Comics Rainbow - Supergirl

Edited by Robert Beach 

So, Supergirl has premiered, and I loved it. It’s a fun show that absolutely cuts to the heart of what makes Supergirl such a great character and proves how easy it is to actually get the Superman franchise right without descending into the same disappointing well as Smallville, Quest for Peace, Superman Returns, or Man of Steel.  It’s actually a pretty impressive feat given the fact that Supergirl has always had a decidedly checkered history in the comics. 

Like a lot of female heroes that emerged out of the comics code to support superhero families, Supergirl’s design, origin, and backstory have been through a plethora of alterations; none of which was helped by her sidelining in the mid-80s when DC wanted to revert Superman to the last Kryptonian survivor on Earth.  In honor of Supergirl’s triumphant debut on the TV landscape, this is your full spectrum look at Supergirl, all her shades, shames, and successes. 

Saying that Cir-El is “hated” is a bit misleading. It’s not so much that fans hate her as much as they regard her with crippling apathy, and rightly so if we’re being honest.  She debuted in the mid-2000s, exactly when most of the comics medium was entering into a pretty lame period. Marvel was still floundering after their return from bankruptcy and the incredibly ill-advised Heroes Reborn event while DC was laboring under bizarre and unfocused events of their own like Bruce Wayne Fugitive and Our Worlds at War. Pretty much nothing from the mid-2000s has endured well; Cir-El is no exception. 

She was part of a major attempt at the time to redefine Brainiac as part of the Superman mythos as Brainiac is another character who has been through an infinite number of revisions and re-imaginings. In the case of Cir-El, she was created by Brainiac as a human/kryptonian hybrid and implanted with false memories of being Superman’s daughter from the future. The whole situation was engineered to “throw Superman off balance,” which is weak writer speak for “just because,” though Cir-El did end up as the triggering device for one of Brainiac’s master schemes. 

She ended up sacrificing herself in what was essentially a beat-for-beat recreation of the Grant Morrison Tomorrow Woman story from Justice League of America. Even given the similarities, it’s hard to hate too much on the Cir-El for that. JLA was one of the only good comics in the mid-2000s, so if you’re going to rip anything off, that’s a good choice; however, despite her heroic sacrifice, pretty much nobody cared about Cir-El. She faded into obscurity, only to re-appear briefly as part of a Superman/Batman story so incredibly bizarre it’d need an entire additional article to explain it. Since then, however, Cir-El hasn’t been heard from and no one seems to care. 

The original Supergirl was Kara Zor-El, Superman’s cousin whose home of Argo City survived Krypton’s destruction just long enough for her to be rocketed to Earth as well. She was created in 1959 by comic book legend/genius Otto Binder, around the same time as Batgirl and right when DC was transitioning a lot of their key heroes into family units. This basically had the result of Superman acting as the grumpy ‘50s dad to Kara who got up to all kinds of ridiculous shenanigans and super-powered adventures. 

The Silver Age Supergirl is actually one of the most important characters in comic history as she was the first teen hero to get hero own comic book, pre-dating Spider-man by 3 years. Spider-Man, incidentally, owes a lot to the early Supergirl comics as the central gimmick that was applied to her character was that she had all of Superman’s powers but because she was an emotional teen girl she would often mess up or misuse her abilities.  

Her classic stories are all incredibly fun and even their dated elements are pretty enjoyable, especially whenever the authors would dip into their approximation of ‘60s teen slang.  Even though Supergirl’s adventures never managed to match Spider-man’s unique blend of serious melodrama with superhero action, they were enjoyable for trying to blend teen adventure and circumstances with superhero action; it was legitimately new at the time. 

Also Supergirl is where characters like Streaky the Supercat and Comet the Superhorse first showed up, thus earning it my undying love and affection. I’m not the only one. When this version of Supergirl was killed off in 1986’s Crisis on Infinite Earths, DC editorial received a flood of mail lamenting her passing, though praising the epic way she died saving all of reality. 

The modern version of Supergirl may be outwardly in line with her Silver Age counterpart, but trust me when I say DC has no idea what to do with the modern Supergirl. She first appeared in a Batman/Superman story where the two discovered her inside a kryptonite meteor. Her arrival throws everyone into a bit of a tizzy as Superman is happy; Wonder Woman is concerned; and Batman doesn’t trust her.  Turns out Batman was right, sort of the norm for late-2000s DC Comics, as Supergirl was kidnapped by Darkseid in short order and brainwashed into being one of his furies for a time.  

After that, DC basically bounced Supergirl through a number of story points; each one more confused and contrived than the last.  For a time, it was revealed she was actually sent to Earth with orders to kill her cousin because her dad was evil, and then she was lost in the future hanging out with the Legion of Superheroes till she just wasn’t anymore. DC never really settled on what her deal was, basically pinging her around through situations and none of it was interesting.

Eventually, they just scrapped all the revelation and revisions as part of a really cool event series called New Krypton. This was part of DC’s efforts in the late 2000s to reintegrate all their crazy old concepts into continuity. Stuff like the cube Bizarro world planet or Batman having a son with Talia Al Ghul. A big part of this was the return of the Bottle City of Kandor, a Kryptonian city shrunk by the computer menace Brainiac. 

As part of Kandor’s return, it ended up re-enlarged on Earth complete with Kara’s parents who revealed all her false memories and wrong assumptions were the result of deep-space paranoia. Later, Kandor broke off from the Earth and became its own planet of New Krypton with Kara moving there and becoming their champion. This is pretty much the only time modern Supergirl was interesting as the New 52 branding initiative has more or less returned her to a state where instead of a personality she just has constant revelations and false memories. 

Okay, this is a bit of a cheat, but it’s my list, so I’m including Linda Danvers as her own unique entity. This particular Linda Danvers, technically the second character to have the name, was a re-imagining of Supergirl in the post-Crisis era from acclaimed author Peter David. There’s a lot of weird backstory for how she came to be involving pocket dimensions, shape-shifting entities, literal angels, and creepy Lex Luthor-based incest. Most of that proved ultimately unimportant in the grand scheme of things, and I’ll get more into it in the next two installments. 

This Linda Danvers came about in the late ‘90s when Superman the animated series was gaining major traction on TV and had introduced their own version of Supergirl. Given the show’s popularity, DC writing and editorial went about contriving a way to create what was essentially an in-continuity counterpart to the animated Supergirl who was proving so popular at the time, that is Linda Danvers. 

Even though her stories at the time didn’t draw a large readership, they’re absolutely amazing. David has always been a strange writer, but when he’s on, he’s incredibly on. And there’s a reason he and a lot of his creations have stuck around the mainstream for as long as they have. He’s one of the few writers to really embrace the complete freedom that comics offer a creator without losing the thread of humanity and actual emotions that inform good storytelling. He’s a lot like Grant Morrison only without Morrison’s emphasis on meta-narrative and old comics. 

In any event, the old Linda Danvers books from the ‘90s are incredible and easily the best Supergirl stories ever told: a brilliant blending of imaginative weirdness, well paced adventure, and moving drama.  Even though they never got their due at the time, and the weirdness of Earth angels and shape-shifting transdimensional incest bots hovered over the series, they stand tall in Supergirl’s storied history. 

Strap in, folks, things are about to get strange and stupid. In the wake of DC’s Crisis on Infinite Earths, writer/artist John Byrne wanted to start reintegrating the popular parts of the Superman mythos that had been jettisoned as part of the maxi-event. One of those parts was Supergirl as she had always proved a popular hit with female Superman fans. The only problem was that DC Editorial was holding firm on the idea that there were to be no other Kryptonians besides Superman. 

So, to get around this problem Byrne introduced the idea of a pocket dimension that was being ravage by General Zod and a collection of other Kryptonian criminals. In this world, there’s no Superman to stop them so Lex Luthor, who is a good guy there, develops a shape-shifting artificial life form named Matrix who defaulted to look like Supergirl. Eventually, Matrix emigrated to the main DC universe where she kicked around as a supporting character and evens started a romance with her father’s son Alex, which is pretty creepy no matter how you’re slicing it.

Matrix may never have really found the popularity DC editorial was hoping for, but she remains a favorite to me.  I like the idea of a refugee Supergirl from an alternate world, though I like the idea of a shape-shifter choosing to be Supergirl even more. There’s a lot of interesting stories to be told with that concept and the possibilities are only more engaging with the added dynamic of her being the creation of Superman’s greatest enemy. At the time, Luthor had become something of a hero so that idea wasn’t really explored in full but transposing the same concept to a modern setting could work really well. There’s a serious Frankenstein vibe to the whole situation that I like, and we’ve already seen Luthor created Super beings work for great drama with Kon-El and Bizarro. 

Yes, Supergirl was an angel for quite awhile. This was the first thing Peter David added to the mythos when he took over, but before he settled into the more straightforward and enjoyable Linda Danvers stuff I discussed earlier. What happened was that Matrix Supergirl underwent an existential crisis about whether or not she actually existed as a real person, and so chose to meld with a human woman named Linda Danvers. Linda was dying when she melded with Matrix and from their fusion/death the two morphed into a new Supergirl who was also a literal angel. She had all of the standard Supergirl powers in addition to weird angelic abilities like giant wings of fire and such.

I can’t say that angel Supergirl was ever well done, though there are at least a few elements of the idea that might be worth exploring. She’s one of the few iterations of Christian Mythology within the DC Universe, a facet of the DCU that actually became a major part of continuity in the late ‘90s/early 2000s. DC has never really squared this fact with the idea that the Gods of ancient myth also exist, even though Wonder Woman and the literal angel Zauriel have palled around as Justice League members. 

Add to the that the weird idea that alien Gods like Rao and H’ronmeer totally exist in DC continuity as well and there’s a lot of weird cosmology going completely unaddressed here. If Supergirl was to die but return from death as some kind of fusion of Kryptonian and Christian mythologies, traversing the mythic planes of deities and the dead that’d actually be a really cool comic to read.  As it stands, the angel stuff David infused her solo adventures with never really amounted to much, which is why I separated it into two separate entries.  Still, it was a good idea, just one applied in the wrong way. 

Firstly, yes, Power Girl is technically a Supergirl character. She was originally created to be the Supergirl of Earth-2, a parallel reality made up of heroes from the ‘40s who had actually fought the Nazis in World War 2 and were a team known as the Justice Society of America. The idea of Earth-2 when Power Girl showed up in it in the mid ‘70s was that all the Earth-2 heroes were starting to get older and more out of date, and a new generation was coming in to replace them. When she did show up in the original Justice Society, Batman was dead; Superman was going gray; and the Star-Spangled Kid was leading the Justice Society of America. Power Girl stuck around Earth-2 for nearly 10 years before it was destroyed in DC’s Crisis in 1986; however her popularity ended up saving her from the same oblivion that consumed a lot of the Earth-2 characters.  

She was quietly slotted into the new DC Universe and eventually joined the Justice League Europe, though the details on that are the subjects for a different article. Even though Power Girl was still part of continuity, she spent the better part of 3 decades without any kind of in-universe origin. Eventually, in 2005, DC reintroduced the multiverse and basically just threw up their hands and admitted Power Girl was the Supergirl of Earth-2. That’s still her origin now under the New 52/DC You continuity where she’s still headlining comics.

I don’t think there’s any secret to why Power Girl is popular, both with the DC artist and editors and with a good chunk of the male comic readership.  There’s actually an industry legend that the artist who created her, Ric Estrada, deliberately started drawing her breasts larger and larger to see if anyone from the editorial side would notice her ridiculous proportions and ask him to stop. I don’t know if that’s true, but it’s certainly believable. And there’s no getting around the fact that Power Girl’s cup size is a big part of why the editors at DC have been so keen on keeping her around. 

However, and I admit this is a big however, I actually think Power Girl has developed a strong personality that’s wholly apart from the overt sexuality of her design.  

A lot of this comes down to my own standards of sexism and sex appeal in artwork, but I’ve always lived by the reasoning that if a female character exists as a well written and interesting character outside their sex appeal then I’m fine with them existing as an idealized being. After all, there’s nothing objectively wrong with sex appeal or idealized physical forms in stories that exist expressly for wish fulfillment. Given I’m actually a major Power Girl fan, especially during her time as the tough as nails leader of the Justice Society of America. 

She was always an extremely powerful leader with the muscle to back it up, especially since she’s as powerful as Superman making her one of the most powerful super-women in comics.  So yeah, even though I’m sure a good amount of her popularity comes from her so-called “boob window” costume, I’d like to believe there are just as many people who like her for being a commanding and kick-ass hero in her own right. 

Next week: we’ll see what’s topical I guess. 


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