It will be interesting to see what becomes of Sophie Campbell’s Supergirl. The book leans delightfully into the Silver Age, though that’s often been modern DC’s exception and not its rule. There’s also the book’s focus on female friendships, which assuredly has its place but where DC has recently struggled to keep titles afloat, between Power Girl and Hawkgirl, and etc.

Campbell’s title has going for it the prominence of Supergirl herself, the upcoming movie, and ties to the larger family of Super-titles. At the same time, the tone of Supergirl Vol. 1: Misadventures in Midvale is decidedly different than Tom King’s (also excellent) Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow on which the movie is based, and I wonder if that will ultimately dictate a change in the Supergirl title, despite the acclaim Campbell has received.

Meantime, Midvale is fun, overall enjoyable, and finds ways to win even at its roughest.

[Review contains spoilers]

Over the first four issues Supergirl Kara Zor-El arrives in Midvale, battles Kandorian doppelgänger Lesla-Lar, then takes Lesla under her wing, and by the end, Kara and Lesla are partying in a Midvale goth bar with other gal pal Lena Luthor and fighting a rampaging goop monster. Such is the speed at which Campbell’s Supergirl runs. The book does not feel hurried but rather well paced, and the swiftness to an extent speaks to Campbell’s characterization of Kara. There’s not much time spent on angst about trusting Lesla nor Lena, two ostensible enemies, but rather Kara’s baseline seems to be trust and that naturally moves things along quickly.

The penultimate chapter felt to me the weakest, a Super-Pets spotlight issue. Campbell has all the pets think in a kind of halting baby talk that I felt read very quickly and, different from the earlier issues, didn’t leave much room for complicated plotting. That said, the pairing of sarcastic Streaky and relative innocent “Tinytano” (the miniaturized Titano, of course) is fun, the impertinent Streaky muttering “Idiot” and Tinytano crying that a gaggle of kittens (that he just met) can’t come live with them.

All of which is to say Midvale starts strong but then falters toward the end. I wasn’t necessarily sure the book could right itself in the final chapter, given what seemed the trope of Kara fighting her own “darkness” within a dreamscape. But for a continuity wonk, Campbell’s closing issue is a dream on its own, a tour of Supergirl’s most fraught experiences, which stops short of Buzz but includes Supergirl’s death in Crisis on Infinite Earths, her subsequent “resurrection” in Jeph Loeb’s Superman/Batman, her stint as a Red Lantern, what is either the death of Thomas Price in Kelly Puckett’s Supergirl or the death of Dick Malverne in Tim Sale’s Solo, that bit in the New 52 when Zor-El was the Cyborg Superman, and a clip of Supergirl in Woman of Tomorrow.

We’ve seen “everything happened” across a variety of titles from Dawn of DC through DC All In, though notable here is the (perhaps inexplicable) inclusion of the New 52 iteration and also Kara’s “death and resurrection,” as first suggested in Mark Waid’s New History of the DCU. I was skeptical at first, but it’s growing on me, both in how this allows Supergirl and Robin to be pre-Crisis contemporaries in Waid’s World’s Finest and also how much history it restores, down to the lineup of Kara’s various costumes over the years, and now Campbell’s made it truly concrete on the page.

Though we’ve had Kara Zor-El Supergirl series since Loeb brought her back, including Sterling Gates' rather definitive one, arguably then Campbell’s is the first real Supergirl-Supergirl series, picking up from where Crisis left off. And notably, after years where there was some concern about the Supergirl character being overly, even inappropriately edgy, Campbell’s “original” Supergirl rarely if ever throws a punch — once between panels, perhaps, and another time where the punch turns out to be a hug — and her superheroics include helping a young Midvale girl with her math homework.

Campbell isn’t hesitant in surfacing Supergirl’s sci-fi Silver Age history, from the yellow ring of Nor-Kann right at the beginning to the chromatic super-comb, Lar-On, through to the Kandorians and the Super-Pets. By modern sensibilities a lot of this has been downplayed because it seems campy or else confusing, the various shades of Kryptonite whittled down to just a handful. In this, Campbell’s comic is something of a defiant act, not even trying to make Supergirl’s sillier aspects cool, but rather resurrecting them along with “original” Kara as an intrinsic part of the hero.

I was pleasantly shocked when Joshua Williamson brought back Lex Luthor’s daughter Lena Luthor, a character not seen since the “Our Worlds at War” days. All through that character moving from Superman to this title, I’ve been considering her through the lens of that “City of Tomorrow” era. It’s not until I saw Campbell’s iteration of Lena, now with dark hair, that I realized we had Kara and Lena together again a la the TV series, another nice level for the comic given that I don’t think the upcoming movie will be playing in that territory.

Can Sophie Campbell sustain it all? I’m thinking of Amanda Conner and Jimmy Palmiotti’s Power Girl, for instance, which went 12 issues before it got a soft reboot that was less zany, more focused. Again, Supergirl Vol. 1: Misadventures in Midvale has received rave reviews, but a movie (especially a successful one) is a powerful force, one it might be hard even for the original Supergirl to surmount.

[Includes original and variant covers]