Adventures of Supergirl Chapter #6 Review and *SPOILERS*

Someone’s Rocking My Dreamboat

Written By: Sterling Gates

Art By: Emanuela Lupacchino, Ray McCarthy, Hi-Fi

Letters By: Saida Temofonte

Digital Price: $0.99

Release Date: April 4, 2016

*Non Spoilers and Score At The Bottom*

When I was young, my older brother would make me watch horror movies when my parents were out on a Friday or Saturday evening. To my memory, only two made me lose sleep: the oft-forgotten Carol Kane vehicle When a Stranger Calls, which was the first scary movie I ever saw at around eight years old, and A Nightmare on Elm Street. I was about twelve or thirteen when I saw it, and I had trouble sleeping for almost two weeks! We are the protagonists of our own stories in dreams, but we are also at our most vulnerable; you can filter the air you breathe and pasteurize the food you eat, but eventually you are going to need some all-natural, original-style sleep. And if Freddy Kreuger happens to stroll through your dreamscape, well that’s too bad for you. That was another movie that creeped me out as a kid, Dreamscape. Dude from the Warriors turned into a humanoid cobra-man in one scene, and I tried to draw it for the next ten years. I saw that in the theater, though, and it didn’t make me lose any sleep. Anyway, I didn’t summon you here to talk about scary movies I saw far too young, that’s for a future podcast. I’m here to review Adventures of Supergirl Chapter 6, wherein Kara has some spooky scary nightmares of her own! Will she be eviscerated by a murderous dream-demon’s specially constructed glove knives? Probably not, but read my review to be sure!

Explain It!:

Last chapter had Supergirl capture computer hackin’ space criminal and relative of Brainiac Vril Dox, after he tried to screw around with her buddy Winn’s reputation as a completely unknown nerd. Well now Dox is in one of those patented D.E.O. cells, the ones that are basically people-sized terrariums with no furniture or visible plumbing. I mean talk about your cruel and unusual, the place is one strip search and a gimmick photo of guards mooning the prisoner away from becoming Guantanamo Bay. Supergirl is interrogating Dox about who hired him to hack into her friends’ social media profiles and change all of their updates to “Baba booey,” when Dox twitches his nose and zaps every attending D.E.O. agent with a green electricity. Supergirl pounds on the clear walls of the cell, while Vril Dox turns into some kind of evil elf with a plus-fifty spooky voice and psychically commands the folks he zapped with energy to shoot Kryptonite darts at Kara, who then wakes up in her own bed with a start!

I was all a dream, which really became clear once Vril Dox sprouted Link ears. “Fourth one this week,” thinks Supergirl, about the frequency of her nightmares. Just then, the phone rings: it’s an unknown caller with a message to turn on the news. There, Kara sees that the D.E.O. facility has blown up, killing everyone within! The really cute thing here is that Kara has put on her fakey glasses that she uses to not look like Supergirl; technically speaking, she shouldn’t need them to watch TV. My observation is irrelevant, however, once the television news anchor begins addressing Kara directly and we see it was another dream! Whoa! There really should have been a suggestion to take magic mushrooms before reading this chapter. Now, she wakes up at the destroyed D.E.O. facility (though it appears less destroyed than it did on the newscast), and now D.E.O. agents and Supergirl’s pals Hank Henshaw, her sister Alex, and some blond lady whose name I forget are all zombies, shambling towards Kara! Plus, they say really mean stuff as they overtake and start slashing away at her body. The trash talking is a bridge too far, however, because it tips Supergirl off that these zombified versions of her sister and mentor are not real, since they would never be such meanies to her! Well, no one said she was a great detective.

Kara realizes she’s being spun through dreams, and is able to see some gigantic, feminine eyes of yellow above her, which belong either to the entity keeping Supergirl in nonny-land or a super-sexy space tiger. Oh, please let it be a super-sexy space tiger. Before Supergirl can get to the bottom of it, she’s sent to another dream, this time of her youth on Krypton. She’s having a perfectly normal meal of gross-sounding stuff with her parents, but quickly realizes that none of what she is experiencing is real—because, you see, she was sleeping for a long time while her escape pod puttered its way to Earth via the Phantom Zone, so she learned how to control her dreams a long time ago! She can even rend apart some, uh, dream fabric, and she’s off to find this yellow-eyed space tiger in the next chapter!

This was a pretty cool chapter that is likely setup for what will be an ass-kicking second half. The fact that one of Supergirl’s powers is to be totally good at lucid dreaming was unexpected but makes good sense within the context of the character’s origin. I thought some of the plotting choices were interesting; using a kind of haphazard, purple gutter for her Kryptonian dream, for instance, or having a more scratchy, bluer gutter for the zombie dream. Though the reader usually knows what is a dream before Kara does, it’s still interesting to see how each one is depicted, as she delves deeper and deeper into her subconscious. My only misgiving with this chapter is that the art seemed very uneven. I would chalk it up to a stylistic choice to delineate different dreams from one another, but it is uneven within the dreams themselves; sometimes meticulously rendered, and then sort of sketched in the very next panel. It never gets bad, though, and overall this is a fun little tale that won’t give you a ton of information, but is still good fun to read.

Bits and Pieces:

This chapter answers the question, "Does Supergirl dream of electric sheep?" Not when some unseen villain is in charge, she doesn't. Story is okay but the art vacillates between very good and not very good, and never really fits the tone of the book as I've come to know it. We're probably going to see Supergirl kick major butt next issue, so if you want to see that, you should probably get this chapter so you're all prepared. And besides, it's the only way you'll find out if Supergirl sleeps in the nude!

6.5/10