I got The Daring New Adventures of Supergirl #11 and #12 out of the quarter bin, and while Gil Kane is awesome, I was kind of wondering how he got away with basically the same cover twice in a row. Looking at GCD, Supergirl didn't have a great 1983 for covers: #7 and #8 both have Supergirl looking down on the action from a distance; and try to imagine the cover for issue #5 drawn by Adam Hughes, or much worse, Michael Turner.
The story features Kara, seemingly dead of an exotic radiation poisoning, her body being examined by generic evil organization the Council. Lazy, but what do you expect from a group headed by the Chairman, a guy in a red costume and...a chair. At Marvel, it would've been C.O.U.N.C.I.L. or something...Chronal Omnipresence Union, Northern Canada Independent League. Crap, that sucks. Kara gets upgraded from mostly dead to feeling crappy, barely able to heat-vision a couple of guards during her escape.
The Council sets their Supergirl clones on the trail, all six of them; which sounds impressive, except they didn't have enough "material" and ended up with six twelve-inch tall copies. (I suppose they could've made one clone a fifth larger than the original, or maybe one regular size and a spare twelve-incher...) Since the clones have all her powers and she's currently barely super at all, it doesn't go well for Supergirl; and they smash up a bit of her cousin's Fortress of Solitude.
I did kind of like the last page of the story, where during the wrap up, a recurring (I guess) cop character gives Kara the hassle because he doesn't approve of vigilantes, and she tells him where he can cram it. At the time, I'm pretty sure Superman didn't have to put up with any police blowback. It may be telling that Kara gets lip from the same cops that probably would've kissed the hem of Superman's cape; but it's just as in character that she doesn't take it quietly either.
Lois Lane was the back-up feature for Supergirl at the time, and the back-ups don't have any of the charming insanity of her old solo book. Hell, they don't have any charm at all. Moreover, it seems like DC either put their girl-characters in a ghetto together, or put all their girly eggs in one basket: wouldn't it have been smarter to have Supergirl's back-up feature be, I don't know, the Viking Commando or something, more of a draw to male readers? Then, keep Lois as a backup in Action maybe, to pull more female readers there? Well, like a lot of things I say, that probably sounds reasonable but is completely wrong, and I don't know where these hypothetical girl readers were coming from anyway, and I'm Monday-morning quarterbacking an unsuccessful comic from 1983.
Panels from the Daring New Adventures of Supergirl #12, "Guess Who's about to Die?" Written by Paul Kupperberg, art by Carmine Infantino and Bob Oksner. The title would get downgraded to just Supergirl the next month, saving everyone a lot of typing and confusing the filing.
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