Over at Comics Should Be Good! there's a series of daily posts called A Year of Cool Comic Moments, detailing, well, cool comic moments.
I was thirteen years old when the comic that provided this moment hit the stands.
It choked me up then, and it still chokes me up now.
Overwrought? Sure. Melodramatic? That too. Talky enough to fill up five or six entire issues of a modern comic? Absolutely. Corny? Okay.
It is, in fact, almost an archetype of everything that a modern reader could find fault with in comics of the past, a collection of every flaw, criticism and negative adjective you can imagine.
Even so, the Perez art is so, so, SO gorgeous, and Wolfman demonstrates very clearly that he is a master of the medium, and even looking at it through eyes jaundiced by more than two decades of cynicism and the incessant deconstructions - of varying quality - of the super-hero, it's still heartbreaking, and undeniably cool.
Beyond that, it's a fitting end - and tribute - to a character who had a long, slow arc of character development that culminated in this moment.
I have a lot more to say on the topic of Supergirl in particular - and comics in general - inspired by this Cool Moment, which I will try to form into a coherent thesis in a future post.
