I Am, as Far as I Can Tell, the First Person to Ever Apply Farah Mendlesohn's Literary Theory to Bob Budiansky Transformers Comics... and Probably Also the Last

Sometimes you happen to read the two right things around the same time to realize there's a connection between them.

I like to think that I mix my "lowbrow" reading with "highbrow" reading. So, on the one hand, long excavations of mediocre comics from the 1980s; on the other hand, literary critical theory. Such a coincidence happened earlier this semester, when I was reading my way through Marvel's 1980s Transformers comics and rereading bits of Farah Mendlesohn's Rhetorics of Fantasy for a couple different projects I have been working on. (More on those anon, I'm sure.)

Something I've been thinking about a lot during this rereading of the Transformers canon, and occasionally reference in my posts on it, is the essay "Budianskian and Furmanist: A New Model of Storytelling Analysis" by the poster only known as "Broadside" (it's totally possible she gives her real name somewhere, actually, I dunno) on the blog of the Transformers wiki. In this essay, Broadsides posits that there are essentially only two form of Transformers storytelling, Budianskian and Furmanist.

from The Transformers US #20
(script by Bob Budiansky, art by Herb Trimpe and Ian Akin & Brian Garvey)

The modes are named after the two biggest writers on the G1 Transformers comics. Bob Budiansky was the editor for the US comic's first few issues, and then with issue #5 became the writer; he was the man who developed a lot of the major elements of the G1 mythos, including the names of almost every character. As Broadside says, "Budiansky believed that the most interesting thing about the entire Transformers setup was that the Transformers were on Earth. The vast majority of his stories revolved around ideas of culture clash and worlds colliding; Bob’s Autobots would be perplexed and fascinated by human behaviours, from small-town life to professional wrestling."

Examples of the Budianskian mode include the first two seasons of the G1 cartoon, the Michael Bay films, Transformers Animated, and the latter part of John Barber's run on Robots in Disguise for IDW.

from The Transformers: Robots in Disguise Annual 2012
(script by James Barber, art by Guido Guidi)

Simon Furman became the primary writer of the UK Transformers comic after its first few installments, and took over for Budiansky on the US comic after he moved on. As Broadside says, Furman's approach "looks at Cybertronians from an internal perspective; it’s concerned with how they interact with each other, and the lore and history and substance of their own world. The point of the robots as characters isn’t to contrast with the human experience, but to be a stand-in for them."

Example of the Furmanist mode include the 1986 Transformers film, Beast Wars and Beast Machines, and More than Meets the Eye and Lost Light from IDW. 

Broadside herself points out that each writer was totally capable of working in the other mode. When Furman returned to Transformers in the 2000s for IDW, the story he wrote was Budianskian; I would argue that the very first Furmanist Transformers story was Return to Cybertron, which was by Bob Budiansky. (My claim is that Furman's first true Furmanist story was Target: 2006, which comes after this, and is obviously inspired by it.)

Broadside claims neither of these approaches is better than the other, it comes down to your preference—but that often Transformers stories succeed best when they realize what mode they ought to be working in. I haven't seen the two shows she uses as examples, but she says "[the Furmanist show] Cyberverse flourished when it got out from under its vestigial Budianskian trappings, [the Budianskian] EarthSpark gets bogged down when it delves into the Furmanist lore of the Thirteen..." She is definitely partial to the Budianskian mode.

from The Transformers: Infiltration #5
(script by Simon Furman, art by E. J. Su)

I myself prefer the Furmanist one; my two favorite Transformers stories are Beast Wars / Beast Machines and More than Meets the Eye / Lost Light, both of which feature no human characters. Some of my least favorite Transformers stories are Budianskian, such as the G1 cartoon and the Michael Bay films. All other things being equal, I clearly have a preference. But I can still enjoy a Budianskian story: Furman's original IDW arc is excellent, and it's all told from a human perspective, while one of my favorite-ever Transformers stories is "Showdown!", a G1 comic by Budiansky about the relationship between Skids the Autobot and Wyoming grocery store cashier named Charlene who dreams of being a cowgirl. 

And Furmanist storytelling definitely has a failure mode: what I like about the Furmanist style is how it allows the Transformers characters to pop, but all too often, Furmanist stories can turn into tedious expositions of lore. (James Barber wrote some great Furmanist stories about the state of postwar Cybertron for IDW, but also wrote some really tedious ones about complicated machinations by Shockwave that mostly seemed to be there to resolve continuity issues.) As I quoted Broadside above, in a Furmanist story, "[t]he point of the robots as characters isn’t to contrast with the human experience, but to be a stand-in for them." When the stories spend too much time diving into the "lore," this aspect gets lost.

Like any good literary theory, this isn't just a tool for classification, but one of better understanding: I think I am appreciating Budiansky's G1 comics more on this reread with this insight to use as a lens. 

from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
(story by L. Frank Baum, art by W. W. Denslow)

Such a thing is also true of Farah Mendlesohn's Rhetorics of Fantasy. I think about Mendlesohn's classification of fantasy a lot, because it doesn't just allow you to put fantasy into different buckets, but it also it creates a better understanding of what it's doing. Mendlesohn breaks fantasy down into four categories, based on the relationship between the the viewpoint of the reader and the fantastic. In "the portal-quest fantasy," for example, the viewpoint of the reader is with a character who travels into a new-to-them fantastic world: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is probably the most obvious examples of this, we travel into a new world with Dorothy, and we discover it alongside her.

The two that are relevant here, though, are what Mendlesohn calls the "intrusion fantasy" and the "immersive fantasy." In the intrusion fantasy, we are in a "real" world, our viewpoint is aligned with  characters who do not know the fantastic until in intrudes in their world. From my own recent reading, I would say that Neil Gaiman's American Gods and Sam Swicegood's The Wizards on Walnut Street are good examples of this. This, surely, is the Budianskian mode! In this style of storytelling, the reader and the character have to work together to understand the fantastic. 

The immersive fantasy, on the other hand, is one where our viewpoint is aligned with a character who does know the fantastic, even though we do not. This is your built-up secondary world fantasy, where we are in a complex magical world and need to work to figure it out. Indeed, the pleasure is in coming to understand this fantastic world that the characters already get but you do not; from my recent reading, I would categorize Robert Jackson Bennett's The Tainted Cup and Natasha Pulley's The Kingdoms as good examples. What is Furmanist storytelling but immersive fantasy?

(Sort of a side note, but it's worth pointing out that stories can operate in multiple rhetorics under Mendlesohn's system. The Lord of the Rings, for example, is a portal-quest fantasy, because even though the entire thing takes place in a secondary world, we move from the "normal" world of the Shire to the wider magical world of Middle-earth with viewpoint characters who do not understand the latter. Or you have Robin McKinley's The Hero and the Crown, which starts as an immersive fantasy—we are in the magical land of Damar—then becomes an intrusion fantasy—Damar is threatened by magic from another realm—and finally a portal-quest fantasy—the character travels into that realm to stop it.)

It's probably little surprise, then, that I enjoy Furmanist stories more than Budianskian ones on the whole, because I also tend to prefer immersive fantasies to intrusion ones. Writing my last few paragraphs, it was easy for me to think of immersive fantasies; it was much harder to think of intrusion ones. I like that sense (to paraphrase Jo Walton for the umpteenth time) that the world itself is a mystery we must solve, and you very much get that from the immersive fantasy.

But that also makes the origin of what I think of as the failure mode of Furmanist stories clear. Surely one of the foremost writers of the immersive fantasy in our time is Brandon Sanderson. Sanderson often writes stories that seem like they ought to be portal-quest fantasies, or are engaged with thinking about the parameters of the portal-quest fantasy, but are not portal-quest fantasies; the first Mistborn novel, The Final Empire, is a good example of this. I spent much of the beginning of the book thinking the characters were going to go on a quest, but this never happens; eventually you discover the state of the world is due to someone who did go on a quest in the distant past. But like a bad Furmanist story, Sanderson often becomes interested in "lore" for its own sake; to quote my own review of the third book:

I've always been interested in the people and the politics of this series; the godlike entities have never interested me for their own sake. This volume, however, seems to think I'll find vast cosmic entities interesting just, uh, because? This might be what other people read fantasy fiction for, but I just can't get into it.
     Instead of paying off character and thematic threads from the first two books, the book seems more interested in paying off mysteries of backstory that I didn't even know were mysteries! Like, one of the big reveals of this book is "where did the kandra and koloss come from." I didn't know that the kandra and koloss were supposed to come from anywhere! They're weird fantasy creatures, this is a fantasy novel, why would I think they come from anywhere any more than a dog comes from somewhere in a piece of mimetic fiction? But there's an explanation that ties it into the novel's "magic system." So many things get explained that I never wanted an explanation for. 

This is sort of the equivalent of telling me about Primus or the Fallen or the origins of the Matrix of Leadership in a Transformers comic. These things don't matter in and of themselves, they only matter if they tell us something about the characters. (I make a related point in my review of the sixth Mistborn book, The Bands of Mourning, but I haven't posted that yet, so only click the link if it's after June 3rd.)

What was particularly striking, though, as I mapped Mendlesohn's theory onto Broadside's is that Transformers doesn't have an obvious equivalent to the portal-quest fantasy. Where is the story about a human character who travels to Cybertron, where the human is the viewpoint character throughout? This seems like such an obvious good idea that I can't believe it hasn't been done... but there's so much Transformers out there that surely someone has and I just don't know about it! But if not, please give me a call, Skybound, and I'll write it for you. 

This is a side post to a series about Marvel's The Transformers. The next covers US issues #21-22 and UK issues #85-92. Previous installments are listed below:

1. US #1-3 & 33-34 / UK #1-6 & 9-17 (1984-85)
2. US #4-8 / UK #7-8 & 18-30 (1984-85) 
3. US #9-12 / UK #31-41 (1985-86) 
4. US #13-14 / UK #42-54 (1985-86) 
5. US #15-16 / UK #54-63 (1985-86)
6. US #17-20 / UK #64-74 (1986) 

(I want to note that the greatest film series of our time, Marvel's Thor, did cover all three of these Mendlesohn rhetorics across its first three films. The first Thor movie is an intrusion fantasy (Thor comes to our world), The Dark World is a portal-quest fantasy (Jane goes to Asgard), and Ragnarok is immersive (it's all about what's going on the fantasy world). If only Transformers could reach such heights!)

Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848)

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë

Originally published: 1848
Acquired: December 2009
Read: November 2025

As a Victorianist, I was of course made to read a lot of Brontë novels in undergrad and grad school, either in coursework or beyond: Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, The Professor, Villette. But they were all by Emily or Charlotte... never Anne! I did once pick up a copy of Anne's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall but of course it has taken me over fifteen years to get around to reading it.

I was familiar with Kate Beaton's "Dude Watchin' with the Brontës," which tells us that marrying alcoholic brooding men with no emotional intelligence was a thing that Emily and Charlotte were into, but not Anne, and indeed, that's basically the thesis of Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Our protagonist is a gentleman farmer who gets a new neighbor, a woman with a daughter; he's attracted to her but she's mysterious. Eventually she tells him the story of her first marriage, which was quite terrible. It's easy to read this as what it really might be like to be married to, say, Heathcliff. Then everything works out. It's definitely more pious than the works of Charlotte or Emily, and I don't know that it was more to my actual taste than Jane Eyre, which probably beats it for character complexity. But it, despite being a bit on the slow side, certainly wasn't as boring as The Professor or Villette.

So I am glad I finally read it, and I intend to seek out Anne's other novel now, but I doubt I will ever become a superfan of any of the Brontës, as influential as they all are. 

Marvel's The Transformers Year Two, Part IV: Target: 2006 Part One (UK #75-84)

So here we hit the tie-ins to The Transformers: The Movie. In the US, this was a three-issue adaptation of the movie, which I haven't actually read before, as IDW's Transformers Classics reprints included it in volume 7, not in the volume it would have fit in by publication order, and I only read the first four volumes. In the UK, this was the storyline Target: 2006, where a set of film characters travelled back in time to the present during the events of the film.

I certainly wouldn't recommend this for a new-to-this-material reader, but I decided to read chronologically. Which is to say, for the film characters, Target: 2006 probably takes place after Galvatron says, "Decepticons, to Earth" on p. 5 of issue #2 of the film adaption, so I read the film adaptation up to that panel, then jumped to the beginning of Target: 2006, read all of it, then returned to p. 5 of issue #2 of the film. The Til All Are One compendium, much more sensibly, places the film adaptation in its entirerty after the last part of Target: 2006.

I also read a story from the 1986 annual here, which would have been released around this time, though the compendium places it much earlier. "State Games" is a text story that serves as a prequel to "A There Shall Come... a Leader!" from the 1985 annual, but I like reading it here because it includes Emirate Xaaron, who appears in the present day in Target: 2006, nicely setting up our return to Cybertron in that story arc. (The very short text feature "Cybertron: The Middle Years!", included in UK issue #83, bridges the gap between the long-ago Cybertron of "State Games" and "There Shall Come..." and the present-day Cybertron of Return to Cybertron and Target: 2006.)

That makes this my first batch of Marvel Transformers stories to include no regular issues of the US comic. 

In the National Interest, Parts 2–4 / "State Games: A Tale from Cybertron" / "The Planet-Eater!" / "Judgment Day!" (part 1) / Target: 2006, Prologue & Parts 1–6, from The Transformers UK #75-84 (23 Aug.–25 Oct. 1986), The Transformers Annual [1986], and The Transformers: The Movie #1-2 (Dec. 1986–Jan. 1987); reprinted in The Transformers: Til All Are One Compendium One (2025)

stories by Simon Furman, James Hill, and Ralph Macchio; pencils by Will Simpson, Johns Stokes, Don Perlin, Jeff Anderson, Ron Smith, and Geoff Senior; inks by Dave Hine, Tim Perkins (with Andrew Leary), Will Simpson, Ian Akin & Brian Garvey, Jeff Anderson, Ron Smith, and Geoff Senior; letters by Annie Halfacree, Janice Chiang, and Starkings; colours by John Burns, Gina Hart, Tony Jozwiak, Nel Yomtov, and John Burns

from The Transformers UK #74*

In the National Interest is fine. It has to balance out one thing that I enjoy and one thing I don't, in that I do like the Dinobots, especially the ongoing subplot about Sludge's crush on human reporter Joy Meadows, but on the other hand, the convoluted clandestine machinations of the Intelligence and Information Institute (Triple-I!) rapidly get tedious. Whenever secret organizations get involved in Transformers stories, I tune out; they really shift things away from the core appeal of Budianskian storytelling, I think. Still, good showing for the Dinobots.

 

"State Games" is a decent text story, showing how the war between the Autobots and Decepticons came about. It packs in a lot of exposition and thus gets a bit overwhelming, but it has some interesting ideas; the kernel of the idea that was explored in great detail in the IDW continuity, that Megatron and his comrades had legitimate grievances, comes from this story. It's not as nuanced as it would be later on... but it is pretty nuanced for a 1980s kids comic! Note that in this story, "Optimus Prime" is just a guy's name, not some kind of title, even though it came out a month after The Transformers: The Movie, where we learned there was a mythical significance to "Prime." Not a criticism of the story, but it shows you how much the Transformers mythos was being made up as it went along.

 

from The Transformers: The Movie #1

The first half of the comics adaptation of the movie is fine; it's a bit jumpy and narration heavy, and I wonder how much it would make sense to someone who hadn't actually seen the film. The death of Optimus Prime seems kind of crammed in... on the other hand, the capture of Megatron by Unicron and subsequent transformation into Galvatron is very well done. Mostly reading it made me aware of how much work the film's soundtrack and editing did in making the events seem grandiose.

 

As mentioned above, I directly segued from page 5 of issue #2 of the comic into Target: 2006. In this story, Galvatron attempts to escape Unicron's control by travelling back in time to 1986. (The actual movie was set in 2005, as was the comic adaptation; in the UK comic, the movie's events were set in 2006, and the UK printing of the comic adaptation edited it to be consistent with that, but the compendium doesn't include those edits.) However, this isn't very clear at first: Target: 2006 is designed to be someone's introduction to the movie mythos, and so these things are very gradually revealed to the 1986 characters (and thus the reader) across the course of the story's first seven parts. 

 

Thus, reading it with the added context of already having read/seen the movie undermines it a bit... but to be honest, is probably also helpful, because there is a lot going on here. When Galvatron and his minions come back in time, three Autobots including Optimus Prime disappear, so they are disarray; this means that back on Cybetron, the Autobot resistance becomes aware that something has snuffed out the Creation Matrix, and so Ultra Magnus travels to Earth to find out what, even though he's a key part of a planned attack by the Wreckers on the Decepticon elite that can't be adjusted. So we're not just following Galvatron's machinations but also Ultra Magnus's adventures and what's going on back on Cybertron! Plus, Furman jumps around a lot chronologically; each installment almost always begins a bit after the previous one ended and then fills in some, if not all, of its events retrospectively. I admire his structural ambition, but I very often got lost and some key details of the story eluded me (I was very surprised when Starscream woke up in the Ark... totally missed where he was brought back to it).

 

from The Transformers UK #82

Still, the ambition of the story is admirable. This is surely Furman's first go at what we would now recognize as "Furmanist" storytelling: using the mythos of Transformers to its own end, rather than tying it into human characters, extrapolating from the much more "space opera" mode of the movie. I always like Ultra Magnus, and this is a good showing for him. I do think one of the story's big weaknesses is that not every comic book artist is cut out for drawing Transformers; you can probably get away with this in a story with a lot of human characters, but in a Furmanist story with only robots, you have to be good at drawing robots. Unfortunately, Will Simpson is not. It's a breath of fresh air when Geoff Senior turns up to do the last two installments reviewed here.

 

The other weird thing about reading in this sequence is that Kup and Blurr were pretty much completely cut out of the comics adaptation of the film, despite being prominent in the actual film, so when they appear with Hot Rod at the end of part six, you're very much like, "Who are those guys?" It's also jarring to have Target: 2006 heavily revolve around the comics version of the Matrix, where it's the "Creation Matrix," a computer program in Optimus's mind (than can be mentally transferred between people, even into a human being), when the story it ties into has the very different "Matrix of Leadership," a physical object in Optimus's chest.

 

This is the seventh in a series of posts about Marvel's The Transformers. The next covers US issues #21-22 and UK issues #85-92. (See also a side post analyzing the "Budianskian"/"Furmanist" framing.) Previous installments are listed below:

1. US #1-3 & 33-34 / UK #1-6 & 9-17 (1984-85)
2. US #4-8 / UK #7-8 & 18-30 (1984-85) 
3. US #9-12 / UK #31-41 (1985-86) 
4. US #13-14 / UK #42-54 (1985-86) 
5. US #15-16 / UK #54-63 (1985-86)
6. US #17-20 / UK #64-74 (1986) 

* Yes, I know this scan comes from an issue not reviewed in this post... but I like it too much to omit! 

Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan, Book 2: Broken Angels

I read Altered Carbon as part of my investigation into sf about "life extension"; I ultimately did not include it on my syllabus, but I was interested enough that I put the sequels on my reading list.

Broken Angels by Richard K. Morgan

Published: 2003
Read: November 2025

Broken Angels is very similar to Altered Carbon in some ways, and very different in others. It would have been easy, I reckon, to write another novel about Takeshi Kovacs investigating crimes, once again playing with the tropes of the noir genre. Richard Morgan does maintain the gritty, violent tone of Altered Carbon. Even moreso than in Altered Carbon, too, one can tell this isn't just violence for the sake of violence; this isn't just shock value. Rather, Morgan is very much interested in how politics and capital interact to create massive acts of violence, and how people react to the structures that enable violence. And, given the advanced technology of Morgan's future world, how what already happens in our world could get even worse. It sounds somewhat clinical and banal when I describe it, but I think it's really well done, and probably the best part of the book.

What I missed from Altered Carbon, though, was the setting and the (sub)genre; putting the story on Earth and making it a mystery let Morgan explore the complexities of how immortality technology and mind transference would impact society on any number of levels. Broken Angels is set on an Earth colony, and is more aligned with the mil sf subgenre (though a particularly antipatriotic strain of it, I would say), and thus we don't get as much of what hooked me in Altered Carbon. I think what Morgan is doing, Morgan does quite well, but it's less to my taste.

Still, in the next book Kovacs will be returning to his home planet, and the little glimpses of it we get throughout Broken Angels are fascinating: a place broken by political philosophy and sectarian violence. I think Morgan can go some good stuff with these ingredients, so I am looking forward to the next book. 

Reading L. Frank Baum's The Twinkle Tales Aloud to My Kids

The Twinkle Tales was a series of short stories published by L. Frank Baum in 1906 and 1907, originally as a series of small books, illustrated by Maginel Wright Enright (sister of Frank Lloyd Wright, fact fans!). The first six came out in 1906, and were later published as Twinkle and Chubbins: Their Astonishing Adventures in Nature-Fairyland. In 1907, Baum published a longer installment, Policeman Bluejay; Baum asked for a 1917 reprint of this to appear with the subtitle "An Oz Tale," though the publisher was not interested in this. All seven stories were not collected in a single volume until 2005, by University of Nebraska Press.

This I picked up from the library back when I was in grad school. I think this is possibly the only non-Oz Baum fantasy book I didn't read to my kid on our first run through the Oz books, because I assumed it was in the Oz Club's collection of L. Frank Baum's short stories, but it turns out that it is not. (Probably because the two books came out around the same time and had the same editor, and she didn't want the one to cannibalize the other.) Policeman Bluejay is also reprinted in issue #2 of Oz-story, but when I read the rest of that book to my kids, I didn't want to read it without having read the preceding Twinkle tales, so I purchased this and read it aloud to my kids.

The Twinkle Tales by L. Frank Baum
illustrated by Maginel Wright Enright

Collection published: 2005
Contents originally published: 1905-06
Acquired: February 2026
Read aloud: February–March 2026

Mostly, these stories focus on "Twinkle," a girl living in the prairie in the early twentieth century; in most, but not all, she's joined by her friend Chubbins. Mostly the stories revolved around animals: she visits a town of talking prairie dogs, talks to a woodchuck family, goes on an adventure with a mud-turtle prince, and so on. Some do that thing Baum loved to do and was very good at, which is extrapolate on what animals were actually like to imagine what they would be like if they could talk. We discover what it is to live as a prairie dog from Twinkle talking as the prairie dogs. Others are more fantastical, with the animals being more like generic fantasyland residents. There is a bit of an ecological strain here, with the animals often disliking how humans treat them. That, perhaps, is the most interesting achievement of the book, how it uses fantasy to reposition your perspective. The stories are sometimes framed as dreams, though that doesn't necessarily mean they didn't happen! There's no continuity between them, for Twinkle anyway; one would never know from one Twinkle story that she had already encountered magic in a different one.

One is barely about Twinkle: in "Bandit Jim Crow," she has a pet crow, but it escapes, and most of the story is about what it does away from her, in a forest governed by Policeman Bluejay. Policeman Bluejay reappears in the story of that title, where he actually does interact with Twinkle and Chubbins, who are turned into birds with human heads by a witch. This one has Baum's characteristic interest in weird forms of government; here, the birds of the forest have a hierarchy based on beauty.

Overall, reading them aloud to the kids, I found them cute but kind of ephemeral. They were into them well enough when we were reading them, particularly "Policeman Bluejay" ("dry water" was a hit), but it's hard for me to imagine that these will leave as lasting an impression on them as the Oz novels. (Fun fact: Twinkle knows about Dorothy because she has read the Oz books! As Baum originally published these books under a pseudonym, it's a bit of a sly joke on his part.)

Supergirl: Girl of No Tomorrow / Plain Sight by Steve Orlando, Robson Rocha, Daniel Henriques, et al.

Supergirl, Vol. 3: Girl of No Tomorrow

Collection published: 2018
Contents originally published: 2017
Read: February 2026

Writers: Steve Orlando, Jody Houser, Vita Ayala
Pencillers: Robson Rocha, Steve Pugh, Jose Luis, Carmen Carnero, Jamal Campbell, Julio Ferreira
Inkers: Daniel Henriques, Steve Pugh, Norm Rapmund, Carmen Carnero, Jamal Campbell, Julio Ferreira
Colorists: Michael Atiyeh, Jamal Campbell
Letterers: Steve Wands, Calos M. Mangual

The second half of Steve Orlando's Supergirl run moves away from the strengths that characterized the first. One senses that this isn't his fault, that editorial is revamping the premise periodically because the book isn't selling the way that they hoped. I don't have any proof of this, but it doesn't make sense to me that a writer would set up a bunch of concepts in their first eleven issues clearly designed to create a "storytelling engine" and then largely ignore or abandon them in their final nine. And it's probably indicative that after the last issue by Orlando, this volume of Supergirl took a four-month break and came back with a totally new creative team and a premise that completely moved away from what Orlando set up here. Though it continued this run's issue numbering, the volume numbering of the trade paperbacks reset, so it was clearly conceptualized as totally distinct. (It doesn't sound appealing, so I am not going to read it, but my understanding is that it moves away from this run's YA vibe and also puts Supergirl on her own in outer space. As far as I know, recurring characters like Ben Rubel have never appeared again.)

The series's third volume, Girl of No Tomorrow, begins where the cliffhanger ending of volume two left off, with Cat Grant seemingly shooting Supergirl. This is quickly shown to be the actions of not Cat Grant but a shapeshifter, and the gun doesn't kill her; it makes her powers stronger but also causes them to fluctuate. To be honest, I didn't really get or enjoy this subplot at all. I think my-powers-are-out-of-control subplots are rarely interesting because they don't really map onto anything comprehensible and the fluctuations can feel very arbitrary and thus the hand of the writer is a bit too evident. (The exception, perhaps, is X-Men stories where they can serve as an allegory for puberty; see X2.) Lots of stuff seems to happen but not mean anything: Kara gets attacked by a bunch of different villains, including the Legion's Emerald Empress, which means each one attacks her, then goes away, repeat. There's no development. Kara's powers fluctuate at school, but the reactions to this don't ring true at all—why, when a character falls down a hole that spontaneously appears in a hallway floor is every one just like, "lol kara is such a nerd"?

Well, this will certainly convince everyone you were being compassionate!
from Supergirl vol. 7 #13 (script by Steve Orlando, art by Robson Rocha & Daniel Henriques)

There's also one of my least favorite superhero tropes: the "regular people" turn on the superhero. This feels like a a bad fit for the Supergirl aesthetic in general and a big swerve from the inspirational approach of the first two volumes in specific. On top of that, when you don't have POV characters who embody this approach, it's just randos in crowd scenes going, "yes i used to look up to you but now you suck!" which just feels arbitrary and random. (Cat Grant is the one actual character we get who doesn't like Supergirl, but I didn't follow her reasoning.)

Look, I love the Emerald Empress, but I literally have no idea what she is going on about here.
from Supergirl Annual vol. 7 #1 (script by Steve Orlando, art by Steve Pugh)

The story doesn't so much end as stop (why all these bad guys were attacking Supergirl thinking she was a danger to the future is just not adequately explained), and there's a big status quo change at the end that doesn't pan out at all. Before that gets developed, though (which is more in the fourth volume), there's a one-issue story about Supergirl teaming up with the "New Super-Man" of China. This is fine but a bit short and facile.

Supergirl, Vol. 4: Plain Sight

Collection published: 2018
Contents originally published: 2018
Read: February 2026

Vol. 4, Plain Sight, unfortunately leans into the things that didn't work for me in vol. 3. At the end of Girl of No Tomorrow, Cameron Chase was fired as the DEO director in National City, and her boss, Director Bones, takes direct control of the DEO's operations there. For reasons that, again, I never really understood, Bones has some kind of vendetta against Supergirl. This means the setup of the first two volumes, where Supergirl works for the DEO is abandoned. Supergirl's adoptive parents are DEO agents; they quit. Who her parents are is scrubbed from the DEO records... somehow Bones can't figure this out, which doesn't really make any sense. What also doesn't make sense is that Kara continues to attend human high school despite the danger this puts both herself and her classmates in; for some reason, she also continues in her internship at Catco even though this means she spends much of her manufacturing anti-Supergirl content. Why does she need this internship so much?

This book does attempt to recapture the storytelling enginge set up in vol. 1 again, by including a subplot about Kara and Ben going—or not going—to nerd prom together, while a girl shows up who's a rival for Kara's affections. I felt, though, that this coordinated pretty awkwardly with the main plot of Supergirl continuing to battle bad guys sent by an increasingly and implausibly unhinged Director Bones. (Like, why would this guy be dumb enough to think, "oh someone from apokolips is definitely more trustworthy than supergirl"!?) Also it might have worked better if the rival character had ever appeared before! (Or maybe she did but was completely unmemorable? Either way, not well done.)

And this dude promptly never appeared again.
from Supergirl vol. 7 #18 (script by Jody Houser & Steve Orlando, art by Carmen Carnero)

The book does have a standout issue, though; the penultimate one is a lot like the story in vol. 2 where Supergirl redeemed a villain, in that it's character-driven and mostly focuses on seeing Supergirl through another's eyes. In this case, though, it's not a villain, but a nonbinary kid who finds acceptance with Supergirl when they can't get it at home. Great art by Jamal Campbell, and I felt that we were tapping into what make Orlando's version of the character actually work for the first time in a long while. Too bad the rest of the book couldn't do this.

To be honest, I didn't totally buy this argument. "If your parents reject you, it's because they love you!"
from Supergirl vol. 7 #19 (script by Steve Orlando & Vita Ayala, art by Jamal Campbell)

The last issue is very much an "oops we're being cancelled let's cram it all in and wrap it all up" one, unfortunately. Necessary from a storytelling perspective, I guess, but not interesting to read. Shame that this run started out strongly but fizzled out so badly.

How did Director Bones get to be so dumb?
from Supergirl vol. 7 #20 (script by Steve Orlando & Jody Houser, art by Robson Rocha & Daniel Henriques)

As I said, I'm not interesting in continuing onto the Marc Andreyko run that continues from here (even if it does feature Kevin Maguire on art!), but what I've read about the subsequent Sophie Campbell one makes it sound more my speed. Maybe someday!

Reading Roundup Wrapup: April 2026

Pick of the month: The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber. My secret Santa on LibraryThing got this for me, a weird religious science fiction novel. More anon, I suppose; I haven't really processed it yet.

All books read:

1. Britain after Rome: The Fall and Rise, 400–1070 by Robin Fleming
2. Star Trek: Vanguard: Summon the Thunder by Dayton Ward & Kevin Dilmore
3. Death of the Planet of the Apes by Andrew E.C. Gaska
4. Star Trek Classics #3: Encounters with the Unknown by Jeffrey Moy, W. C. Carani, et al.
5. The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber
6. Star Trek: Vanguard: Reap the Whirlwind by David Mack
7. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum, illustrated by W. W. Denslow
8. DC Comics Classics Library: The Legion of Super-Heroes: The Life and Death of Ferro Lad by Jim Shooter, Curt Swan, and George Klein
9. Star Trek: Vanguard: Open Secrets by Dayton Ward
10. Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion by Terrance Dicks
11. The Speckled Rose of Oz by Donald Abbott
12. Black Panther: Panther’s Prey Omnibus by Jack Kirby, Ed Hannigan, Peter B. Gillis, Don McGregor, Jerry Bingham, Denys Cowan, Gene Colan, Dwayne Turner, et al.
13. Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor

Hugo reading has begun!

All books acquired:

1. Edges: Thirteen New Tales from the Borderlands of the Imagination edited by Ursula K. Le Guin and Virginia Kidd
2. Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor
3. The Space Cat by Nnedi Okorafor and Tana Ford
4. Absolute Wonder Woman, Vol. 1: The Last Amazon by Kelly Thompson, Hayden Sherman, and Mattia De Iulis
5. The Invisible Parade by Leigh Bardugo and John Picacio

As has Hugo buying! This is the first batch; a second should come in a few days. 

Currently reading:

• Star Trek: Vanguard: Precipice by David Mack
• Doctor Who and the Cave Monsters by Malcolm Hulke

In between Hugo finalists, I am working my way through the Star Trek: Vanguard novels and third Doctor novelisations. 

Up next in my rotations:

1. Star Trek: Vanguard: Declassified by Dayton Ward, Kevin Dilmore, Marco Palmieri, and David Mack
2. The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Sixteenth Annual Collection edited by Gardner Dozois
3. The Poe Clan Vol. 1 by Moto Hagio 
4. On Progress in Physics and Subjectivity Theory: An Amateur’s Meanderings as Inspiration for Actual Physicists by N. Otre Le Vant 

Books remaining on "To be read" list: 669 (down 2)

Black Panther: Newly Reprinted Stories from the Panther's Prey Omnibus

Black Panther: Panther's Prey Omnibus

Collection published: 2026
Contents originally published: 1977-96
Read: April 2026

I recently finished my reading of all of Marvel's Black Panther comics that have been released for free on either comiXology or Hoopla... but also recently, Marvel has put out the Panther's Prey Omnibus, a mammoth 1,236-page collection containing every Black Panther–related comic from 1977 to 1996. Mostly it's taken up by the Jack Kirby run, the Gillis/Cowan/de la Rosa miniseries, and Don McGregor's Panther's Quest and Panther's Prey. Sprinkled in among these stories, though, are a number of guest appearances and one-offs that have not previously been collected. Or, at least, that I haven't read. (With only two exceptions, the new-to-me stories all come from the 1978-80 timeframe.) In this post I'll be writing up and reviewing just those new-to-me stories from the Panther's Prey Omnibus.

"Conjure Night!"/ "Voodoo and Valor!", from Marvel Two-in-One #40-41 (June-July 1978)
plot by Roger Slifer, dialogue by Tom DeFalco and David Kraft, art by Ron Wilson & Pablo Marcos, letters by Irv. W & Annette K. and Joe Rosen, colors by Phil Rachelson and F. Mouly

These two issues come from Marvel Two-in-One, which I think was a series where in each issue, the Thing teamed up with a different superhero. In the first issue collected here, the Thing teams up with Black Panther (duh), while in the second, Brother Voodoo, but it concludes the story begun in the previous issue and still has a decent-sized role for T'Challa. They were released during Kirby's run (between #9 and 10); SuperMegaMonkey's Marvel Comics Chronology places them after Kirby's run came to an end in issue #13, before the last two issues by other writers.

I actually liked the glimpses of the bits of drama we got of the Thing's life; the other highlight of the story was actually getting to see T'Challa as inner-city teacher (an idea coined for The Avengers, I think, which was quietly dropped later on... because really, it makes no sense). The actual story here is pretty nonsensical; a lot of the drama revolves around a list of prominent black citizens of New York City... a list that no one can find a copy of even though it was published in the newspaper! Then there's a bit where the Thing lands an airplane with one hand while holding one of its wings on with the other! There are a number of creators whose other work I have enjoyed involved in this (The Omega Men's Roger Slifer, Justice League Europe's Pablo Marcos), but none of them are doing their best work. Or even their mediocre work.

"The Razor's Edge!" / "The Killing of Windeagle!" / "Journey through the Past" / "The Ending, in Anger!" / "Battle Royal!" / "Like a Proud Black Panther..." / "The Left Hand of Silence!" / "Cry-- Vengeance!", from Marvel Team-Up vol. 1 #87 (Nov. 1979), Marvel Premiere #51-53 (Dec. 1979–Apr. 1980), The Defenders vol. 1 #84-86 (June-Aug. 1980), and Marvel Team-Up vol. 1 #100 (Dec. 1980)
written by Steven Grant, Ed Hannigan, and Chris Claremont (with John Byrne); penciled by Gene Colan, Jerry Bingham, Don Perlin, and John Byrne; inked by Frank Springer, Gene Day, Alan Gordon, Tex Blaisdell, Jim Mooney, Pablo Marcos, and Bob McLeod; lettered by Robins, Diana Albers, M. Higgins, and A. Kawecki; colored by G. Wein, Bob Sharen, G. Roussos. and Robbie C.

from Marvel Team-Up vol. 1 #87
(script by Steven Grant, art by Gene Colan & Frank Springer)

The next story is a Spider-Man team-up from Marvel Team-Up; the omnibus places this after Black Panther #14-15, but as SuperMegaMonkey points out, it must actually precede those two issues. since Marvel Premiere #51-53 continues straight on from Black Panther #15. It is pretty dire. I don't know what's up with writers who invent lame villains who even the characters in the story call out for being lame. Why cut your own story off at the knees like that?

The three issues of Marvel Premiere continue straight on from the cancelled Black Panther ongoing, with the same creative team of Ed Hannigan and Jerry Bingham. These issues are a bit of an oddity. So, Don McGregor's original run on Black Panther in Jungle Action was abruptly cancelled mid-story in 1976; in 1977, it was replaced by Jack Kirby's ongoing, which completely ignored everything McGregor had been doing. When Kirby left Marvel and Hannigan and Bingham took over in 1979, they began a story to explain what had happened to all the story threads and characters abandoned when McGregor was fired... but then their book was cancelled too, so the issues ended up published in Marvel Premiere instead. All of that is to say, this is a wrapup to a cancelled story that was itself cancelled! And it finished in 1980, over three years after the story it was designed to wrap up! Intellectually, I admire that Marvel actually bothered... but in practice it's a terrible story and they probably shouldn't have bothered. Memory loss is a hacky explanation for it all, and there must have been a better way to handle this. Did Monica and her boyfriend (who I think all later writers just forgot about) really sit around for years before trying to figure out why T'Challa abandoned them? It admittedly has been a long time since I read the original Don McGregor run, but the explanations given here surely do not line up with it in any way, shape, or form. I feel like there's no real conclusion here anyway; just a bunch of fights and then people are like, "Oh the story is over now."

from The Defenders vol. 1 #86
(script by Ed Hannigan, art by Don Perlin & Pablo Marcos)

The other issues here are more team-ups: a three-issue arc of The Defenders featuring Black Panther and a one-issue story of T'Challa meeting Storm of the X-Men. The Defenders arc is by Ed Hannigan again; it has some good ideas but I feel like Hannigan's writing jerks around from idea to idea and the choices the characters make range from arbitrary to stupid. I found these a struggle.

Issue #100 of Marvel Team-Up is the story that established a preexisting relationship between T'Challa and Storm. I hadn't realized that had happened all the way back in 1980 in a story by Chris Claremont and John Byrne; I don't think it made its way into an actual Black Panther comic until much later, I want to say not until Reginald Hudlin's run in 2006. It's a short ten-pager about an enemy from Storm and T'Challa's youth popping back up in the present; the backstory is fine, the present-day stuff is kind of silly. But this small story had a profound impact on the future of both characters.

"Panther's Pest, Part 231 of 8!" / "Of Kings...and Bright, Shiny Things...", from What the--?! #9 (Oct. 1990) and Over the Edge #6 (Apr. 1996)
written by Don McGregor and Ralph Macchio, penciled by Mike Harris and Robert Brown, inked by Tom Palmer and Mike Witherby, lettered by Joe Rosen and J. Babcock, colored by Marsha McGregor and Glynis Oliver

from What the--?! #9
(script by Don McGregor, art by Mike Harris & Tom Palmer)

The first of these stories is a ten-page humor comic satirizing Panther's Quest... written by Don McGregor, writer of Panther's Quest! Though not every joke landed, and I didn't really care for the art, I appreciated McGregor's ability to laugh at himself. If you've ever read a Don McGregor Black Panther comic, there are some good jokes here.

The other story is a Daredevil team-up from 1996; I thought this might be a humor comic too at first thanks to the ridiculous art, but no, that's just how they thought comics should look in 1996. I don't know why people keep getting Ralph Macchio to write Black Panther stories because they're almost always bad. In this one, Black Panther attends an extradition hearing for Ulysses Klaw that's attacked by Killmonger;  Foggy Nelson is representing T'Challa, so Daredevil is close to hand when the attack begins. Guess what: the introduced-just-moments-ago best buddy of T'Challa turns out to be traitor. Kid has like one line of dialogue before this "twist"; I feel like Macchio wasn't even trying. The art often fails to communicate basic essential information.

The moral of this story is probably that none of these issues were probably really meant to be (re)read on their own like I did. As seasoners to the omnibus, things meant to show you you're getting your money's worth because they haven't been collected before whereas most of the other stuff here has been, they probably work just fine. But as a main feature, they're very much lacking. 

ACCESS AN INDEX OF ALL POSTS IN THIS SERIES HERE

Jump to the Beat!

As has been mentioned here on several occasions, I've been listening to my music more consistently in the last couple years. The consequence of this is, of course, that so have my kids. While Kid One is largely agnostic toward music (they do occasionally enjoy a bit of They Might Be Giants), Kid Two, like me, is the kind of person who will get a song stuck in their head and begin singing it randomly later on.

A particular favorite of Kid Two's in this regard is Belle and Sebastian's "The Party Line." I know Belle and Sebastian has been around for a while, and plays the kind of music that is very much to my taste, but I only got into them within the past six months, and have listened to their album Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance (2015) a decent amount. Kid Two would randomly bust out with "jump to the beat of the party line!" and begin jumping around. It actually hit the point where I could be listening to a different Belle and Sebastian track and he would start going, "Put on 'Party Line'!" (I do not think Kid One has this capacity to recognize different artists' styles yet.)

This wasn't the only song Kid Two would bust out with at random; in particular, the other was Goldfish's "Show You How," where he would just start going "get up and shake it now!" To a lesser extent, he'd sometimes also do the "oooh waaah oooh waaah oooooh oooh waaah oooh waaah oooh" bit from Goldfish's "This Is How It Goes."

Additionally, at his daycare, he somehow picked up "We Will Rock You," though he thought it was "We will, we will, we will rock and roll you," and would often ask for "rock and roll"... and would accept literally no other song as "rock and roll" because it didn't say "rock and roll" in it! I don't have any Queen on my iPod, but I did persuade him to accept "We Built This City" as a substitute... though the version I own is from 2011's The Muppets!

This seemed like enough songs for a critical mass, so I ended up making Kid Two a Yoto card. A Yoto, if you don't know, is a kid-friendly, screen-free audio player. Both of our kids own Yoto Minis, which allow them to place various cards in them that stream audio content: music, audiobooks, podcasts, and such. You can purchase premade cards from Yoto (we have bought a number of audiobooks from them especially), but you can also build your own playlists and link them to "make-your-own cards"; for Kid One, I have made a card of Pokémon theme songs, for example, and both kids have copies of a card of songs from Colourblocks and Numberblocks.

Kid Two was into the card. This was back in January, I think, and as time has passed, I have added songs to it either when I notice him singing them a lot or when he specifically requests I do so. He listened to it a lot early on, less so recently, but I'm sure he'll rediscover it sooner or later. Here's the current track listing:

1. "The Party Line" by Belle and Sebastian, from Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance (2015)
2. "Show You How" by Goldfish, from Get Busy Living (2010)
3. "This Is How It Goes" by Goldfish, from Perceptions of Pacha (2008)
4. "We Built This City" by the Muppets, from The Muppets (2011)
5. "Shake It Up" by Nortec Collective, from Tijuana Sound Machine (2008)
6. "Mouthwash" by Kate Nash, from Made Of Bricks (2007)
7. "Up the Mountain" by Regina Spektor, from Home, before and after (2022)
8. "Talk to Me" by Goldfish, from Late Night People (2017)
9. "If I Could Find" by Goldfish, from Late Night People (2017)
10. "What Might Have Been" by Regina Spektor, from Home, before and after (2022)
11. "They Might Be Giants" by They Might Be Giants, from Flood (1990)
12. "Watching You" by Rogue Traders, from Here Come the Drums (2005)

Forty-eight minutes of excellent taste! Clearly a fan of South African house music in particular. His interest can often turn on very small things, in all seriousness; "Mouthwash" is on there because he likes the bit where Kate Nash goes "and I'm singing 'uh oh' on a Friday night..."

I do have to double-check lyrics before loading them onto the card (thankfully the Kate Nash song is appropriate for example! on the other hand, "The Party Line" includes the lyric, "People like to drive their cars and smoke up / People like to sit inside and toke up").

I recently asked him which of the songs on the card was his favorite, and he told me it was "Up the Mountain" by Regina Spektor. That one is a hit with both kids!

EDITED ON 2 MAY 2026: Just added "Get Down" from They Might Be Giants's new album The World Is to Dig at his request!

Supergirl: Reign of the Cyborg Supermen / Escape from the Phantom Zone by Steve Orlando, Brian Ching, et al.

Supergirl, Vol. 1: Reign of the Cyborg Supermen

Collection published: 2017
Contents originally published: 2016-17
Read: February 2026

Writers: Steve Orlando, Hope Larson
Artists: Brian Ching, Emanuela Lupacchino, Ray McCarthy, Matias Bergara, Inaki Miranda
Colorists: Michael Atiyeh, Eva De La Cruz
Letterers: Steve Wands, Deron Bennett

My seven-year-old is a bit of a Supergirl fan; they've read all of the Supergirl volumes in DC's short-lived "Silver Age" series of trade paperbacks, the Showcase Presents Supergirl volumes that cover what that series doesn't, and even The Daring New Adventures of Supergirl trades collecting the 1980s material. So one day, when I was flipping through the books in my library's "Friends of the Library" bookshop and found the first collected edition of Supergirl's "Rebirth" comics, I paid a dollar and brought it home for them (after doing enough perusing to determine it was age-appropriate). They enjoyed it and requested the next, and I ended up picking the other three volumes online, and once they finished the series, I decided to read it myself.

I'm not very au fait with Supergirl's "New 52" continuity, but writer Steve Orlando does a very good job of quickly orienting the new reader. Kara has recently lost her powers (and I guess Superman is dead, but by the time of vol. 2, he's not anymore, so it doesn't really matter), but has agreed to work with Director Cameron Chase of the Department of Extranormal Operations to cooperate with them in exchange for getting her powers back. Part of this deal is that Kara will be adopted and raised by a married pair of DEO agents and live as a human, even attending high school.

The art really nails the cute-but-dorky vibe.
from Supergirl vol. 7 #6 (script by Steve Orlando, art by Brian Ching)

But just as Kara is settling into her new home and family, the ghost of her old home and family return. National City is attacked by the Cyborg Superman, who I guess Supergirl has battled before—but what she didn't know until now is that he's the Brainiac-revived remnants of her father, Zor-El. 

You go Kara.
from Supergirl vol. 7 #7 (script by Steve Orlando, art by Matias Bergara)

This is basically perfectly-executed light superhero comics. I mean, there is some heavy backstory here, but overall the book's not going for exhausting; it keeps the pace moving and the energy up. I don't think I've ever read anything by Steve Orlando before, but he writes above-average dialogue for superhero comics, which manages to balance action and character and exposition. Orlando moves into position a solid cast of supporting characters, including Kara's new parents, Cat Grant, and a guy at Kara's new school named Ben. You can sense things being shifted into position for an ongoing run, in a good way; this is a setup that should continue to generate stories.

Poor Kara.
from Supergirl vol. 7 #3 (script by Steve Orlando, art by Brian Ching)

Orlando is ably aided by Brian Ching, who draws all but one of the seven issues collected here, and whose style is a perfect match for what Orlando is doing in the writing. Ching was one of the regular artists on the Star Wars ongoing Knights of the Old Republic back in the day, and was instrumental to that series's success; I'm glad to see him employed by one of the Big Two.

"Yes, we swear these characters who were previously from totally different continuities really do have a relationship!"
from Supergirl vol. 7 #8 (script by Steve Orlando, art by Matias Bergara)

I even really like Steve Wands's lettering. Contemporary comic book lettering is often very samey, but he does some different things here that I found very effective. 

Supergirl, Vol. 2: Escape from the Phantom Zone

Collection published: 2017
Contents originally published: 2017
Read: February 2026

The second volume is pretty good, too. It begins with three one-shots: one where Kara teams up with Batgirl (in the "Burnside era," though after the original creative team left and I stopped reading), one where Kara helps redeem a villain from the previous volume, and one where Kara connects with her cousin. Each of these is pretty solid; the best is definitely the middle one, a really well done story about Kara reaching out and helping someone who needs her, someone who was let down by everyone his whole life; Matias Bergara does a solid job fitting the Brian Ching style. I though the team-up was fine, though Supergirl seemed to be made a little dumb so that she had a reasons to need Batgirl's help. The Superman one has some good moments, but Matias Bergara's art seems rushed and the story is too obviously there to make sure you know how everything fits together.

The last three issues are one long story, "Escape from the Phantom Zone." On the one hand, I was glad Brian Ching was back, but on the other hand, I found the premise didn't play to the strengths; Supergirl, Batgirl, and Ben end up trapped in the Phantom Zone, and the setting of National City and Kara's supporting cast is largely irrelevant; Ben is there, but having him interact with Supergirl turns out to be dramatically inert. I did not think the villains were very interesting, either. 

I do appreciate how Orlando paces his ongoings. Usually each issue's story ends a couple pages before the end, then there's a bit of a breather/coda, and then the issue will end with a couple pages setting up the next one. It's a simple but effective device.