The cousin of to her more famous namesake, Supergirl has pretty much all the same powers as the Man of Steel, the two most important being that 1. She can fly 2. She's functionally indestructible. Which also means that 1. She would never need to drive a car and 2. If she did, and got into an accident, she would be fine. Because she's indestructible. Never mind all of that logic, though, because in the mid-eighties DC teamed up with Honda and US Department of Transportation to feature Supergirl in a comic all about wearing your seat belt! The basic message of the comic is simple - wear your seatbelt, dummy - but it illustrates it in the most insane way possible. After a friend of hers who refuses to wear seatbelts falls into a coma following a collision with a drunk driver, Supergirl uses some tech from the Fortress of Solitude to dive into his brain and attempt to wake him up. For some reason, her friend's subconscious takes the form of a Mad Max-esque dystopian future where he's racing away from bandits with a precious cargo of rare petrol, only to be slammed into by a bulldozer and put into another coma because he wasn't wearing his seatbelt again. Like a lunatic's interpretation of Inception, the friend falls into further comas-within-comas as he enters each new scenario - a film noir, an pulp adventure - which all end with him not wearing a seatbelt and getting into a car crash. Eventually, with no help whatsoever from Supergirl, he wakes up and has learned an important lesson. That if you don't wear your seatbelt you will enter a disturbing Life On Mars nested hallucinations until you bolt awake and a B-list superhero has a go at you.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
