The Woman of Tomorrow Today

The script for Supergirl #1

Eisner voting is closing tomorrow, and Supergirl Woman of Tomorrow, by Bilquis Evely and myself has been very kindly nominated for best series. (If you’re eligible, you can vote here.) In honor of this honor, I’m going to post the first script to the series below.

This series was developed with DC editors Jamie Rich and Brittany Holzherr. My marching orders were simply, “make Supergirl bad ass.” These are good marching orders to have, and as is my instinct, I went to old movies looking for plot. I ended up landing on True Grit, a very bad ass film and book, where an old craggy bastard of a cowboy accompanies a naive but tough girl on a quest to kill the man who murdered the girl’s father. I then pitched this to Jamie and Brittany with Lobo (“or whoever” ) as the cowboy and Supergirl as the, well, girl. It’d be entirely different from True Grit because we’d be in space and there’d be lots of Supergirl lore in it, but those were the bones of the thing.

It was Jamie who had the suggestion that changed the title and made it good. He said, what if Supergirl was the old craggy bastard of a cowboy? This was immediately clarifying, that lighting striking thing you sometimes hear writers talk about and you sometimes hope to experience.

Of course! Supergirl wasn’t naive. This wasn’t her first rodeo (in space). She had seen the death of her world. Three times! She had spent years and years fighting in every Crisis next to her famous cousin. She had been through it. A few dozen times! She was the craggy bastard. She was the cowboy. And her guiding another person into that world, using her pain to teach someone new how to deal with their own pain—that was a better story than anything I’d get out of Lobo…or whoever.

And so this first issue is the set up to that pitch. We meet Ruthye, we see the death of her dear father, we see her meet Supergirl, who is recovering from a night of hard drinking, trying to escape a bit from her everyday, and finally we see them united on a mission that will change everything, for them and ultimately, for me. I hope you dig it.

(I should warn you, there is a spoiler in the script in an editor’s note about the fate of the dog—if you haven’t read the whole series, and you should read the whole series, you’ll find out something early. But seriously, did you think I was going to kill the dog? Maybe don’t answer that.)

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