I don't actually want to discuss Supergirl Plus #1, so let's instead look at a Final Night tie-in and Supergirl Annuals #1-2

Gail Simone and company's story from the Summer of Supergirl anthology—which was collected in Supergirl Vol. 2: Hometown Horrors, a trade I reviewed in this column—was about the first meeting of the current version of Supergirl and the current version of Mary Marvel. Reading it made me curious about a previous story about the first meeting of a different version of Supergirl and a different version of Mary Marvel, 1997's Supergirl Plus. There weren't all that many Plus books, but I thought they were a pretty fun idea, oversized one-shots featuring a team-up of a popular character plus a sometimes less popular one (There were a whole round of them featuring the cast from the short-lived monster rock band book Scare Tactics, for example). I recall liking the handful of them that I had read (Batman Plus featuring Arsenal by Devin Grayson and Rodolfo Damaggio, Green Lantern Plus featuring The Ray by Ron Marz and Scott Kolins, The Flash Plus featuring Nightwing by Brian Augustyn, Mark Waid and company, and so on). I don't want to speak ill of the recently dead David, an unquestionably great writer who has produced an incredibly revered an influential body of work, including several seri...