Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow Deluxe Edition for DCUI Ultra (2025)

Sorry for that mouthful in the title, but this week I received a special reprint of the 2021 miniseries. It was one of the first things I read completely on my tablet, so it’s funny that I now have a print copy. DC sends out a premium gift each year to its yearly subscribers to the Ultra tier, and this book was this year’s new title.

Word has it that James Gunn is relying heavily on this for inspiration for the Supergirl movie, so if you care about source material it’s worth reading just for that.  I find that most books that Tom King has written are worth reading.  The art by Bilquis Evely shows a powerful Kara Zor-El without resorting to the boobs-n-butt that so many male artists will, um, accentuate.

The story’s a good one, a bildungsroman for the girl that Kara befriends.  This retelling of Krypton and Argo City for Kara is an insight into her character that I can see James Gunn attaching himself to.

The special edition has an exclusive cover (pictured with this post) and welcome material on the inside cover, but otherwise has the features of the “regular” deluxe edition. I enjoy seeing variant covers; generally the art sketches or pencil reproductions don’t do much for me and the reproductions here are very small. If you are a budding artist, though, it is probably a great insight into how a story like this is made.  I appreciated the rejected script for issue #6 as that kind of thing is rarely reprinted.

This story has been frequently cited on “best of” lists and with the movie coming you’ll probably see a lot more about it. Check it out from your local library. If there’s a teen girl that’s looking for something ‘meaty’ in the world of the fantastic this is a perfect thing to pass along.

Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run (2025)

This book is credited to Paul McCartney, but as an oral history the credit really goes to historian/editor Ted Widmer and the crew at Paul’s company MPL that had all the archives.  The book is seen as a companion to the documentary Man on the Run coming out in wide release in 2026 on Amazon Prime.  Many new interviews were done for the documentary and transcribed for the book.  It’s the first time we really hear from the McCartney children, particularly Mary and Stella.

I was expecting a coffee-table book, but this is standard hardcover size, which means that most of the pictures are black & white and smaller-size, although there is an insert with nice color photos.  The text is organized chronologically, and includes the time of McCartney and McCartney II which is strange for a Wings book.

As with anything blessed by Macca, there is nothing that speaks ill of him (or Linda). In particular, his spectacular hubris leading to his Japanese arrest gets off lightly.  That arrest killed the last incarnation of Wings, which was the first one I can remember experiencing as it happened.

As I was reading the book I was surprised how familiar the events seemed.  Then it hit me that earlier this year I read the well-researched McCartney Legacy II by Allan Kozinn.  If you’re only going to read one book about Wings, read Kozinn’s.

The book contains a “timeline” of contemporary events and popular music hits of each album’s era, and ends with superfluous capsule biographies of each member of Wings. The useful appendices are a detailed discography and a “gigography” with all the dates of Wings’ performances.

I am looking forward to the film documentary but I suspect I’m going to wonder about ten minutes in why it seems so familiar….

Batman Deadpool (DC/Marvel, 2025)

There’s been a great collaboration between the two American superhero comics powerhouses since March 1976 and Superman vs.  the Amazing Spider-Man. Every few years something would crop up, and these stories are fun because they are never “canon” for either comics universe.

The latest of these are the two issues Deadpool Batman and Batman Deadpool.  There are no multi-part stories and it’s not just the title characters but about fourteen stories of varying lengths featuring team-ups like Captain America and Wonder Woman, etc. Even a new Amalgam character called Logo (Lobo and Wolverine ‘Logan’)!

I ventured into my local comics shop to pick these up as I had read they weren’t going to be issued in digital format (turns out that was wrong). There were even two digital-only books (Flash/Fantastic Four and Thor/Shazam!).  The latter is notable because in the book the Fawcett/D.C. hero is actually called Captain Marvel, which hasn’t been done since the 80s when D.C. lost the trademark lawsuit to Marvel!  Here’s hoping that this is one thing that carries over into D.C. canon so they can stop calling him just “the Captain,” which makes no sense at all.

These books were a nice way to start off my holiday season.  I chose the cover variant pictured because I recognized Ryan Sook’s homage to the classic Crisis on Infinite Earths #7 cover by George Perez.