Variety interviewed several film writers, including Ana Noguiera, who’s penned the screenplay for WB’s new take on the Maid of Might, and predictably, not only does this version take the Tom King route, as was to be guessed earlier, one could also say it puts the late Otto Binder and Al Plastino’s original Silver Age premise on trial:
“Everyone read it as a genre script,” she says. “So I started getting called in to pitch on world-building fantasy and futuristic sci-fi.” One such meeting was with executives at DC Studios, who handed her a collection of comic books written by Tom King about Superman’s cousin, Kara Zor-El — better known as Supergirl.
While Nogueira doesn’t regularly read comic books, she is a big fan of superhero movies — but Supergirl hadn’t ever quite made sense to her. “She watched Krypton completely be destroyed,” Nogueira says. “I was always like, ‘I can’t get my head around the version of the character that is so sunny.’” King’s “rougher and grittier and edgier and funnier” approach, by contrast, leaned into Kara’s past. “When I read it, I was like, ‘There she is,’” she says.
I can’t understand why she sees King’s approach as “funny”, since it’s dampened by the emphasis on “rougher”, “grittier”, and “edgier”. Also, if that’s how she views the original premise for Supergirl, you could say the same thing about Spider-Man’s premise, in which his uncle Ben Parker was murdered by a burglar, yet did Peter Parker let that totally dictate and dominate his entire emotional state going forward? In better days, Stan Lee and successors gave Spidey and his cast a sense of humor that helped tremendously, and if they’d followed the playbook Batman writers have particularly stuck with since Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns, it would’ve been dreadful. I also hesitate to think what Noguiera would say about Starfire’s premise as first seen in New Teen Titans, since Koriand’r was established as a victim of intergalactic slavery, sexual or otherwise, and as written by Marv Wolfman/George Perez, she didn’t let it block out the ability to find happiness either.
The screenwriter also seems to ignore that in later stories during the Silver/Bronze Age (Action Comics 309), Supergirl and Superman discovered that her parents had survived any Kryptonite danger that prompted them to send her to earth from their breakaway colony of Argo, and her mom and dad, Alura and Zor-El, went to live in the bottle world of Kandor. Depending on one’s perspective, that Kara’s parents could’ve survived at the time could help alleviate any trauma she could’ve gotten from loss of family earlier. Not to mention that, by science-fiction terms, with Superman and Supergirl’s ability to read books almost as fast as the Flash, Kara could read tons of books on psychology and figure out how to overcome trauma in seconds flat. But Ms. Noguiera apparently can’t use her imagination.
What’s also grating about this interview is that the same Hollywooders who believe sadness and trauma must be the answer to everything likely wouldn’t consider what the victims of September 11, 2001 in New York, October 7, 2023 in Israel or even the Bataclan massacre in 2015 think, regardless of how they’ve led their lives since. That’s one more reason why it’s best to avoid whatever story planning they’re brewing up. It’s a real shame the Maid of Might’s fared easily worse on the live action screen than the Man of Steel has, but regrettably, the seeds for destruction of all these Golden/Silver/Bronze Age jewels were surely in the works for much longer than thought, and now, it’s impossible to look forward to what’s being produced now.
Originally published here
English (US) · 