It feels like it all should have been so terribly simple. In 1958—driven by changing demographics and a general desire to shake things up—DC Comics got an idea in its head to create a younger, female counterpart to its flagship superhero, Superman. A trial run—involving (obviously!) photographer Jimmy Olsen, a magical Native American totem, and an inevitable fatal sacrifice—proved that readers could adjust to the idea of Superman having a girl version of himself hanging around just fine, and so, a year later, DC published “The Supergirl From Krypton!” Written by Otto Binder (who’d previously done something very similar for one of DC’s chief rivals, Captain Marvel/Shazam, with Mary Marvel) and artist Al Plastino, the issue laid out most of the biographical details that anyone vaguely familiar with Supergirl’s history over the next seven decades could know or guess: She’s Superman’s cousin (on his father’s side). She’s another orphan from his doomed home planet. And she has pretty much all of his same ideals and abilities, granted by good orphanage living and the Earth’s yellow sun. (Yes, Superman stuck his long-lost relative, who traveled light-years across the cosmos to be with him, in an orphanage. What was he going to do, rent a bigger apartment?)
And, certainly, that’s all you really need to know about Supergirl headed into Supergirl, this summer’s follow-up to last year’s Superman, which briefly introduced Milly Alcock’s hard-drinking party girl version of the long-running character. But eliding that 70-year history would skip over a huge amount of extremely bizarre fictional biography—including multiple deaths, Atlantean sorcerers, Earth-bound angels, and that bit where she was flying around in space, vomiting lava on people. It also, critically, skips over decades’ worth of comics creators who’ve worked hard to solve the key question presented by the character’s whole existence: Who is Kara Zor-El/Matrix/Linda Danvers/etc besides being “Superman in a skirt”?
The first several decades of Supergirl’s existence were fairly normal, at least for a character whose major romantic interests are a 30th-century super-genius and a centaur who turned himself into her magic horse. She got into Superman-ish adventures, saved the day, time-traveled liberally (allowing her to be a major part of DC’s future-set Legion Of Super-Heroes books), and generally lived the eternally wacky, charmingly silly, consequence-lite life of a Silver Age superhero. Kara (secret identity: Linda Lee Danvers) was popular enough during this time to helm her own comic more than once, leading DC mainstay Adventure Comics in addition to multiple self-titled books, and, owing to the multiverse concepts the publisher started messing around with after 1961’s famed “Flash Of Two Worlds!” eventually picked up her own other-Earth doppelganger (eventually known as Power Girl). She even got her own movie—although Christopher Reeve’s refusal to lend a little extra star power to the film, and the generally dire state of the Superman film franchise circa 1984, led to Supergirl being a box office and critical bomb.
Worse things were ahead. The editorial minds at DC had decided that Superman needed a serious revamp, and that that push would begin by making him unique again, as Krypton’s only survivor—no more super-dogs, no more dozens of different flavors of Kryptonite, and no more super-powered cousins invading the continuity like so many omnipotent Balkis. Many of the sillier aspects of Kal-El’s old backstory would be allowed to lapse into obscurity, quietly swept away with the coming of John Byrne’s reboot comic The Man Of Steel. But an example had to be made of how serious DC was about this “No more ‘Beppo The Super-Monkey’ shit,” and Kara was the chosen sacrifice. DC executives tapped Marv Wolfman and George Pérez to be their hitmen, and the seventh issue of their massively hyped crossover comic Crisis On Infinite Earths as the crime scene. Fighting the event comic’s big slab o’ bad guy, the Anti-Monitor, Supergirl died saving her cousin, and was mourned by all of DC’s heroes… for like 20 pages, before her entire existence was wiped from continuity just a few issues later, rendering her not just gone, but forgotten.
The thing about company-wide reboots of five decades of ongoing storytelling, though, is that they’re tricky beasts to manage, and DC’s handling of the post-Crisis publishing environment was notably slapdash. (We should all thank our various gods that Isabela Merced hasn’t landed a Hawkgirl movie yet, or we’d be here all night trying to explain how the character is somehow both an alien bird cop and a reincarnated Egyptian princess.) Supergirl was especially tricky, thanks to how many other comics she’d been a prominent part of before getting scrubbed out. For instance, DC wasn’t rebooting The Legion Of Super-Heroes, where she’d made many prominent appearances (and which was also wrestling with the decision—motivated by both legal and storytelling concerns—to erase the concept of Superman’s teen hero-ing career as Superboy from its history.) Well, okay: Superboy was eventually replaced with the hilariously transparent copy “Mon-El from the planet Daxam,” so what’s one more Daxamite on the pile? Enter “Andromeda.” Meanwhile, Power Girl—Supergirl’s copy from the now-dissolved Earth 2—had developed a decent-sized fan-following in her own right, mostly as part of the Justice Society Of America. How do you keep telling stories with that character, when there’s only supposed to be one Kryptonian floating around Earth? Easy: Explain that she’s actually the daughter of an Atlantean wizard who’d been put in suspended animation and then tricked into believing she was Superman’s cousin. It’s so simple, we’re shocked you even had to ask.
The other big issue, though, was coming from inside the house: Lots of creators at DC liked Supergirl. Although never the deepest character, she had a fun visual design, and helpfully highlighted the more idealistic and hopeful parts of Superman’s character. (Also, DC writers in the 1980s were no more immune to the lure of nostalgia from characters they’d read as kids than modern creators.) And so, inevitably, Supergirls started slipping back into reality—despite the “no other Kryptonians” ban. John Byrne himself made the biggest move, introducing a “protoplasmic humanoid” named Matrix who was created by an alternate universe Lex Luthor, and who just happened to end up shapeshifting into a form almost exactly like our universe’s Supergirl before she followed Superman back to the main DC reality. (If you’ve ever read the massive ’90s comics event The Death Of Superman, Matrix is the one doing Supergirl stuff around the margins, in between making out with a bizarrely young and lion-maned Luthor.) As if being a mentally unstable goo-monster from another dimension wasn’t weird enough, by the way, the character eventually fell into the hands of writer Peter David, who mixed her with a devil-worshiper named Linda Danvers to create a character referred to as an “Earth-born angel” with magical fire powers. Pretty far afield from “Superman’s cousin is coming for an interstellar visit,” huh?
When future publisher Dan DiDio rose to prominence at DC in the mid-2000s, the ridiculous convolutions surrounding Supergirl were an early target of his new regime. The company had clearly bent itself into insane positions in an attempt to fill Supergirl-shaped holes in its character roster without breaking a now-20-year-old edict, and all it had gotten them was a bunch of interesting, but decidedly bizarre, comics that nobody really treated as the “real” Supergirl. Working with writer Jeph Loeb, DiDio re-introduced a new version of Kara Zor-El in the pages of the popular book Batman/Superman that hewed strongly to the ’50s story: Another survivor of Krypton, albeit one with the additional twist of having been born before her famous cousin, and thus old enough to remember life on the planet both before, and during, the cataclysm that destroyed it. That more complicated relationship with Krypton’s legacy (itself a matter of about a dozen different revamps and reboots) has colored much of the character’s publication history over the last 20 years. (Including that “vomiting lava” bit, when Kara’s rage at her homeworld’s destruction made her an apparently prime, if temporary, candidate for Geoff Johns’ utterly ridiculous, anger-fueled Red Lantern Corps.)
Most importantly, DC allowed itself to lighten up with the revived Kara’s continuity. All-ages books, like Landry Q. Walker and Eric Jones’ Supergirl: Cosmic Adventures In The Eighth Grade, allowed the character to be used in stories actually aimed at the kids who might be interested in the idea of Superman having a young pal their own age. Other writers took obvious cues from Melissa Benoist’s open-hearted portrayal of her in six-season Arrowverse series Supergirl. And other writers began to explore, in far more meaningful detail, what Kara’s status as the last survivor of a dead planet might actually feel like.
Which finally brings us to the book James Gunn has made clear served as the main inspiration for Ana Nogueira’s Supergirl script: Tom King and Bilquis Evely’s 2021 critical darling Supergirl: Woman Of Tomorrow. Like many great standalone comics stories, Woman Of Tomorrow possesses exactly as much continuity as it needs: Kara Zor-El is Superman’s cousin, she saves people who need saving, and, yes, she enjoys the occasional drink. (The version of the character in the book doesn’t seem quite as dedicated to the sauce as Alcock’s portrayal in Superman would suggest, but she does wind up on a planet with a power-sapping red sun on her 21st birthday specifically so she can drink herself into a lonely stupor.) As written by King and drawn by Evely, this Kara—viewed through the eyes of an alien girl she reluctantly takes under her wing—bears many of the surface traits she featured in 1959: Blond-haired, blue-eyed, and heroic as all get out. She is also in an enormous amount of pain; unbroken, not because she has not been subject to horrendous breaking pressures, but because she possesses an ironclad unwillingness to break.
Much has been made (including by Gunn), of Superman’s status as an immigrant story: A child—convenietly clear of any messy baggage from their “homeland”—arrives in America, and makes it better with their native gifts. King’s story doesn’t position Kara Zor-El in that same clean light; she wasn’t lucky enough to be tucked safely in a rocket (or a “birthing matrix”—John Byrne apparently really loved that word) and allowed to miss the lethal fireworks. As we learn in our journey with her across the stars, she watched Krypton, and its people, die, over and over again, and while her chronicler Ruthye—reportedly played by Eve Ridley in Craig Gillespie’s film—cautions readers not to take her interpretation of Supergirl as gospel, the book also makes a strong case that that refugee trauma is both the weight on her back, and the fuel raging inside her like a sun. King and Evely’s work was widely touted when it was being published, and it’s not hard to see why: How many creative teams could pick up a character, 65 years after her debut, and finally find her wounded and beautiful heart?
If we’re being honest, though, the seven-decade story of Supergirl is mostly a story about adaptability: Of creators taking a name, some powers, a costume, and the rules surrounding them, and bending them into the stories they were personally interested in telling. (Whether about eighth-grade misadventures, Atlantean warlocks, or alien slime monsters who are also angelic magical girls.) Gunn, Gillespie, Nogueira, and Alcock are now set to tell their own story about her, and though it’ll likely be indebted to King and Evely’s tale, it’ll also inevitably be some new deformation of Kara Zor-El’s endlessly fluid identity, pitched to the needs of the current moment. That’s okay, though; Supergirl can take it. God knows she’s been through worse.
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