For the brief sequence that Mariko Tamaki’s Supergirl: Universe End reads like a spy thriller, I thought maybe this volume would turn out all right. But being the backup story to 12 issues of Mark Waid’s Action Comics: Phantoms gets to this book just like filling 12 issues got to Waid. By the end, we’re looking at splash page after splash page; for the most part Tamaki does fine in her moment-to-moment writing of Supergirl, but equally it feels plenty of other superheroes could have been wedged into this tale. There’s just not that much here, a waypoint before Sophie Campbell’s new Supergirl series that the reader could just as easily skip.

[Review contains spoilers]

I am contractually obligated to mention that the one reason some readers might want to glance at Universe End, despite again that there’s not much to see, is that Tamaki nods to the events of Tom King’s Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow here; that is, to the eternal question of whether Woman of Tomorrow “happened,” Tamaki says it does. Obviously it did not occur precisely as it did on paper (see the strange case of Comet the Super-Horse), but if you were a person inclined to think about putting Woman of Tomorrow on a continuity timeline of some sort, now you’d have your answer.

Before Universe End gets to the point of making that reference, there actually seem some superficial similarities between Universe and Tomorrow, just in the sense of Supergirl Kara Zor-El adventuring in space in the midst of a minor identity crisis on Earth. Had Universe End actually been successful, following the Woman of Tomorrow playbook would be inspired (two collections, then, that readers could find familiar after the Supergirl movie); instead, at the point in which Universe is getting most in the weeds, it inadvertently reminds the reader how much better Supergirl stories can be.

The audience is dropped into the beginning of Universe proper with Supergirl seemingly using a device to wipe people’s memories; she tricks some information out of a United Planets administrator and also has Steel John Henry Irons build something before she makes him forget he did so. This is all to get the location of a mysterious convict whose crimes not even Supergirl knows, so that Kara can then ferry them to prison safely.

If we pause there, again we have the makings of something interesting. Supergirl isn’t a character we normally associate with subterfuge, so Tamaki’s already building interest — what could be so serious as to drive Kara to these extremes? Equally there’s a prisoner here whose crimes Kara doesn’t know, but she’s been handpicked by Superman for this mission. The Cyborg Superman? (Though he’s otherwise occupied at the moment.) Maybe Mr. Oz, the alt-continuity-ish Jor-El, was not executed as the United Planets previously led Superman to believe? Despite the book’s slow start with Tamaki’s Supergirl Special, I was intrigued.

But quite a bit of that ultimately comes to nothing. The prisoner is one half of a brother-sister “Destroyer of Worlds” team, with the peaceful sister unable to escape her brother’s thrall. There’s some reason to keep the prisoner’s location quiet so as to protect her from her brother, but no good explanation is given why Power Girl or Steel couldn’t know about the mission, or why Superman or Supergirl couldn’t be provided more details. Supergirl ultimately guesses that Superman chose her for the mission because she knows good can come from bad (the destruction of Krypton giving way to her life on Earth), but she’s hardly the only hero that carries that moral, letting alone the silliness of Kara never asking Superman, “Why me?”

Artist Skylar Patridge contributes thin, serious line art to the early chapters; it doesn’t look out of place with the often-sunny Supergirl, but shines particularly when Tamaki ramps up the mystery in the beginning. I also thought Patridge did well when Supergirl fights some marauding spider aliens, choreographing Kara’s ducks and weaves. But artist Meghan Hetrick steps in for two issues at just the wrong moment, ahead of a sequence that demonstrates Kara and the prisoner making psychic contact through the use of a couple two-panel “splash pages” showing half of each’s face. Those plus others end up accounting for about 10 one or two-panel pages among Hetrick’s 20 pages total, and again, it gives the sense Tamaki’s run out of what to say.

There’s a strange concern in Universe End, most prominent in Tamaki’s special, where Kara’s getting mistaken for Power Girl and/or feels like that with Power Girl present, she’s not needed. Though granting that the characters are pseudo-dopplegangers, how easy it is to accept that two super-powered blonde women on the Super-team cancel each other out when three young dark-haired men don’t perhaps bears some unpacking.

But also, just recently in Power Girl Returns, we saw Power Girl feeling like an outsider and third wheel because of Supergirl’s presence on the Super-team. Two different writers, two different characters, but it feels like there’s not a good enough editorial bible for these characters' baselines, letting alone why this conflict dogs these particular characters.

Really, aside from that continuity note, there’s not much to recommend in Mariko Tamaki’s Supergirl: Universe End. I will say, I haven’t felt all that enthusiastic about Sophie Campbell’s Silver Age-infused Supergirl necessarily, but Universe End at least shows me what we don’t need, which is a knock-off Woman of Tomorrow that doesn’t keep step with the original.

[Includes some original and variant covers]