they were setting up for some reveal where Kara was so upset about losing her whole civilization that she killed someone early on, like when she came to Earth, and that’s why she left the planet, and now she knows what it’s like. I thank God they didn’t go there, but I was like, where are they going, because every time she was like, don’t get revenge, Ruthie, it’ll ruin you, I know, I’ve been there, it’s like, your parents died of radiation poisoning, she just doesn’t make sense as a character who can speak to the destructive nature of enacting revenge from personal experience, she just isn’t, so that doesn’t make any sense. Also, if all she wants is for Ruthie’s personal soul not to be corroded by revenge, which is a weird thing for her to care so much about regarding someone she doesn’t know, why didn’t she let Lobo kill Krem? Because there’s a moment where Lobo’s about to throw Krem off the ship, and she goes, no. If she was just saying, I need the antidote that’s around his neck, but she also forgot about the antidote whenever it was convenient, or whenever the filmmakers forgot about the antidote.

Matthew
So I do think that moment is defensible, but again, it’s also incoherent, and I don’t blame anyone for missing some of these, and I certainly missed a lot too that you pointed out. I think it’s that if Krem dies and Ruthie isn’t involved, then Ruthie doesn’t actually have any resolution. She wants Ruthie to be given the opportunity to take revenge and decide not to, which I think is different than her just never doing it because she never got the chance. But again, that’s never stated. The TV show Gotham does exactly that with young Bruce Wayne, and it’s fantastic. So does Batman Begins. But here, yeah, it’s never articulated.

Jessica
It’s never articulated, and to be honest, sometimes when I’ve seen similar scenarios done, I find it pretty manipulative on the part of the mentor character to be like, I just wanted you to know you could walk away. It’s like, no, no, no, this person is suffering, why are we doing this?

Matthew
But also, again, you’re now taking a moral bet that you’re right, and if not, you’ve just facilitated murder.

Jessica
Which would actually be pretty funny if they lost that bet, I would watch that story. But also, again, it downplays the seriousness of his crimes. If she’s like, no, don’t kill him, Lobo, I need to enact a little moral fable for Ruthie, don’t worry about those girls in the ship who are going to be raped and killed, that’s not important, what’s important is that Ruthie has agency in the decision not to kill Krem, it’s not great. I agree with you that I think that’s what they were trying to do, but –

Matthew
Yeah, I’m not –

Jessica
I’m not saying again, it’s not consistent, and so it didn’t work for me.

Matthew
Well, and I think you brought up something really important too, and it’s kind of underscored by the language we’re using. We keep talking about the girls, the women who are going to be the brides, the ones who’ve been kidnapped and are going to be sex trafficked, because none of them are named, none of them speak a line in this movie.

Jessica
None of them have any — what if, instead of Lobo, a bunch of them started fighting back in some way, and Kara helps them rise up to fight back, and one of them actually gets to have this moment. I could have seen something where Ruthie drops the knife, and then one of them grabs it and stabs the guy, and Kara’s like, that would have been really satisfying.

Matthew
Or just like a buddy road trip movie that’s just Kara and Guy going through space, like twenty more cantina scenes, keep doing it, I love it, I’d watch that so hard.

Jessica
I will say the daughter of that couple did have a name, but she didn’t have any lines, and three out of four Black characters in this movie were murdered, and then nobody ever talked about it again or cared. That was a thing, and a number of them were happening.

Matthew
And did not fail the moral test they were given. Yeah.

Jessica
The parents turned out to be the baddies, or at least turning our heroes over. At least once I understood they were doing it because their daughter was being threatened, I was like, okay, so they’re not just awful people, but still they faced a moral test and they failed it, and I would fail the same test, let’s be clear. But with so few characters of color in this movie, and that’s who you go with. I didn’t appreciate any of that. And again, for the record, all of that is movie-only, you cannot blame the comic for it. It’s like, again, part of why I don’t have a problem with Kara killing Krem at the end of the movie is because the movie didn’t pause for a single second on the gravity of Krem’s crimes, which is a silly way to put it. He’s positioned as a character who’s as strong as a Kryptonian, and he’ll continue to do this, and the movie also didn’t conclude any of that. Were the girls safely escorted home? Were the other brigands stopped? Did they just let Lobo kill them all to get rid of them? We don’t know. Did they call some Green Lanterns to take them away? Who knows? But if Kara had said, this is for my dog, and this is so you’ll never hurt another girl, it would have fixed so many problems with the movie. It would have fixed her moral through line. It wouldn’t have entirely fixed, but it would have gone some way toward fixing the sex trafficking plotline. And it would have been so justified, instead she says, this is for my dog, Ruthie, this is for what you did to that girl’s family.

Matthew
Yeah, not to any of the other women.

Jessica
No, they don’t count, they don’t have names, they’re not mentioned.

Matthew
Oh, frustrating. All right, quick, let’s just do one or two last quick hits, and then we’ll close it out with the needle drop. I saw a TikTok that said, millennial girlie pop girls all get this, this was for them, and if you didn’t love it, then clearly. So what did you think of the Jimmy Eat World needle drop?

Jessica
Hey, listen, “The Middle” is a great song, I love that song.

Matthew
It’s by a band called Jimmy Eat World, and the singer sounded a lot like Tori Amos of the 90s, in the soft acoustic ballad style, hence, girl world. Go ahead.

Jessica
They had to take this song and make it a girl song for girls. I’m a millennial, I remember when that song came out, I love that song, I know every word, it’s great. I’ve sung it at karaoke. That needle drop was ridiculous, and part of the problem with it was, at the point it happens in the movie, we’d already had at least four other fight scenes where Kara is in the middle of a circle of guys she’s fighting. This is a set piece the director loved and did over and over again, and so even in the climax, in the third act, we have like three of them. So when we get that scene where now it’s Ruthie in the middle, and there’s bad guys in a circle around her, we just saw that sequence twelve seconds ago. It feels like we’re getting climax after climax after climax, but this one’s in slow motion, and there’s a silly acoustic cover of this Jimmy Eat World song that’s extremely literal, the lyrics literally say, little girl, you’re in the middle, and there’s a little girl, and she’s in the middle.

Matthew
For those who haven’t heard the song, listen to it, there are active debates still to this day, like twenty years later, I love the song, but there are debates about whether the singers are serious, or if this is meant to be a parody of the don’t-worry-you’re-gonna-be-okay song, because the lyrics are so on the nose and so painfully sincere.

Jessica
It felt like this was a parody, it felt like something you’d do in a Deadpool movie, or to make fun of James Gunn, but it was played totally serious.

Matthew
Well, let’s just hit the last thing I wanted to talk about, which is another set piece. Why does Kara keep losing her powers?

Jessica
She deliberately goes into space so that she doesn’t have her powers.

Matthew
But it felt like there was the kryptonite sun, then the kryptonite arrows, it just happened so many times.

Jessica
By the way, the green sun thing is not really a thing, it’s in the comic, but it’s not really a thing, you’re not going to find this in any other DC comic, this is very silly. It felt like they didn’t know what to do with a character with that level of power, so they had to keep nerfing her. I don’t even think it had anything to do with her gender, because you see people really struggle with how to tell Superman stories too. But it was something that really wasn’t consistent, because when she first meets Ruthie, she beats the crap out of some guy who’s like three times her size, even though she’s powerless and very drunk. Then sometimes poison works on her when there’s a yellow sun, and sometimes it doesn’t. Also, I don’t know how a planet would revolve around two different stars, but we don’t have to worry about that.

Jessica
That’s very comic-booky, and I’m not going to argue with it.

Matthew
Yeah, and also, if you know you’ve taken someone to a planet with a green sun, you probably know it also has a yellow sun, so maybe that’s a possible motivation for you to watch her crawl off into a cave, maybe you want to find her and make sure she dies in the twelve hours you have before the yellow sun comes up.

Jessica
It’s like, hey Ruthie, where is she, and Ruthie’s like, I’m not telling, and he’s like, okay, bye.

Matthew
It, anyway. All right, let’s close with a positive. How are you feeling about seeing this version of Supergirl, played by Millie, in other projects going forward?

Jessica
I would see her a thousand times, I think she’s fantastic, I loved her performance, I would happily see her in the role as many times as they want to put her in projects, and I hope they continue to, because I really enjoyed her.

Matthew
Me too, me too. And I do think that the way she is now, I liked Jessica Jones in the Jessica Jones show, I think she worked best when she was, in many ways Luke Cage is, almost in the Netflix Daredevil universe, Daredevil isn’t Superman, Luke Cage is the closest to a moral paragon, I think. Him and Jessica Jones play off each other so well, and while I didn’t like The Defenders, the scenes of her playing off Iron Fist were wonderful. I think the amount that I would pay to watch Nathan Fillion’s version of Green Lantern eating popcorn and just going back and forth, like he’s at a tennis match, as Supergirl and Superman are arguing about what to do with someone, that’s old.

Jessica
Or just like a buddy road trip movie that’s just Kara and Guy going through space, like twenty more cantina scenes, keep doing it, I love it, I’d watch that so hard.

Matthew
I think one of my hopes is, you know, one thing we talked about in the MCU a lot is that there was a real sense that the movies are the major leagues and the TV is the minors, and maybe sometimes you go from the minors to the majors, but you never go back down unless you’re like a tertiary character, like Lady Sif going into an episode of Shield. I get the sense with James Gunn that he has none of that, and also that TV is seen as prestigious enough now that actors are willing to do that. I would love to see Kara on an episode of Lanterns, I would love to see her just start popping up a lot.

Jessica
Well, I did hear Nathan Fillion is confirmed to appear, so that, you know, it makes more sense for him to do it, he’s a Green Lantern, but that’s, as you said, big screen going to small screen. Not that Nathan Fillion isn’t very at home on the small screen, but going big screen to small screen. So yeah, I would love to see her on there, I think she’d play off those characters in really fun ways.

Matthew
Yeah, for sure, for sure. Well, especially because she’s a cosmic character, in a way that Lanterns are. And I’ll say that’s the other thing that I’m curious about. Listeners, write in, because I didn’t know those comics, I thought this movie would be set on Earth, I kept waiting for us to get to Earth, so I was very confused by that. But it was fun.

Jessica
There’s even, we know the, is it Abin Sur? Yeah, Hal’s predecessor as a Green Lantern, who failed to save Krypton from destruction. Wait, no, it’s not, it’s Tomar-Re. If you remember the 2011 Green Lantern movie, the guy who looked kind of like a chicken fish, he’s the Green Lantern of Krypton’s sector, and he did a bad job.

Matthew
That’s very true, that’s very true. All right, well, if you’ve listened to episodes I’ve had with Jessica before, you know that take a shot every time I say, Jessica, this is my last question, would be a very bad drinking game. Your liver would be in great danger. But I really hope this is going to be the last question. You mentioned really loving the artist who did Woman of Tomorrow. Did she have, what’s that thing that some artists use that wasn’t in this movie, oh, color, because everything in this movie was so bleak, it really felt like a Snyderverse movie.

Jessica
I don’t know if she did the colors, but I can tell you –

Matthew
My point was just that the comic book was more colorful than this movie.

Jessica
It’s beautiful, it’s a beautiful comic to look at. I think she did do the colors, it’s very much an auteur kind of visual. This was, yeah, pretty muddy. It could have been, again, all those cantina scenes could have been so fun with more color. And again, comparing it to 2025’s Superman, which was so bright and so vibrant and really felt like you were living in a DC comic book. Obviously there are many kinds of DC comic books, but a classic DC comic book. I would have loved to see more saturation, more playing with the idea that you’re in space, you could do whatever, it doesn’t all have to be brown.

Matthew
And I get that it’s a lot more expensive to do that, because you can get away with a lot of fuzzy CGI and stuff when it’s darker. But to me, that’s the thing, if I walk away from this with anything, it’s that the character, Supergirl, and the actress deserved a better movie, and part of that would be a better budget. They deserve to have the real Superman treatment, and not this Guardians of the Galaxy 2 kind of, not that that particular movie is dark, but just that it felt like the tenth movie of the DCU, not the second one.

Jessica
Yeah, yeah, or it felt like it was hearkening back, just a little, not a lot, but it did feel like it was hearkening back a little to the Snyderverse, which is not a place I want to hark in. I will correct myself, the pencils and inks of the comic were done by Bilquis Evely, but the colors were by Matheus Lopes.

Matthew
Got it, okay, good to know. Well, thank you so much, Jessica. As I said before, we can always find you on Book Riot, where you do great stuff, your articles, I know you’ve done some great stuff about Supergirl and her costumes over the years, as well as Squirrel Girl and some others. But you have been published, you have a short story in Sword Stone Table, I’m going to get it right one day, but it’ll be in the show notes. But you’re also now, you’ve signed a couple of contracts for some new full-length novels. Tell us about that.

Jessica
Yes, yes, I have. My debut novel, Mage Struck, will be out with Harlequin next fall, fall 2027. And then I have another book, The Con Man’s Guide to Dragon Slaying, out with Grand Central Press in spring of 2028. So both very far out. If you want to find out more about them, you can visit my website, JessicaPlummerWrites.com, or sign up for my newsletter for more news. They’re both fantasy rom-coms, and I think they’re a lot of fun.

Matthew
Yeah, I really look forward to reading them and to having you on, and definitely giving links to buy them when they come out. So, Jessica, thank you, as always, to our listeners, thank you so much for listening. May the Force be with you.