Supergirl Proves This One Misguided Comic Book Strategy Has Failed
A direct reliance on the source material isn't always the best way to go.
Even though certain 20th-century superhero movies were successful and iconic, we’ve come a long way from the days of Batman: The Movie and Superman: The Movie. Back then, the idea of major blockbusters based on comic book characters was an unproven gamble, but since the late 1990s and into the 21st century, superheroes burst into the mainstream with Blade, X-Men, Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy, and the entirety of the MCU – each one further entrenching us into a moviegoing landscape inextricable from the cultural dominance of the superhero. Even now, as we approach critical mass and conversations about “superhero fatigue” become more and more prevalent, we still can’t make it through a calendar year without at least a couple of costumed adventurers soaring through theaters to the tune of millions of dollars.
In the early days, these movies were far more willing to bend comic book lore to the will of the screenwriter and director – the original Blade screenplay from David S. Goyer, rewrote the character’s origins — created by Marv Wolfman — to be set in America instead of London, a change that quickly made its way to the page, and many other superhero films took their own liberties with the source material as well. But now that the genre has become one of the most prevalent in Hollywood, these franchises have started plumbing the depths of canon with more intentionality, directly adapting iconic storylines and using that sense of “accuracy” as a key part of the marketing…a strategy that has earned mixed results. In the case of this year’s Supergirl, a movie currently being met with middling reviews and a disappointing start to its box office run, part of the criticism has been a lack of fidelity to the Woman of Tomorrow storyline that it’s predominantly based on. But here’s the thing: This criticism could’ve been avoided wholesale if the DCU hadn’t made that adaptational choice such a major factor in the writing and promotion of the movie.
By only using Woman of Tomorrow as the direct basis of the film’s story, Supergirl may have shot itself in the foot.
Tom King’s WoT arc, written throughout 2021 and into 2022, follows Kara Zor-El in the aftermath of her 21st birthday, after a drunken barfight leads to a chance encounter with Ruthye Marye Knoll, an honor-bound young woman seeking vengeance against a space bandit and assassin named Krem of the Yellow Hills who’s responsible for the murder of her family. Initially reluctant to help her on her quest, Supergirl agrees to accompany Ruthye after a run-in with Krem ends with him poisoning Kara’s pet dog Krypto. The central journey of the comic takes them across the galaxy in their search for Krem and the antidote, with Supergirl trying to dissuade Ruthye from her quest for revenge along the way.
To Supergirl’s credit, it sticks to the story in the broad strokes: Krem massacres Ruthye’s family, Supergirl comes to her aid as a result of a drunken bar fight, Krypto is poisoned, and the two of them embark on a journey to find their common enemy. It’s in the details that the execution diverges from the book – Krem goes from being a conventionally attractive swashbuckler to a traditionally “ugly” movie villain (complete with a scarified face and black leather armor), the nature of Ruthye’s quest with Kara is severely truncated, which is what allows Ruthye to see firsthand the nature of the horror up close, and drastically changes the ending of the original arc, simplifying its complicated story about the cyclical nature of hurt and the temptation of nihilism into an easy-to-digest resolution that ends with a dead bad guy.
And on top of it all, out of everything the movie adapts from the book, it leaves out Bilquis Evely’s bold and stunning usage of color.
While there are quite a few other problems the film faces, it’s hard to ignore that its narrative issues stem from the decision to straightforwardly adapt Woman of Tomorrow in the first place. And at first glance, that seems like a strange takeaway – it’s a critically acclaimed storyline, and for years comic book fans have wanted to see films adapt iconic story arcs more directly. However, there’s a reason Woman of Tomorrow works on the page in a way the filmed version never could: it’s a story that operates as a deconstruction of Kara Zor-El and the unwavering optimism she has represented throughout her existence as a character. Exploring her buried grief regarding the destruction of her homeworld and her refusal to end a life takes on a new significance because she’s spent over 60 years of real-time storytelling suppressing her pain and upholding her golden rule – directly adapting WoT as Kara’s first DCU outing misses the metatextual nature of why the book works within the decades-long lineage of Supergirl as a comic book character.
That’s not to mention the ways in which the film outright changes certain elements of the story. In the book Krem is a despicable mass-murderer, but the fact that Ruthye and Supergirl banish him to the Phantom Zone instead of ending him forces him to reckon with his own failings as a human being and grow to feel genuine remorse for his crimes – making him a slaver and a trafficker almost demands he meet his end because a moviegoing audience truthfully just has a different tolerance for that kind of debauchery. Kara slaying him by the end fits a character who’s evil in a nastier way, but it also compromises the original intent of a story that’s ultimately about Kara and Ruthye preserving their own innocence and refusing to beat Krem in a way that validates his violent worldview.
The nature of the changes to Krem’s characterization practically ensure the film has to compromise the original story’s complicated ending.
At the end of the day, some of the most successful comic book movies have done so without trying to be a 1 to 1 recreation of specific stories – Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 2 borrows elements of the seminal Spider-Man No More arc and combines them with an original story, and The Dark Knight smashes together The Long Halloween, iconic works from Alan Moore, and even aspects from The Joker’s first comic appearance in order to craft a new narrative. Comic books and movies are different media, and the nature of comic book stories exists in relation to decades of solidified canon; movies, on the other hand, have to craft entirely new depictions of these archetypal characters to appeal to unfamiliar audience members and also to tell cohesive stories unto themselves. By directly adapting Woman of Tomorrow, Supergirl ran the risk of letting down fans of the original story who were promised an impossible direct adaptation of the book, and also compromised its own chance to create a new satisfying introduction for the character by flying too close to source material never meant to stand on its own.
