Supergirl uses the crystal from her ship to travel to the City of Argo, but the Girl of Steel finds a desolate, dead city, rather than silver age fertility. Returning home, she activates a hologram from Zor-El, her father. Alas, he offers no comfort.
Zor-El
Mikes Green and Johnson redeem Zor-El, who was recently turned into a hateful and/or lusty individual with the hots for Lara, in Smallville. It worked for another continuity, but given how Supergirl already suggested a happier childhood for Kara than Jeph Loeb imagined, it wouldn't have fit. Zor-El is more like you expect the brother to Jor-El to be. Decent and brilliant with a love for his daughter.
It doesn't look however like his plan to save Argo worked, or perhaps it worked for a time before falling prey to entropy. Whatever the case, the silver age fairy tale dissipates like a dream or fantasy and gives way to brutal reality.
New Badass on the Block
It's no spoiler to say that the Big Bad doesn't offer that hand for long. Supergirl and she are evenly matched thanks to the distance from earth's yellow sun. Unlike Simon Tycho, Reign deserves her hits against the Maid of Might. That's because Reign's rationale for fighting is much stronger. Her motivation centers on a mystery with Kryptonian roots, and Reign doesn't throw any surprises that haven't been foreshadowed at her. She's super-strong. She's got a fancy pig-sticker. We're done.
No matter if depicting a dead city, the warmth of Zor-El or designing the new threat for Supergirl to fight, Mahmud Asrar and Dave McCaig never give anything but their best, yet the greatest art of all within these pages comes from the many illustrations of the Girl Who Can Fly.
We see Supergirl expressing every emotion in the book. From the above desperation to the despair of discovering that Superman told the truth. Kara's anger is palpable, and you'll never once think of her as Superman's lil' cousin.
Ray Tate's first online work appeared in 1994 for Knotted. He has had a short story, "Spider Without a Web," published in 1995 for the magazine evernight and earned a degree in Biology from the University of Pittsburgh. Since 1995, Ray self-published The Pick of the Brown Bag on various usenet groups, where he reviewed comic books, Doctor Who novels, movies and occasionally music. Circa 2000, he contributed his reviews to Silver Bullet Comic Books (later Comics Bulletin) and became its senior reviewer. Ray Tate would like to think that he's young at heart. Of course, we all know better.