Supergirl #37: This Is the REAL Me!

It’s hard to read this as anything more than a giant temper tantrum on Kara’s part. Unlike the other Infected, Kara manages to keep more of the good qualities of her personality, but with the violence that comes with being unshackled from full heroism. This issue sees her saving a bus full of school children from falling off of a bridge, but the way that she does it is so nonchalant, as if it’s more of an inconvenience to her than anything. 

Rachael Stott, with Cris Peter on colors, does an excellent job of capturing this bored vanity of Infected Kara especially as she casually tosses the bus over her shoulder and looks at her manicured nails. In just a few short scenes, we know everything that we need to about this current version of Kara. She thinks that she’s the hottest hero on the block and that everything is beneath her.

Of course, after she saves the (now crying) kids, she goes on to “check” on the man that caused the accident. In her mad rage, she lifts the driver and threatens to kill him before Superman swoops in to stop her. As he is known to do, he tries to talk her down, saying he’ll help her return to normal, but she’s not having any of it. Supergirl punches him in the chest about sixty-five times and crashes him through an overpass before Batman shows up to the fight.

Batman does his best in between her barbs about his dead Robins and how he can’t control her. We get a really good page where she rips his Batwing apart and pulls him out of it. Stott gives it immense intensity as parts of the plane explode and pieces break apart. Peter colors the explosion excellently and showcases the red of Kara’s cape fantastically against the blacks of the Batwing. She then rips Batman out of his vehicle and holds him in the air.

Batman tells her that with the way that she’s going, she’s only proving his concerns about her correct, calling back to a World’s Finest storyline from years ago. He then asks her to prove him wrong and she sees a flash of her old self before tossing Batman, knowing that Superman will save him. As we’ve seen in contrast to the other Infected, Kara does maintain a bit of her old personality as mentioned earlier and her body seems to be actively fighting back the infection through these visions. 

This apparently reaches a point where The Batman Who Laughs begins to scream in her ear to get her to follow his evil orders. It seems as though he’s not able to get her fully under his thumb, but he promises that she will be in time.