Wednesday, April 29, 2015

SUPERGIRL'S AUTO-NEUROTIC ASPHYXIATION

He'll heal from the head injury, but he'll only have fifty percent mobility in his albumen.
Supergirl's more famous cousin Superman tends to have the more bizarre adventures locked down for himself. In her decades of publication, Supergirl's managed to get by without developing an ant-head, becoming a big-headed Supergirl of the future, or splitting apart into Supergirl-Red and Supergirl-Blue. Although, she has on more then one occasion found Jimmy Olsen romantically attractive, which beats "getting turned into a lion superhero by an out space Circe" by about ten degrees of weird.

Also ranking high on Supergirl's list of personal acid trips is this 1986 public service comic released in conjunction with American Honda, the U.S.Department of Transportation's National Safety Belt Campaign, and methylenedioxymethamphetamine.

Taking the form of a fever dream experienced by a pair of children trapped in the backseat of Linda (Supergirl) Danvers' midsize sedan, for no apparent reason. Boring the children to tears with her endless stories about hiding android copies of herself inside a hollow tree by the orphanage where Superman left her when she started becoming too much of a pain in his invulnerable ass, and how you should be careful when picking a horse from the stable because if you pick right it might turn out to magical boyfriend transformed by celestial happenings into a pony, Linda's soon left alone at the steering wheel as the Xanax kicks in.Even the kids' dog "Barko," named in a fit of creative brilliance, falls into the same dream, which seems to imply that it's a trap set by Freddy Kreuger.

"Identify potential targets on our two and ten and keep the sight clear. If you find the target, terminate it."

Where the kids - Sally and Jack, from the version of Nightmare Before Christmas which took place in a dull suburb near a chemical factory runoff pipe - end up is MOTORVILLE, home of the Motown Sound and your world-champion Tigers.

What Motorville turns out to be is a fantasy land of interlocking highways and endless chains of cars and trucks swinging at breakneck speed. So "Southern California," also it looks a little like a cotton candy-colored MegaCity One. And these kids are perps! Six months in the iso-cube!

Motorville is also pretty heavily populated exclusively with amped-up 80's versions of characters from Mother Goose nursery rhymes, like a corporate Old Lady Who Lived In A Shoe who drives her innumerable kids around in a limo, a hack Humpty Dumpty, a Big Bad Wolf driving a big rig and dressed like Patrick Swayze in both Roadhouse AND Dirty Dancing all at once and a set of Three Little Pigs who look like the answer to a Sphinx's riddle if the answer were "Three stages of John Cusack's career."

Pure soaking wet nonsense.

Packed with traffic-maddened nursery rhymes on a death drive to eternity Motorville basically provides Supergirl with endless opportunities to haul cartoon animals out of flaming wrecks. It's like Faces of Death meets The New Zoo Revue. Count among that a guest appearance by Larry and Vince, the talking Crash Test Dummies (mm-mm) which were the mascots for "buckling up" and the only thing keeping this book from being utterly unreadable, confusing garbage is the absence on rambling, incoherent speech rattled off at lightning speed.

OH WAIT IT'S GOT THAT. The dialogue in this adventure contains just the slightest trace of unregulated Bolivian diet pills on the breath, with panels being crammed full of word balloons uttered ceaselessly by unknown speakers. It's like a nervous breakdown in the middle of a Garfield strip, and I don't know if the writers should've been paid more or less for having flung so many Scrabble tiles so expertly at the nearest wall.

The adventure comes to a close with Vince and Larry doing their one thing and crashing a car, and then the kids gently waking up to find Linda still driving and droning on about stuff like how Streaky is a boy cat but counts as a girl because all cats are girls, legally, on Krypton.

Just in case a cast of frantically exuberant cartoon talking animals constantly extolling the virtues of buckling up, in between having their carcasses hurled like fat ham meteors out of explosive collisions wasn't enough to convince you of the safety of seat belts, then luckily they've also included a game board which you can use to bore your own fellow travelers into a delirious series of half-awake hallucinations of constant carnage. Roll a seven and you get to haul Little Red Riding Hood's mangled legs out from the grill of the semi which cut her in half by jumping the overpass and dropping into oncoming traffic.

This is the game you have to play with the Grim Reaper in order to escape Death. 


1 comment:

Hypersmash Studios said...

This is one of the better illustrated entries in the series. The line work looks great, and the artist seems to have an excellent control of the fundamentals. Very easy on the eyes, and stands up to a lot of the work out on the stands right now.

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