DC Nuclear Winter Special #1 – “Last Daughters” (2018)
written by Tom Taylor art by Tom Derenick & Yasmine Putri
THIS. IS. EVERYTHING.
This is the type of Kara Zor-El story arch I crave and will beg for! Look at the character development in just two pages of this comic! The ache it creates when Kara refuses to put her own child through what her own parents put her through. She knows the horror – the absolute torment – it is for a child to land on a completely strange planet and be brought up by a species different from her own. How terrifying it is. And she refused to put her child through that pain.
And don’t even get me started on how amazing Kara looks here!
The Colin Mochrie story? Gladly. This is a good story.
So I go to this college, and it can best be described as a little weird. It desperately wants to be Cambridge, but it’s not Cambridge, so it takes out its frustration with not being Cambridge on weird collective mockeries of Cambridge stuff. So far so good.
One of these weird mockeries is the debate club.
It’s hard to even properly call the Literary Institute a debate club – it is a club, and it does debates, but the debates are 100% stand-up comedy in a parliamentary format and the other half is bullshit pantomiming. For instance, every year at matriculation, the club drunkenly rushes the stage, interrupts the ceremony, and calls everyone in the audience a horse’s ass (occasionally while quoting Dune). It also puts on a yearly event called ‘Tuck-Ins’, in which people in the dorms can sign up (or sign their friends up) to have the entire LIT burst into their room, give them bedtime snacks, give them bedtime beer, sing some bedtime songs, and tell them a bedtime story. Except, the LIT never does anything seriously, so the bedtime song was always Barrett’s Privateers and the bedtime story was almost always something we called ‘The Rat Story’. Let me tell you about the Rat Story.
The Rat Story was a piece of… literature… that a LIT member dragged out of the dregs of the internet many years ago. Nobody knows where it came from, and my efforts to find it again were unsuccessful, but good lord, it was bad. It was a page-and-a-half-long Hermione/Wormtail (rat form) smut fic and it was awful.So awful. I’m cringing just thinking about it. It’s the worst thing I’ve ever read, and at this point I basically know it by heart. We read it aloud, from the poorly worded introduction to its horrible closing line (AND HE SCAMPERED AWAY WET! STUNNED! AND THRILLED!) dozens of times in a single night to unsuspecting students. It was an experience.
Now you might be wondering how Colin Mochrie fits into this.
So, one of the other things my college does powerfully and often is pretension. We are the most pretentious college you will ever see, and our college clubs are proof positive of this. Every year, various college clubs send out dozens of official-sounding letters inviting our various favourite well-known-people to attend our meagre college events (I, as president of the James Bond Society, personally invited Barack Obama, Sean Connery, and the Queen to our AGM). However, this year the Comedy Club was riding particularly high, and it sent out quasi-sincere invitations to speak to a variety of Canadian comedians.
And Colin Mochrie showed up, one fateful Tuck-Ins night.
He gave a talk, which was very good, but noticed as the talk finished that many students were rushing away to something in an awful hurry. We explained that it was the night of Tuck Ins, an important and sacred college tradition and that
We would be delighted if he would join us.
And that, my friends, is the story of how I found myself crammed in a dorm room with 20 other people, listening to Colin Mochrie describe Peter Pettigrew’s rat boner to a couple of second years who had no idea what they were getting into.
the universe is not just weirder than we imagine, it’s weirder than we CAN imagine
Alice Isn’t Dead, a podcast about a lesbian trucker searching for her missing wife and encountering ghoulish mysteries along the way, is being adapted for print and tv
Ever since that night when Reign defeated Supergirl, she has changed—Lena thinks it might be because Supergirl is a friend of hers and she’s anxious, too, because no one knows what happened to the heroine.
Lena notices how different this…Kara is. She’s restrained, stiff but not in the adorable, awkward way her Kara is. Her voice is the same, when she tells Lena good morning and asks how her day has been like the past few days hadn’t happened. When Lena hesitates to answer, this Kara asks what’s wrong, and the crinkle between her eyebrows is the same but something is off. This Kara’s smile doesn’t quite reach her eyes…
And her eyes, they’re different. They look the same, but they feel… Different. Like she’s seeing Lena in a different way, and Lena wonders if she’s finally lost belief in her and sees her now as a Luthor.
She tells herself she’s imagining things, and laughs when Kara tells a donut pun. Tells herself this is her Kara, and that everything is fine and she’s overthinking.
This Kara nods, smiles, and pulls Lena into a hug. They do it now, more often than they used to, and it’s then that something clicks—their hug isn’t quite as warm as before, and there’s something off with the way this Kara held her. This Kara’s hug doesn’t quite make her feel as warm as their ones before, like she’s hugging a whole another person who looks and smells and feels like Kara but-
But isn’t Kara, and there’s something wrong. Something is awfully wrong.
“I don’t know who or what you are,” Lena whispers against this Kara’s ear. She doesn’t have a weapon to threaten her—it—with, but she angles her arm around her neck just slightly, and one wrong move and Lena could end it. The blonde stiffens a bit, and Lena feels panic and anger flare in her at the thought of this- whatever this is, pretending to be her Kara. “You tell me now where my Kara is, or I will hurt you.”
The blonde doesn’t move. Lena thinks it doesn’t breathe, but then feels her sigh with something like defeat. “I can’t tell you,” she says.
“You can and you will,” Lena demands, puts pressure around the blonde’s neck. She doesn’t fight back. “Tell me where my Kara is!”
The blonde stays still for a long time. Lena grows impatient, anger flaring and making her fingers twitch, but before she could move, the blonde speaks.
“She’s safe,” she murmurs. “Recovering.”
Everything clicks into place and Lena’s heart drops.
Lena harasses fake Kara. Repeatedly. Demands her where her Kara is, who the fuck she is, how her Kara is doing. She had seen the way Supergirl had fallen, lifeless, and the mere thought of her Kara broken like that makes Lena tear up, makes her scream in fake Kara’s face to demand where her Kara is.
She doesn’t say anything, says it’s confidential.
Lena turns to Alex. James Olsen. Stalks that Winn Schott, Jr. in case he knew something. They tell her Kara’s fine, tells her of fake Kara’s location, and asks her if she’s okay.
She’s not okay. Her Kara is broken—recovering, but badly hurt—somewhere and she wants, needs to know where she is. Needs to see her.
She needs to know she’s alive. Just that would suffice.
No one tells her anything, but she’s Lena Luthor and she will tear the planet apart before she gives up on her Kara.
She finds the DEO, after eighteen hours of nonstop research, hacking, counterhacking. There are bags under her eyes and fear in her heart but she finds the DEO, walks into the building they use as a front and demands to see Supergirl. She has a gun on her waist and anger in her gaze and someone is given clearance to let her in and she takes it, storms through everything until she’s lead to a room where her Kara is—broken and bruised but alive.
Lena cries. She doesn’t leave her side for hours, hours, days, weeks, and Lena sits on the floor, bags under her eyes and fading hope in her heart as she watches her Kara fight for life.
Lena cries.
Lena cries. She doesn’t leave her Kara’s side, and she’s the first to see her fingers twitch, voluntarily, the first to see blue eyes flicker back to life—and it’s her, her Kara, broken and bruised and alive and it’s her and things aren’t quite right yet but it’s her Kara.
“You’re here,” her Kara croaks, broken but alive.
“You’re back,” Lena cries. Kara smiles, broken but somehow full of life.