Power Girl
32 years ago - Karen Starr is born in a suburb of Metropolis.
14 years ago - 18-year-old Karen graduates high school and moves to Metropolis, temping during the day and working as a waitress at night.
12 years ago - 20-year-old Karen is taken by alien geneticist Despero and used in an experiment to synthesize Kryptonian DNA. She becomes half-human, half-Kryptonian, and is saved by Superman. She adopts her Power Girl identity, but is warned by Superman that she needs to mature as a hero before she is taken seriously.
11 years ago - 21-year-old Karen begins working on her own startup company.
10 years ago - 22-year-old Karen defeats Atomic Skull.
8 years ago - 24-year-old Karen sells her startup for several million, and uses the money to start her own technology company Starrware Tech. She helps Superman frees himself when his personality is rewritten by the Eradicator, and finally learns his secret identity.
6 years ago - 26-year-old Karen meets Kara Zor-El, and suggests that she takes up her Supergirl Identity.
4 years ago - 28-year-old Karen becomes the new chairperson of the Justice Society. She deliberately begins aggressively recruiting young heroes to mentor, including Courtney Whitmore & Pat Dugan.
3 years ago - 29-year-old Karen invites Kendra Saunders & Albert Rothstein join the Justice Society.
2 years ago - 30-year-old Karen and Michael Holt begin their relationship in earnest. When Billy Batson is forced to leave the Justice League when his age is revealed, Karen invites him to join the Justice Society.
DC might have a few specific characters that are it's major flagpole characters that get their faces on the lunchboxes, but once you get past that group there are certain characters that serve as DC's lifeblood, and Power Girl is absolutely one of them. Explaining just who she is tends to take a while, but it's always been worth it, because when she's firing on all cylinders, she's an absolutely beloved part of the world. Finding a way to make her work in our timeline was a huge priority, and we're pretty proud of the result.
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Power Girl's Comic HistoryPower Girl showed up for the first time in All-Star Comics # 58 in 1976. The numbering is a little confusing, because All-Star hadn't been published since 1951, when it followed the Justice Society of America back before their place in the timeline got weird thanks to the introduction of the Multiverse in 1961. The innovation here was to tell new stories in the Earth-2 world of the Justice Society and to introduce a new second generation of heros. This included the already established character Star-Spangled Kid, an adult Dick Grayson who was still Robin, and a brand-new Earth-2 take on Superman's cousin Kara.
Supergirl had been around for a bit, but her popularity was at an all-time high, so the decision to base this new character on her made sense. A huge part of Supergirl's story in that era was the fact that Superman kept her secret forever, even having her live in an orphanage... Pre-Crisis Superman was notably a dick. This new character, the Earth-2 version of Kara (now Karen Starr), was hidden much longer, so she was an older character...which basically meant that she could be drawn overtly sexually in practically every panel. This is when Wally Wood drew her, and the old "he drew her chest bigger in every issue because he didn't think anyone was paying attention" urban legend happened. Weirdly, because the book was being structured to show her off so much, she got a ton of appearances and was actually able to establish herself as a real powerhouse character... just one that was largely defined by her looks. |
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Other books continued to feature the world of the 'modern' Earth-2 heroes, expanding a new generation of characters. Power Girl continued to play a central part in all of it, eventually joining the children of the Justice Society in the 1984 series Infinity Inc. Her costume was gently updated in what might have been an attempt to sexualize her less, but of course she was still a woman in a comic book in the 80s, so... yea.
1985 brought the Crisis of Infinite Earths, and the restructuring of the entire DC timeline, removing the idea of multiple Earths and changing the Justice Society to make those characters active in World War II. For the better part of the 80's, lots of characters had their individual timelines uprooted by the changes wrought from the Crisis, some faring better than others. Power Girl took a little longer than others, because her story was tied to Superman, who was having his whole world redesigned Post-Crisis by John Byrne. One of the edicts of Bryne's Superman was establishing that he was the ONLY survivor of Krypton, period, end of sentence. Lots of characters who were once Kryptonians had their stories re-designed; the new Supergirl was a shapeshifting extra-dimensional lifeform, and Zod was the son of Russian cosmonauts who was affected by Kryptonian radiation. |
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Power Girl, however, didn't have her story completely retold from the ground up; the character we knew continued to exist, joining the book Justice League Europe in 1989. She needed a new origin, though, and soon discovered that she had never been Kryptonian, but was in fact related to Arion, the sorcerer from ancient Atlantis. It was, admittedly, a pretty flimsy origin that never really found its footing, but for the better part of the 80s and 90s this was who she was. Like a lot of characters she had new costumes, none of which would ever make any sense outside the 90s. This era also featured a nearly pathological need for all the characters to constantly talk down to her; as though her entire role in the comic was to be a target for misogynistic abuse. I have no idea why this happened, but it was not good.
Geoff Johns' 1999 JSA series was a huge part of restructuring the larger world of DC, and did the same with Power Girl when she joined the book in issue #31 in 2002. Her origins were largely ignored, but they returned her to her original costume, which predictably saw her popularity climb. She starred in her own solo arc of JSA Classified in 2005, where she was drawn for the first time by husband & wife team Amanda Connor & Jimmy Palmiotti, whose work on the character has largely defined her in the modern era. This story arc introduced the idea that would then play out that same year in Infinite Crisis; that she was in fact a refugee from Earth-2, and her original origins were still intact. |
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WIth her story newly invigorated, Power Girl got her own series in 2009 by Connor & Palmiotti, and this is really where the character seems to suddenly, truely, arrive. Unlike a lot of other overly-sexualized characters in comics, She's finally depicted as being fully aware of her status as a bombshell, and is basically fine with it. She gets to be fun, powerful, and sexy all at once, and those ideas are finally not conflicting with each other. In short, she gets to be a complete person. This version of Power Girl really leaned into her excellence, reminding the reader that in addition to being a huge powerhouse, she was also the CEO of her own tech company.
The series ran until 2011, when DC reset everything with the new 52. She was absent for the first year, but was introduced as the co-star of the series World's Finest, pairing her with Huntress as refugees from Earth-2. She went through a series of costumes, some better than others before eventually having her 'debut' her classic Powergirl costume. She appeared in Mister Terrific's solo series, but eventually found her way back to Earth-2, where she was a lead character in all series set there, including World's End & Society. This take on the character is actually surprisingly faithful to her pre-new 52 characterization, and since she has once again gone back to living in an alternative version of Earth her world is free to undergo wild changes. Her current costume is actually back to featuring the Superman logo. |
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Our Power Girl StorySo here's a character that puts us in a real pickle. We are absolutely, 100% required to have Power Girl in our timeline... it's simply not DC without her. But we're also definitely not going to use her normal continuity backstory, because we're not using the Multiverse. So we're in a position where we need to completely rethink her origin... which means we have to start by establishing exactly who she is and how she operates, to make sure our original origin produces EXACTLY the character we want her to be.
First of all, she needs to be almost as powerful as Superman himself. More than that, though, we actually want her powers to be somehow Kryptonian in origin without actually making her a Kryptonian; doing that would basically make her Supergirl 2.0. She needs to be older than Supergirl, and to really get her personality right she needs to be aware of her status as a sex symbol, and be totally comfortable with it, even going so far as to be willing to use it to her advantage. |
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But how does she get her powers in the first place? What we need is a method of giving her hybrid-Kryptonian physiology, with the understanding that this needs to be something that could never possibly happen again.
Despero is an alien geneticist that underwent a massive physical change in his quest to perfect his own biology, and is empowered by a weird alien magical force. He works perfectly as a character who would attempt to synthesize Kryptonian DNA using human subjects in ways that would be impossible to replicate. Karen Starr, therefore, can be a young human woman who, out of nowhere, is taken by Despero and used in his experiments, and comes out the other end with an incredibly potent set of superpowers. Superman might be hesitant to trust her with his powers, but he would also want to give her a chance to earn them. Bearing in mind that we're actually building a timeline, we get to build that into her story. She can start out younger and more impulsive (possibly more prone to lean into her sexuality), and then see her mature over time, building her tech company and becoming the Chairperson of the Justice Society, really coming into her own. |
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Power Girl's CostumeLet's just get this out of the way; Power Girl's whole deal is that she's a bombshell. It's not even subtle. The leotard with the opening in the chest isn't a costume that came about over time, that was her original design. We
mentioned the urban legend about artist Wally Wood (who had done his share of adult comic work) deliberately drawing her with larger and larger breasts every issue to prove that no one was watching, but honestly he didn't have to. She was being drawn incredibly, overtly sexually from her very first appearance on-panel. I've said this elsewhere, (probably in one of the innumerable other female characters with similar situations) but while I don't find the practice of drawing characters so they're fun to look at to be problematic on a surface level, it can quickly become problematic if you are so busy objectifying your characters that you forget to actually make them characters... or way, way, worse, if your penchant for objectifying women in your art starts to become insulting or alienating to readers. These characters are supposed to be a power fantasy, and we're meant to be identifying with them. Power Girl was aggressively objectified for a long time, but it often was less to do with her costume, and more with the way the creators were using her. |
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Powergirl has been depicted in lots of costumes, but she was actually way more objectified in her full-body outfits of the 90s than in her more obviously sexualized costumes.... and has been a very actualized and complete character while still rocking her infamous "chest window". In the end, a character that is being drawn to titillate can, if done right, still be likeable, empowering and heroic, and Power Girl might just be the best example of that.
So what is it about this costume that makes it work so well, beyond the fact that everyone clearly needs to go to horny jail? Well, it's a clean, functional look with really subtle use of block coloring, uses details like her hair and off-center cape to give her a very good recognizable silhouette, and despite the memes that might say otherwise, actually manages to convey a lot about her character beyond just 'has breasts'. It says that she's confident and assertive, and maybe even cocky. We're served up a lot of weird explanations for why her costume looks like that, but honestly, it might just be wildly overthought. People wear the clothes they wear for all sorts of reasons. Karen might just think she looks awesome and not care if someone has a problem with it. Yes, the costume is wildly impractical, but these are comics we're talking about. If costume practicality is the hill you're going to die on, this might just not be the medium for you. |
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Power Girl's FuturePower Girl is always going to be at her best if you just allow her to be confident, brash, brilliant, and powerful. She's a character that shines when you put a spotlight on her, so we just need to make sure she gets her spotlight.
The modern Justice Society is largely a team of legacy characters, and Power Girl has made it her business, now that she's the Chairwoman of the Society, to focus on and mentor new, young heroes. Under her leadership the team gets to grow and thrive, but that also means she gets to be the beloved mentor to a generation of young heroes. In fact, even Supergirl, who is stepping up as the main hero of Metropolis as Clark spends more time as a father, considers Power Girl her pseudo-big-sister. Within the world of our timeline, Karen started out as a hero who didn't seem to take the job seriously, who was unreliable and unfocused, but over time she dedicated herself and proved just how capable she is and earned her place, not just showing her power but her capability as a leader and mentor. The fact is, she's very likely the single most powerful native earthling on the planet, so I actually imagine some future storyline where she is chosen to represent Earth as a whole in some broader arena, and absolutely killing it. |
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