I’m not going to tell you that Supergirl is one of my top superheroes, but I do really like her when done right. Kara Zor-El, last survivor of a chunk of Krypton that flew off into space and gave science the finger until science pushed back by turning the place into Kryptonite clearly has a tragic history. In a couple of other versions, Argo City or something similar survives in a pocket dimension or something, and Kara has to get home. There’s also the “Matrix” Supergirl, a protoplasmic being created in a pocket dimension post-Crisis On Infinite Earths, when DC decided messing with their “no multiverse” change was less objectionable than not messing with their “no Kryptonians except Kal-El” rule, which might have been the wrong choice, but she certainly has her fans and I like what little I saw of her…until her story went into this weird twist involving angels, demons, a suicidal girl who was part of a two-person cult, and someone who may or may not be God because they really don’t care about Biblical accuracy in the Big Two anymore. There’s a reason I dropped that title pretty early.
One of the defenses I see for the James Gunn version of Kara, and make no mistake that Gunn is seriously influencing this despite not being the screenwriter or director but is promoting the hell out of…himself again mostly, and using Tom King’s Woman Of Tomorrow comic is that this version of Kara, born of the DC plague that is the New 52, is finally addressing watching her people die. The pain has clearly gotten to her and the only direction you can take her is a broken, self-destructive, angry girl who needs to learn to be better. To quote Colonel Potter from M*A*S*H, horse hockey.
The Kara Zor-El I knew pre-Crisis and the original Matrix version of Supergirl both suffered loss. They were also good, caring people who attached themselves to something familiar like family or the alternate universe version of her creator. As I wrote recently, Supergirl and Captain “Shazam” Marvel were seriously altered in the New 52 and that’s the version Tom King turned into someone who shunned her family in favor of going off to get drunk on an alien planet with a lower drinking age in his Supergirl: Woman Of Tomorrow miniseries. King is notorious for “breaking the toys”, making Mister Miracle suicidal, anti-drug hero The Protector into an addict to deal with the stress of his mission in a story where a freaked out Wally West kills a bunch of people at a superhero therapy retreat accidentally then has to die to rectify the situation and create an alternate timeline counterpart, and having Bane trick Catwoman into leaving Batman at the altar because he “needs his pain”, which is clearly just Bane ruining Bruce’s life again. (Bane is the TRUE master of “prep time”.) That’s not even all of it, but this isn’t about King, it’s about his Supergirl story and why I reject the idea that adding trauma to Supergirl’s backstory means making her a self-destructive, rage-filled party bitch.
Even the seat belt PSA comic and the Radio Shack promotion comic understood Supergirl better than the current writers.
No, I don’t care if King’s story or the movie inspired by it ends with Kara getting over her trauma and being a better person. My point is that she’s suffering the trauma of watching her world die. The Silver Age didn’t really do “trauma” because it was convinced kids are stupid (some things never change, they just fade a bit and return worse than ever) and the ultra strict “Comics Code” probably wouldn’t let them. We do see Kara saddened when she makes her debut in Action Comics #262, but the story was focused on setting her up on Earth and following her growth into a superhero, doing super deeds in secret much as early Clark would be shown to do in the post-Crisis reboot and shows like Smallville. Since the Kents were dead in Superman’s adult years, she couldn’t live on the farm. Later versions that left the Kents alive because of the fan support from the pre-Crisis “adventures of Superman when he was a boy” would have versions of Supergirl staying with them as they knew how to raise a young Kryptonian with love and support.
Every version of Kara prior to the New 52 was not full of rage or self-destructive tendencies. She was kind, helpful, wanting to do good. This is one potential starting point for a Kara suffering from the trauma of her world dying, being a teen when she witnessed it happening. The problem isn’t the addition of trauma, it’s the change of attitude the New 52 and Tom King versions insist she must have when adding it, as if hating everybody was somehow her only available response. So she’s no longer allowed to be good natured or hopeful, a contrast to how the DC universe operated prior to Dan DiDio and his preferred writers like Tom King. Instead of a personality shift, I could see Kara maybe being too willing to help, jumping the gun to try to keep her new home from ending up like her old one, but without Kal-El’s practice in using her powers. This is one of the reasons Clark sent her off to the orphanage pre-Crisis and the Kents afterwards. She needed to learn about her world, herself, and her powers.
When Kara was finally introduced in the post-Crisis/pre-Flashpoint period she had the Trinity fighting over her. Clark thought she’d be another him, Batman was deep into his “paranoid” period and wanted to lock her away, and Wonder Woman wanted to make her an Amazon simply because she was a girl with great powers. She eventually got sick of all their nonsense, which makes a lot of sense. This was not a good version of the “Trinity” but while we saw Kara at a nightclub a few times she wasn’t the drunken bitch we have these days. Even in the girl-targeted DC Super Hero Girls it’s been weird. In the second version on Cartoon Network by Lauren Faust, you’d think she was told to remake My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic with the DC heroines given how different that show was from her previous translation of DC heroines, Super Best Friends Forever, the DC Nation shorts. By rights Kara should have still been closer to Fluttershy in personality, but instead she’s the Rainbow Dash. That’s just not right.
Compare it to the Shea Fontana YouTube series, where Kara was trying to learn her powers, had to overcome clumsiness, and was still a kind and caring person. Supergirl: Cosmic Adventures In The Eighth Grade, which kept Argo City around like the 1984 movie, which also had a kind Kara trying to get back home, showed us a Kara/Linda Lee (her usual secret identity is Linda Lee or, if adopted, Linda Danvers, while the CW series just kept her Kara name) having a hard time adjusting to life on Earth and wanting to get back home. It’s one of my favorite takes, but that’s not really the trauma people are talking about. That’s adjusting to Earth having spent half of her formative years on a chunk of Krypton before it turned into Kryptonite. Another direct to video movie had her world destroyed by Brainiac, which led to other trauma but while her anger was more justified, it was aimed at the party responsible, not at people who wanted to help her, and she didn’t drink herself into a mess because of it. She was still worthy of the name Supergirl. We won’t discuss My Adventures With Superman or Smallville since the latter had stopped following multiversal continuity by that point and the only characters the former got right were Clark and his Earth parents. The DCAU had her put in cryogenic suspension, giving her PTSD in the cold, but she still wanted to do what she couldn’t do with her home planet, and save it. Sound familiar, Batman?
Answer: a director who can’t get over the Guardians Of The Galaxy plotline now acting as movie “showrunner”.
Even Matrix, the Kara replacement, lost her world while she was sent to get Superman to help save her pocket universe from that continuity’s version of General Zod and company. She ended up wanting to protect her new home, but made the mistake of falling for the son of this universe’s version of her creator. Except her creator was a good version of Lex Luthor, and nobody knew the “son” was actually Lex in a clone body pretending to be his own offspring after his alpha was killed by Kryptonite poisoning. It left her blind to evidence that, offspring or not, this Lex was still pretty darn evil until the evidence was right in her face. So add naivety to shyness, adjusting to her new life, and wanting to keep her new home safe this time around.
Plenty of people go through a traumatic life experience of losing everything and everyone without falling apart. Even Job from the Bible suffered a serious test of faith after losing his family. I’m not saying it isn’t realistic the way they want to have her respond. I’m saying it’s not the only way to respond, and it’s one that requires rewriting her entire personality, one shared with a superhero namesake, that she’s had for so many decades it should be multiversal continuity at this point. I don’t like the new version of Supergirl not (just) because she isn’t the Kara I knew growing up, but because it’s a rejection of how DC handles heroes and just makes someone I used to like completely unlikable. I remember when Kara used to be worthy of the S shield and the name Supergirl. The DC Gunniverse version and its inspirations on the other hand I’m glad isn’t wearing the proper S shield and I can’t bring myself to see her as Supergirl.
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