Streaky
7 years ago - A litter of barn cats is born on one of the farms in Smallville. One of the kittens is stricken with wanderlust and becomes a stray.
5 years ago - Kara Zor-El saves an injured ornery 2-year-old orange cat on the Kent farm which bonds with her. She names it Streaky after the white lines down both sides of its body.
3 years ago - 4-year-old Streaky first meets Connor Kent & Krypto. She doesn't like either of them, and they give her a wide berth.
2 years ago - 5-year-old Streaky moves to Metropolis with Kara Zor-El as she attends Metropolis University.
I know that the Silver Age of DC is filled with a lot of kind of silly stuff, and we do leave a lot of it in the past, but when you go back and read these stories one thing that really stands out is just how solid the worldbuilding is. Modern readers who are used to very loosey-goosey continuity will probably be shocked at just how consistent everything is. It's that firm structural worldbuilding that actually works for you when you build playful creations like Streaky the Supercat. The idea that there is a hidden ball of twine somewhere in Midvale that one particular cat keeps playing with and inadvertently getting superpowers just seems like the sort of worldbuilding element you are allowed to introduce when you're doing your job properly.
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Krypto's Comic HistoryStreaky appeared for the first time in Action Comics #261 in 1960. Supergirl, in her Linda Lee identity, sees a small kryptonite meteor, and collects it using a lead capsule. She attempted some experiments to try to invent an antidote for Kryptonite, but failing to do so, she discards the fragment in the woods, unaware that she's altered the Kryptonite into Kryptonite-X. later, she saves a stray cat, and adopted it as a pet, naming it Streaky. Unbeknownst to anyone. Streaky went and played with the Kryptonite-X, and was granted temporary powers. After some brief adventures with Supergirl they wore off, and he was left to dream about again becoming Supercat. The Kryptonite-X would later become entangled with a ball of twine that Steaky hides, even though he has no idea this is what keeps giving him superpowers. He would continue to appear in lots of classic Silver Age Superman stories, eventually becoming part of her Legion of Super-Pets, which did in fact exist and wasn't a fever dream I had once. .
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By Supergirl's solo comic in the seventies, you really only saw him as a normal cat snuggling with Supergirl when she was home... something very necessary in a comic mostly about her pining for a boyfriend. The Superpets were one of the first things removed from the Superman mythos when John Byrne recreated it after the Crisis, although the comics did continually make references to them. Even Supergirl herself was replaced by the 'matrix' Supergirl, which is a whole thing, but in the 2000s Kara appeared again, and when Joe Kelly did a stint on her solo book, he reintroduced Streaky as an ornery cat Kara saves that is just around her apartment a lot and slowly becomes her pet.
The idea of Supergirl being a cat-owner has essentially persisted ever since, but in recent years, as comics have started to slowly get more comfortable re-introducing the whimsy of the Silver Age back into their stories, we've actually started to see a return of Streaky with superpowers. She (she's a girl now) was reintroduced in 2017 a Super Sons Annual centered around the Superpets, and is now a regular part of the current run of Supergirl. |
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Our Streaky StoryWe had an interesting conversation about Streaky. We all agreed that giving her a cat is one of the more humanizing things you can do for Kara. In our version of her story, where her time on Earth takes her from the Kent farm to Metropolis actually creates a really interesting framework for Streaky, starting her out as a ornery barn cat and later having her move to the city where she can live with Kara and Nia as they attend college.
We had an interesting conversation about Streaky's powers. As fun as they are, they're kind of the least useful thing she does when compared to the companionship she provides Kara. The nature of her powers actually does kind of set her up for a story where she gets them temporarily just one time, but that does mean we have to introduce a method for imbuing someone with Kryptonian-level powers, which is a big deal. Maybe if we can come up with an elegant way of intruding Kryptonite-X as a one-time thing, we could do it, but for now we actually like her just as she is. |