I’ve always had a fondness for Supergirl. When I was a kid, I even liked the movie, well, parts of it anyway. Just like the Superman franchise, it had its flaws… namely the fact that the movie people of the time tried too hard to add humorous bad guys and just basically made the movie into some kind of joke. Of course people weren’t going to want to pay money to watch it.
Still, Supergirl’s story is a fascinating one and there’s so much there to work with.
Kara In-Ze was a teenager when she first came to Earth, an alien with no real idea of how to deal with humans. It would be like taking an American teenager and sending them to live in Afghanistan. Things would be very awkward and toes would get stepped on.
You might say that her story is too much like Superman’s–orphaned alien living on Earth pretending to be human, blah, blah, blah. Except that he was adopted as a toddler and really the only life he knew was the one he had with his human family and friends. He is basically a human with superpowers because he never knew any different.
Supergirl on the other hand was dumped on a whole new world and because of “Clark Kent” and the fact that he already had a life there, she was forced to take up a fake identity and pretend to be a normal human girl. So not only did she lose her family and her culture, she can’t even talk to anyone about where she came from or the losses she’s suffered. And however great the Kent family, they are not professional psychotherapists. Especially when everyone just basically tells her to “get over it” and no one gives her the chance to grieve.
In another incarnation of Supergirl, she was created on a parallel Earth that Superman never came to. The Earth suffered great catastrophes and the savior of what humans were left was none other than Lex Luthor, philanthropist scientist. He created Supergirl out of genetic material gathered from Lana Lang, making her her clone twin, and the telekinetic powers she displays are due to the energy matrix he imbued her with.
Superman shows up when everything’s falling apart and Lex Luthor sacrifices his life to save Supergirl, telling her as he’s dying that he loves her. Then she goes back with Superman to his Earth and he basically stuffs her into the role of fake normal girl and just kind of expects her to be able to fit in to a completely alien situation. Sure, she was born on Earth, but it was a post-apocalyptic Earth and she never saw how things were in the good times.
Of course she was going to be lost and afraid and would search out something familiar. Which happened to be Lex Luthor, though he wasn’t the man she knew and was instead a megalomaniac criminal that took advantage of her feelings to make clones of her and try to take over the world. She was forced to help Superman defeat him–the man that looked so much like the man she loved and would never see again.
Even the Linda Danvers Supergirl, who was kind of a bad girl and gained her powers by absorbing the energy matrix of a dying Supergirl had to deal with some real grief. Supergirl sacrificed her life to save her, which left her in debt, so she took up the mantle of Supergirl and set out to keep the legend alive. So she had to look like a dead superheroine, pretend to be the self-same superheroine, hide her secret identity from her family and friends, and deal with a bunch of people that knew the real Supergirl, all while hiding the fact that she was the reason why Supergirl died.
In any incarnation, Supergirl is a tragic figure. But the real tragedy has to be the way the comics gloss over her as a character. She gets pigeon holed as a simpleton in the Silver Age, she gets relegated to being a sidekick, and basically she’s just shoved aside because the legend of Superman is the be-all end-all.
It would be awesome if she received another book, though I would have it be that she was the first to arrive on Earth. Kal-El was sent out only a few weeks before her, but due to time dilation and cosmic drift he arrived on Earth first. So what if instead a teenaged Kara In-Ze came first?
Raised on a Kryptonian colony with Kryptonian ideals, she would be a completely different character, especially if Superman’s not there to force her to toe the line. Some of the versions of Krypton I’ve seen had it being a kind of militaristic society–they weren’t exactly the saviors of the universe. And the Els and In-Ze’s seemed to be pretty high up in the hierarchy.
To come from being basically a princess of Krypton to being nothing on Earth, I don’t think she would have put up with that for long. And to show up in the Golden Age or the Silver Age–the 1950s before the feminism movement? To have a strong, superpowered woman have to deal with that, I don’t think she would have taken it well. At the very least she would have forced society to have to treat her as an equal to anyone around. And that would have been kind of awesome. It probably would have saved Wonder Woman a lot of trouble in “man’s world,” especially if she had another powerful female figure to deal with.
I don’t even know if she would have to deal with kryptonite, since it’s irradiated fragments of the planet Krypton. The fragments came with Kal-El when he traveled through space. But if Kara went ahead, she didn’t have kryptonite with her, so she wouldn’t have to deal with any weaknesses until Kal-El showed up, which could be thirty years from her arrival.
Which would be another twist. To go from having no weaknesses, to suddenly coming across something that can kill her? It would be frightening.
I just think that Supergirl needs another chance. She needs a strong story and a chance to really shine, whether she turns out as a hero or a villain.
