SUPERGIRL #32

Time Heals All Wounds

October 2008

Written by Kelley Puckett

Pencils by Ron Randall

Inks by Ron Randall

Cover by Drew Johnson and Ray Snyder

Synopsis

After the funeral for Tommy, the boy that Supergirl intended to cure but could not, Supergirl tells Superman that no matter how long it takes, she is going to bring him back.  Fifty years later, Supergirl is in outer space and prepares a squad of men to attack Dolok, a destroyer of planets.  Just as Supergirl gets close, Dolok goes back in time and captures her.  However, Supergirl planned for that.  A Green Lantern is hidden among the squad of men, ready to attack Dolok.  Seeing that Dolok jumps back in time, but Supergirl is waiting for him at that exact moment.  Dolok continues to jump backwards and each time Supergirl is waiting.  She finally defeats him and steals the time-traveling device.  She takes it back to Earth, to Tommy’s parents to give it to them as a gift, but she is too late, they died.  She then thinks she can go back before they died or even go back before Tommy died or go back and correct all of her mistakes. But then she destroys the time machine as she realizes that for better or worse she needs to move on.

Review by Binkley (e-mail)

So, does this mean that for the next 50 years, Kara will be spending all of her time in outer space waiting for Dolok to come backwards into time?  And why does Dolok go back to the exact same spot?  Is that what the time machine does?  It is not explained.  Think about this:  if someone appeared to punch you in the same place every few years, wouldn’t you try to avoid that spot?  And since he is going back in time, he should then be able to fix the future and never appear there again?  Oh, wait, he lost the time travel device, so he shouldn’t be able to jump back in time because he already lost it in the past.   Oh, time travel stories make my head hurt.

And I think this is my basic problem with the issue.  I mean, I like the way Puckett gets to the point where Kara needs to move on with her life rather than deal with something she can’t fix.  But the time travel situation just doesn’t make much sense.  And I think the most important time travel moment is missed:  the one in which future Supergirl tells past Supergirl to let it go.  Because let’s face it, the character that learns the lesson?  Thirty years in the future.  The current Supergirl in the current DCU has learned nothing.

In an earlier issue, Puckett showed a future in which Kara really did cure cancer and created a human race that was entirely meta.  So that future never happened?  But if never happened, how could it actually occur.  And while you can argue that something happened to prevent that future, I would be hard pressed to determine what that was; I don’t think Puckett tried to explain that to the readers.  As I mentioned in my previous review, there are a lot of good ideas peeking in and around this story, but it doesn’t coalesce into a whole and there are tons of dangling plot points that never get addressed or re-addressed. 

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