Review: ‘DC Super Hero Girls: Hits and Myths’

DC Super Hero Girls: Hits and Myths
Writer: Shea Fontana
Artist: Yancey Labat
DC Comics; $9.99

The second in DC’s line of original graphic novels based on Mattel’s Super Hero Girls toy-line/media franchise, Hits and Myths takes advantage of having already introduced the concept and characters to tell a somewhat more complex story. Or, at the very least, to focus not so much on introducing readers to the main characters as to giving those characters a more elaborate adventure to engage in.

In one of the series’ many references to the comic book source material, the school’s poetry teacher is Etrigan The Demon, the Jack Kirby creation who speaks in rhyming couplets. He is teaching Wonder Woman and friends The Odyssey, which somewhat loosely provides this book with its structure, as the adventure will follow a very brief summary of the epic poem.

And I do mean brief, reducing the epic into basic sections like so: Cyclops, Witch, Sirens, Underworld, Return Home.

After school, Wonder Woman’s friends are all supposed to pile into Batgirl’s Batplane and fly to Themyscira for a sleepover, but the Batplane goes missing…as does Professor Etrigan! It’s up to the girls–and boys, The Flash and Beast Boy–to unravel the mystery, rescue Etrigan, and recover the Batplane. They split into teams to do so and encounter the Odyssey-inspired elements listed above. One-eyed bad-girl Ravager, tyrannical head of drama club, is the cyclops. Art teacher The Enchantress is the witch. Black Canary and Silver Banshee, each of whom lead their own rock bands that are involved in a literal battle of the bands, are the sirens.

And the journey to the underworld? Well, that is pretty much literal, as it turns out Etrigan was captured by Trigon The Terrible and imprisoned in He–Er, “The Underworld,” where our heroes must go to save him…with a little help from Trigon’s rebellious daughter, Raven. She and Etrigan and Enchantress and Trigon are among the several new characters appearing in the DC Super Hero Girls milieu here for for the first time.

As with the previous graphic novel, this one provides a bridge between the comics and this particular multi-media iteration of the characters that is a two-way street, offering fans of Super Hero Girls or readers of this particular book an introduction to a wide swathe of DC comics characters (major and minor, good, bad and in-between) while simultaneously offering DC comics fans an introduction to a particularly charming, all-ages take on those characters.

Filed under: All Ages, Graphic Novels, Reviews