Review: So Super Duper #12

Artist(s): Brian Andersen, Celina Hernandez.

It’s been a while since the penultimate issue, but So Super Duper is finally back for its last outing, where questions are answered, closet doors are blown open, and everybody finds somebody.

Brian Andersen has been playing with his characters and his readers’ expectations for a while now, but it was all for a good cause, and the ending(s) provided here start with who did propose to Psyche in the previous issue.

Wide-eyed Idol, waiting for the answer

You can discover that for yourself in the preview offered by Andersen on his site–go there, read it and come back. Ready? Alright.
Captain Idol, the squeaky-clean hero, has had on obvious crush on Psyche for a while, and here he comes out with flying colors. Psyche’s answer might surprise some readers, but for a series about a seemingly airhead kind of guy, there are a lot of sensible decisions made, far from soap opera (or mainstream comics) clichéd situations, decisions made by characters portrayed as grown-ups.

There were other questions raised during the course of the series, including the permanence of Psyche’s fairy form, which is also answered here. Finally, Psyche’s fake relationship with his best (female) friend ends with his being finally honest, but not without a cost.

The best part of the issue might be the wordless sequence showing what happens to the characters after the end of the main story. This montage is a testament to the strength of Celina Hernandez’s art, which gives the reader a lot to enjoy, without any dialog to complement it. The storytelling itself is also more than solid, and I hope the artist will continue to work in that direction.

I can’t avoid mentioning that this issue ends with a short back-up about Comet that Brian Andersen asked me to write. It was fun trying to give the closeted hero who could have been Psyche’s love an open ending, and artist Gustavo Aviles did a great job with those eight pages, in a realistic style that’s in stark contrast to Hernandez’s own cartoony art.

You might have noticed that the pages of this series were all numbered in one go, from 1 to 273, showing that Brian Andersen had always envisioned these twelve issues as one, complete story. There should be a a collection of the series, just as Andersen’s other, lighter series Reignbow & Dee-Va was collected a few months ago, and I’m sure the collection will be an even more rewarding reading experience than the individual issues were.
So Super Duper has proved to be a twist-filled, unpredictable series about far more than a cute twink with non-offensive powers. Brian Andersen and Celina Hernandez have given us a worthwhile story about taking control of one’s life and finding real friends, something that can resonate with every reader, even ones who don’t fly around and wear sparkly costumes, which is more or less everybody, after all. At least for the flying part.
I hope I’ll have the pleasure of reading more projects from these two artists, together or not.

You can buy this comic from the Indy Planet site or Prism Comics, and the author’s site is here (with previews of the issues).

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