Superman Through the Ages! Forum

Behold!

The first appearance of Power Girl (http://superman.nu/tales4/pg/)!

(This was actually contributed by somebody who sent me a bunch of old comics a few months ago, including this issue of All-Star.  Unfortunately, I don't remember who it was.  If the generous contributor is reading this, please speak up!  Thanks!)

:s:

Wally Wood is one of my favorite artists ever!

I've said for years that if they were to have killed ANYBODY off in the Crisis, it ought to have been Power Girl. She has never had that interesting a personality (under ANY writer that has written her, from Gerry Conway to Paul Levitz to Roy Thomas to Geoff Johns, and that says something), and the tittering, immature adolescent fixation with her breasts that is her single distinctive trait got old decades ago.

Power Girl was a redundancy whose existence was only justified by the fact that there is no Superman Family on Earth-2. If the multiple Earths were to be eliminated, she is deprived of her one uniqueness - indeed, her only true reason to exist. You guys blew your best chance to get rid of her with the Crisis. Instead, the bullet missed the target and hit the infinitely more interesting character of Supergirl. Way to go, boneheads!

I'm not a big fan of character death for the simple reason that one of the "rules" of working in a medium like comic books with a continuum, is that you can never "close a door." You can't blow up a place forever or kill a character. Even if you can't think of a story there, some other writer in the future might. That said, if I had to pick five characters to die, they would be:

Power Girl;

Immortus (I could write an entire post about this, but here's my justification in a nutshell: if he isn't a reformed Kang that has learned the err of his ways, like Steve Englehart wrote, what's the point of having him around at all? Kang is a better time travelling villain than Immortus could ever hope to be)

Wolverine (this choice speaks for itself)

Cable (ditto)

US Agent (or at least have him made into a villain. There are some traits that destroy any chance of a character that has it being likeable in any way. If a superhero was an antisemite, for example, I would not like him no matter how much personality he has. US Agent's mindless, cynical Ultra-Nationalism makes him profoundly sinister and unlikeable no matter how many issues of AVENGERS WEST COAST he appears in - and the fact that he's a Cap clone is just frosting on the horse manure-flavored cake)

Apocalypse (despite being derivative in name and appearance from a villain a thousand times greater than he could ever hope to be, his complete lack of anything resembling a concrete motivation, his vague non-personality reduced to saying cryptic things the writers never explain, and his power that is so vaguely defined as to be virtually limitless, I still have a few more bad things to say about Apocalypse nonetheless: for instance, his gag-inducing overexposure and level of undeserved veneration in the X-Books)[/list]

Incidentally, I take it as a source of pride that the one woman I would select to kill is Power Girl. Fans, when asked this question, fans give lists comprised mostly of female characters, and that speaks volumes about 1) the inherent misogyny of male oriented comics fans, for whom strong women are intimidating; and more importantly, 2) the irrelevancy of female characters: they can die because they won't matter. Batman had his spine damaged and he recovered. Babs Gordon on the other hand...

Please note that DC had and still has I believe a strict no other Kryptonians besides Superman rule, so the Earth-Zero Power Girl is therefore not suppose to be the same person as the old Earth-2 Power Girl, no matter what the ending of Crisis might led one to believe, afterall, she was last seen there with the Pre-Reboot Superman, so they both were re-conned.

Read all about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Girl

Geez, gone for over a week with over a dozen replies to make ...

OK, first, I agree that the original Supergirl was a superior character to Power Girl.  Given my druthers, I'd keep her over the E-2 copy.

That having been said, I also agree with DC's decision to axe E-1 Kara and keep E-2 Kara.  Consider that the original Supergirl had an unbroken history of not being salesworthy.  She'd never been able to sustain her own book.  Power Girl was still relatively virgin territory without that 100% fail record, and she had a lot of potential as a non 'S'/'super' character to be worked into something that would sell.

If it were a choice between the proven failure and the hopeful newbie, I know where the business guys were going with this.

The jury's still out on how the 'new' Kara Zor-El will work out.  Again, all incarnations of Supergirl, both Pre and Post Crisis, have tanked.

I'd read that, but I don't think I want the migrane right this instant.  :D

My point here is this:

Crisis messed up a lot of things. Characters that were previously interesting (Hawkman, the DC space heroes, Superman) were changed unrecognizeably and hideously. The only DC character that actually benefitted from Crisis is Wally West, and that was because he was given over to talented writers (Baron) that made him likeable and distinctive. Supergirl died, which surely was a case of throwing out the baby with the bathwater if there ever was one.

Oh, but heaven and earth had to be moved to let Power Girl survive somehow.

Despite the fact come post-Crisis she has no real reason to exist. Despite the fact that her presence in a future DC universe would not make sense. And most importantly of all, despite the fact that she was never worth saving in the first place.

Many characters killed in Crisis (or altered abysmally and cluelessly by later events) were interesting and worthwhile. Power Girl was never interesting or worthwhile. Yet, she survived the Crisis while better characters did not.

Go figure.

To rephrase what I said earlier, Supergirl was a proven failed property while Power Girl still had potential to be salvaged given the distinctiveness of the copy and the relative newness.

Geoff Johns, the character doctor, has his hands on Power Girl now in JSA Classified.  While I think Johns is overrated, he does have a tendency to make characters fresh and workable.  Hey, he fixed the Hawkmess which was no small feat.  While his science and pseudoscience stinks, his themes and characterization tend to be bang on.  My only complaint is how he handled Guy Gardner in the recent Green Lantern: Rebirth series, but it's a minor nit at that (Guy cheating on his taxes?  Lying about not wanting the ring back?  GLs are chosen for honesty as well as fearlessness!).

Your point makes no sense, since it's NOT the same Power Girl.

The Power Girl that is running around is NOT the pre-crisis Power Girl, she didn't make it, she didn't survived crisis. She is NOT a Kryptonian, she is not Superman's cousin. She is NOT the same character in those two pages.

Again, have some pills handy and read the link.  :P

This is totally true.

However, while I as a reader can understand the rationale behind decisions made at the business end, ultimately my priorities as a reader are very different from those of a businessperson. The priorities of a businessperson are to sell comics. The priorities of a comic book reader like me are different: I want to read good comics.

Business decisions are made with considerations apart from the aesthetic or entertainment value, which are the only two things that are important for me. A comic's sales numbers do not determine quality for anybody except the accountants.

Thus, I have no desire to defend a creative decision on business grounds. The fact that Power Girl is a more marketable character than Supergirl does not change the fact she is less interesting than Supergirl was.



I will say one thing about Geoff Johns's take on Power Girl: he had her form a relationship with other female heroes, friendships with Stargirl and the Huntress, and a mother/daughter dynamic with the original Red Tornado. The fact he was able to make her connect with other characters shows he thinks of her more three-dimensionally; Virginia Woolf once said that the surest test to know if female characters are real or window dressing for male characters is if they form friendships with one another. In other words, Geoff Johns' Power Girl adds instead of detracts. Maybe he sees something there no one else does (and certainly I don't).

While I share your POV re: the aesthetics of Supergirl vs Power Girl, it would be exceedingly arrogant to claim our tastes are the ultimate say in this matter.  Even you yourself stated that Wally/Flash works because of good writing.  Surely, the same could be said of any character, Power Girl included.

I still think Power Girl had potential while Supergirl had run her course.

That DC has mangled Power Girl too isn't something inherently wrong with the character but more to do with corporate mismanagement of the character.

Power Girl was actually more interesting than Supergirl when she first came out because she strove to establish an identity very separate from her Superman's instead of being content to bask in the shadow of the original 'S' and be a perpetual second-stringer.  She balked at Kal-L's choice of being a journalist (interfering busybodies is what she called them and compared them with her cousin).

I still like the original model over the E-2 copy.  But you do a great disservice to her by claiming she was completely inferior to the original.

The scuttlebutt is that Conway intended Power Girl to be Earth-2 Kal-L and Lois's daughter, and was named Power Girl so as not to be confused with Supergirl.

I would disagree that Power Girl started out more interesting.  The thing I remember about her was that she was a strident (nay, shrill) feminist who nonetheless wore the most revealing outfit for a superheroine up to that time.  Nothing is more annoying or tiresome than a female character (in comics or otherwise) who runs around showing T&A while screaming, "Take me seriously, you male chauvanist pigs!"  :roll:

That said, I do agree that every character has potential and if we had to lose Kara Zor-El, her E-2 counterpart was better than nothing.  The problem is DC dropped the ball as usual and tripped all over itself with about a half dozen conflicting origins all trying to explain how she's not from Krypton.  It's like that old parable about building a house upon the sand...without a solid foundation you can't develop a character worth reading, and since Kara didn't know who she was or where she came from, she really never went anywhere.

I have to agree with Julian here that the single distinction Power Girl can claim after nearly 30 years in print (!!!!!!) is a sexy costume.  It's her whole identity, and her sole appeal.

Ha, there's irony for you...I just suggested that Power Girl is "under-developed"! :lol:

You guys are killing me.

The great thing about those 2 pages is the way Power Girl's emasculation of the two classic he-man heroes is visually demonstrated by having her wrestle and stomp on a giant pink phallic symbol!  An awesome sight!






I think this scene was used in an early JLU animated cartoon episode, replacing Power Girl with Supergirl and adding more JL characters and the Brimstone character from Legends(?)????

Hey! Your site is great, and i don't mean to be too demanding, but why haven't you published the whole story?

I'd love to see the rest of the story, Rao. Power Girl has become one of my favorite characters (mostly thanks to Johns) and I'd love to see her full origin. I've read about it but I've never seen the comic.

Her "first appearance" and her "origin" are not the same story.

What you see in these two pages is all you get for her introduction.  She showed up; she punched villains and bickered with all of "the guys," including Superman; and that's it.  No close relationship with Kal or Lois; no adoption; nothing.

Her "origin" was told later over the course of three issues of some other title.  I don't remember being that impressed with it.  The recent re-telling was a bit better.

The odd thing was that the first "origin" story was really just a re-telling of her own recollections, as possibly planted by the spaceship that brought her to Earth.  When you read it up against the Arion retcon; and then the recent back-to-Earth-2 re-retcon, you realize that she has never had a real origin story.  The first one feels just as fake as all the other ones she has had.

:s: