Showcase #98 - When the Symbioship Strikes

WHEN THE SYMBIOSHIP STRIKES
SHOWCASE PRESENTS #98

Published: 15th December 1977
Cover Date: March 1978
Cover Artists: Joe Staton / Dick Giordano
Writer: Paul Levitz
Penciler: Joe Staton
Inker: Dick Giordano
Colourist: Adrienne Roy
Letterer: Ben Oda
Editors: Joe Orlando

Introduction

There is an advantage of bingeing a whole load of comics is that you get to remember the lost classics, and lost duds, that have gotten lost in the general zeitgeist of the shape of things now. Those who do it the long way around however tend to edit history to suit whatever the current image of a character/show. An excellent example of this is Captain Kirk from the original Star Trek, his womanizing ways, a characterization that made it into the Kelvinverse films, is vastly overstated and even compared to the time he's almost chaste.

What has this got to do with Power Girl you ask? Well unless you're a completes and/or a blogger/YouTuber the version of the character is going to be the most popular version, for Pee Gee the confident badass girl boss version of Karen Starr of the 21st century. Normally the two live in harmony, and to be clear neither is wrong until a writer doing due diligence reads the older comics and picks up an aspect of the character that doesn't vibe with the zeitgeist. This is what is happening now (in 2023) with this comic in particular having a massive influence on the latest Power Girl adventure, that being Night Terrors: Action Comic which is a nightmare version of this issue.

That's a lot of words for a comic that whilst has some of my favourite panels it's really a masterpiece just solid. So let's get to this...

Sypnosis

We start as the last issue ends with the reporter Andrew Vinson being trapped in a suit of Power Armour attacking Power Girl, in a full-page spread that also quickly dispenses the whole Earth-2 explanation that apparently was too complicated for 80s readers to understand. The suit has a whole biofeedback thing that means Pee Gee has to pull her punches otherwise she'll hurt the reporter trapped in the suit. Using her smarts she fashions an iron ring that she tosses it over the suit causing it to crash allowing her to free Andrew. The suit then reverts to the symbioship (comic brain me wants to use the term symbiot, but no t in this case). 

Pee Gee goes to take her ship safely away, but the idiot Vension grabs hold of her cape to come along to find out what is going on with Kara. We stick with the cops one of whom is working for the baddies and basically waltzes into the evidence room to take the item they were after from the very beginning. Through this, he reveals himself to be Brainwave, in both his more superhero look and Doctor Sivana forms.

We then cut back to Pee Gee where we finally get the origin of this version of Kara, after the classic Krypton explodes and an El sending a rocket to Earth, we learn that Zor-el put his toddler daughter into suspended animation, suspended-ish as she still grows up but slower to count the fact that whilst it took forty-ish years (the comic says sixty years to really screw things up timeline wise) to get to Earth if you accept that the Goldern Age to Silver/Bronze Age happens in real-time and not the current comic book time we have not, that causes all kinds of the weirdness of what is and isn't currently in continuity. The screwed-up nature of this suspended animation is that Kara was fed a virtual reality version of Krypton, growing up in this version of her homeworld for what she felt was twenty years. When she says she woke up from her Krypton to the "real" world she managed is such an understatement to the trauma that she must have felt from going from that to finding out her world and everyone, unlike Clark or even Supergirl, she knew for a good decade even if they were virtual.

Anyway, the Symbioship take this exposition as a chance to grab Pee Gee and reintroduce her into virtual reality again. In her The Man Who Has Everything moment (this is also eight years before that comic, not to suggest Moore stole this idea or anything) she starts to reject this reality, starting with the perfect boyfriend whom she rejects almost immediately. The ship changes tact giving her a university education and a career, which she also rejects out of hand. Then in a full-page spread I can't help but love, it gives her a  a baby, sex unknown, who is also rejected, though it doesn't play up the pathos as much as it could. So the ship punishes her by showing her a dead world with her being to only inhabitant, which is the worst thing it could do as it gives her the impetus to escape reality crashing out back into the real world. This all in three pages of what could, as the aforementioned Moore comic shows, could have been a story in its own right. There's a reading or this reality, one that might very much be me, is a rejection of the classic nuclear family and that if ignore later stuff can easily imagine that Kara is gay but the comic being of the time can't say such things. Obviously, the only thing I can say for sure is that Pee Gee is following the ideas of second-wave feminism (the good parts) of a woman being able to have a career and family without any man being involved.

Free but still feeling the ship's influence they flee to the Superman museum, in Metropolis I guess though it might be Gotham for some reason, or rather are drawn there by the ship that talks to tell her that she'll never escape its influence until Andrew in a moment of usefulness uses the museum's holoprojector to confuse the ship into the idea that it's back on Krypton, which in a very Original Star Trek overloads its logic circuits causing it to shut down. This moment of weakness, where Pee Gee had to be saved by someone else, is where we start the point of this mini to soften Pee Gee a little to have her be a lot less abrasive than she's been in the previous issues of All-Star's.

Final Thoughts

This issue is on the whole rather light, but I still can't hate it for those four pages that give us a glimpse of an idealised Krypton, one that only a decade on would have been the entire series rather than the whole Brainwave thing rumbling on the background, to spoil the next issue the bioship thing goes away and doesn't play a part in the finale. Even her future career in computing has nothing to do with virtual reality, even though her getting a university education plays a part in the story.

Despite this, I can't help but love this story, in principle at least, as this for me is really the comic where I got the character and is probably the reason why all these years later I'm still (sometimes erratically) writing this blog.