Dear DC (and artist J.G. Jones),

Recently, when the cover artist was asked about this cover painting for Final Crisis no. 3 in an interview, he stated:

NRAMA: We’ve seen the Supergirl cover now. How did you approach that character?

JGJ: I love that painting, and I generally don’t like my covers or my art that much. But that one, I thought, turned out really well. I really wanted to portray Supergirl as what she is—a 17-year-old girl. Not, you know, some sex bomb with boobs popping out all over the place. I worked really hard on the pose and that sense of wonder on her face. That’s actually why I turned her head away from the viewer. The first two characters are looking straight out at the viewer, more or less, addressing their body language to the viewer. And she’s more turned in space, looking up and away at the light source so we don’t really know if something’s approaching or what’s going on.

NRAMA: Is that also kind of a lack of confidence? That she’s not looking the reader right in the eye like that?

JGJ: Yeah. That’s exactly how I was reading it. She’s new here, she has a lot of power, but she’s also trying to figure stuff out.

Yeah, the problem is, she doesn’t look like a person trying to figure it out, she looks like a terrified moron, an out-of-her-depth female, cowering in fear.

Listen, sure, she’s young; but she can fly, she’s invulnerable to harm, and she can melt things when she looks at them. “Oh golly gee, I am so worried” is not a response you would see on a person who can do that. You’re not going to see it on the face of Superman, and he has the same powers.

“Wait,” you say, “he is trying to focus on her being young and not knowing what is really going on; that’s a legitimate argument.” Well, I submit to you that young does not equal dumb—especially not in the fantasy world of comics—and again, playing along with the character, she has near-omnipotent powers and is an alien from a world hundreds of years more advanced than ours.

This is not a standard pose for any young superhero—and there are dozens. The fan repulsion if Robin or Superboy would be standing there, cowering in fear, would be vitriolic and immediate and valid.

J.G. Jones and DC published the picture of a terrified, simpering girl—who doesn’t even have a relationship to the all-powerful alien that the character “is” and should be portrayed as. This person is worried about whether she’s going to make the cut for the varsity cheer squad, because OMG that text everybody has seen. This cover is of Lauren Conrad, not Kathleen Hanna, and the fact that you get them confused means that you don’t understand your own characters, let alone what they could be.

Is it as bad as if she were stuffed into a refrigerator? No, but in this pose, she is depowered and paralyzed as much as women inevitably are in mainstream superhero comic books (and, all symbolism aside, the variant cover features Wonder Woman in a face-distorting mind control helmet).

Guess what, DC? Not only has it been a mind-thuddingly boring, ineptly plotted (if decently drawn) series, you just got X-FORCED!!

That is, to say, dropped for sheer lameness.

P.s. also that costume is completely repulsive and becoming more dated by the moment. DC, get thee to Project Rooftop and grab some of those ideas. They’re for women and girls, not simpering morons.