It Really Is Hard to Write Superman Stories

 A couple months ago I noticed this fairly rude and ill-informed review of Girl Power on Goodreads:

This is a 2½ Star book rounded up to 2 as Goodreads does not allow half stars. The main characters are Superman, Batman, Aquaman and the Flash straight from DC comics with only the names changed.

What was good - the author, as several other reviewers have remarked, has gotten that silver Age of Comics down well. Unfortunately, now as then this comes with large doses of homophobia and misogynism..

What was bad, Batman/Midnite Specter - no-one with an attitude like this could even communicate with another member of the human race never mind run a successful major company (the same applies to Apex Girl's first boss), the feminazis were really cringeworthy and the whole female experience thing, hormones, weeping and so on was worthy of Jane Austin. Did the author go to an all boy school? Has he not got a daughter? Has he never had any female friends? Midnite Specter could not even do one push-up when he became a 12 yo girl, really? My 12 yo daughter can do 20 military style non-stop.

For some reason I have bought the omnibus 4 pack so I will see where the next one goes before giving up. Hopefully in the time between #1 and #2 the author has read a few Supergirl comics

I was pretty cheesed off about some of that.  I mean, really, why would you think that to be successful in business you have to be nice?  Hello, Donald Trump?  Elon Musk?  George Steinbrenner?  And so on.  Successful businesspeople are frequently successful because they're assholes.  And most of Midnight's homophobia is internalized; she only calls the gay guy a "pansy" one time.

But really Midnight Specter, aka the Batman character, isn't the same as businessman Robin Holloway as he is as Midnight Specter.  In his normal person disguise he's really a womanizing dumbass, which is mentioned when it talks about how easily people believe Holloway disappeared to "go find himself" IN Nepal and that he has an illegitimate teenage daughter.  "A womanizing flake" is how he's described.

And when Robin becomes a girl, she's 17, not 12.  It says the exact age when she's given a new identity.  The push-up thing was like after a couple of weeks after she became a girl, losing probably a good 20-25% of her mass--a lot of that muscle.  Your 12-year-old daughter has spent years training, so it's not the same thing at all.  It really irritates me when people get things so badly wrong that I assume it must be on purpose.

It was good that she bought the omnibus because she liked the other two books.

I was hard on the first book in the series as it really was not very good, This book is so much better,

The relationship between Robin and Melanie if you sit down and think about it is complicated in so many ways but the author makes it totally believable (and they make a really great couple) great characters. Starla is a disappointment in this book and I find Elise hard to relate to outside the action sequences. As for Alison, don't want to say too much to spoil things but the relationship gets interesting.

Storyline is not wonderful but I suspect the author is getting his pieces in position for the next book - that and letting us see more of the heroes characters

And:

The 4 stars I have given is for the trilogy as a whole as well as this volume. Loved Robin and Melanie, hated Starla, neutral to dislike for Alison and neutral towards Queen Neptune or whatever she is calling herself.

Action sequences were good and the Silver age feel was there but the series could and should have been so much better. The author's attitude to women and girls tells me he has not got a daughter because real world girls and women behave nothing like the girls in this book.

Disappointing but hope the author takes on board criticism and continues writing about the girls 

And the short stories:

Really just a period at the end of the "Girl Power" trilogy to show that around a year after the events all the girls are still girls and moving on with their lives. A little extra detail about some of them. Ion girl and Hitter are interesting and Starla is boring as usual. Really a bridge between the original trilogy and possible future novels.

Could just as easily been fitted in to the end of Girl Power #3.

 Hope the series continues

Obviously since it's been about 9 years I have no plans to continue writing the series.  Maybe if people actually bought it, I would, but at this point I'm long past it. 

Finally, when I mentioned the sort-of spin-off novella GAIA: Rogue State, she bought that and reviewed it too:

After reading the original 3 novels and short stories I left what in hindsight was an unfairly harsh review and the author was good enough to take the time for a few back and forth comments in which he mentioned "Besides the 3 novels and short stories there's also the novella GAIA Rogue State that mostly involves Melanie and Hitter and someone who would have become like the Green Lantern of Earth" and I am really glad he did. This novella is a coming of age of the series so to speak in which the girls are at peace with their new identities and moving onwards.

If no more are to be written this is a fitting conclusion to the series containing my favorite heroes from the series. I can also understand why the author is going to leave the series here.
Recommended to "girl power" fans and those on the fence about it. 

So at least one person besides me read the whole series.

Anyway, her reaction to Starla, aka the Kryptonian character, is not entirely unwarranted.  Of the four characters in the first book, I'll admit Starla's story is the thinnest.  Stan Shaw was a reporter with somewhat similar powers to Superman (flight, super strength, invulnerability, but also flame breath and infrared vision instead of heat vision and X-ray vision) and then got changed into a young woman named Starla who has the same powers.  Most of Starla's story is dealing with a sexist boss and forming a friendship with the Lois Lane-type character, Kate King.  At the end she realizes Kate doesn't really have time for her and makes friends with the Jimmy Olsen character and his friends.

Acknowledging that Starla's story was the weakest, I gave her a meatier story in the second one that took its cues from Superman II.  After Starla thinks a bunch of innocent soldiers are killed because of her, she goes to her frozen lair and gives up her powers.  As a normal young woman she meets the Jimmy Olsen character and they start dating.  Meanwhile a clone of Starla's male self has taken her place and is dating Kate, but inevitably the clone turns evil and Starla winds up getting her powers back to kill the clone by luring him into the sun.

I thought it was a better story but I guess this person thought otherwise.  

In the third story Starla gets married and on her honeymoon is arrested and taken halfway across the galaxy by the Galactic Peacekeepers, a Green Lantern-type organization.  She's again powerless and imprisoned, until Kila, an alien Peacekeeper, finds proof she's innocent of the crimes she's accused of and helps her escape.  Then she returns to Earth to destroy the Galactus-type monster about to destroy Earth.

Her short story in the collection is about revisiting her home planet, where she finds a recording of her mother, whom she never really met before.  Again, I thought it was a pretty good story but this person thought it was boring.

So, I don't know, I guess it's hard to write good Superman stories.  I mean because the character is so powerful, you usually end up having to somehow take away his power. That was the whole reason they came up with "Kryptonite" in the first place.  If you don't take away his power then you have to come up with a villain who can compete on his level, which is why they came up with Doomsday.

In the Girl Power universe, gamma radiation was like Kryptonite, which was mostly used in the first book to pacify him/her.  And similarly a red sun would also take away her powers just like with Superman.

But I thought in the second book and the short story especially there was a good focus on the human parts of the character.  I suppose some people would still find that boring.  Which really begs the question of what the writer is supposed to do with Superman--or Apex Girl.

I'm not really sure.  I doubt this person would like the Gender Swap Heroes series by Eric Filler much better.  The Kryptonian-type character in that would probably be boring too.  Most of the first story she gets a swelled head by becoming the most popular girl in high school and a really popular superhero too.  After that she doesn't do a whole lot in the rest of the series.  She basically moves back to Nebraska or wherever with her adopted parents and only shows up when needed.  Maybe it's better to keep her in more of a support role and focus on other heroes.

I guess I can appreciate the problems DC has had in recent years of making the character relevant to modern audiences.  People get mad if you try to make him gritty and violent.  But if you don't then it's boring.  I'm not sure where the balance is.

Something to think about if I ever did try to continue either series of stories.