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Author Topic: Timeline: 1st Appearances of each Supergirl, Superwoman, etc  (Read 26418 times)
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Lorendiac
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« on: June 17, 2005, 12:02:07 AM »

1. Introduction: Why I Wrote This
2. The Timeline of First and Final Appearances
3. Short Lists of The Different Users of Each Relevant Name



1. Introduction: Why I Wrote This

In various online forums where I hang out for comic-book-related discussions, people keep asking perfectly reasonable questions such as:

“Who is the current Supergirl? How is she different from the last Supergirl? (And the one before that, and the one before that?)”

“Just how many Supergirls have there been in the comic books, anyway?”

“Why so many?”

“Are they all related to Superman?”

The problem is that there's no simple “sound bite” of an answer that can honestly and accurately answer such questions in one minute or less, even if you actually have all relevant facts at the tip of your tongue (which I certainly didn't when I started writing this).

For instance, if you start trying to delve into these subjects in a way that is not just shallow and superficial but really meant to clear things up, then you've got to talk about the differences between Pre-Crisis and Post-Crisis continuity if you're going to make a clean sweep in explaining just how many Supergirls there have ever been, and why the one who held the job for over a quarter-century is no longer with us.

And since Power Girl started out as a parallel-world analog of the Silver Age Supergirl about thirty years ago, shouldn't she at least get an honorable mention in any in-depth discussion of The Many Supergirls even though she's never claimed the name “Supergirl” in her life? What about the various females who have called themselves “Superwoman” instead of “Supergirl”? Mightn't a fan who wants to know about the Supergirls appreciate having the Superwomen sorted out for him as well, at no extra charge? What about Kara of Argo City in the Superman Versus Aliens miniseries ten years ago, who never called herself “Supergirl” but was obviously designed to strongly remind us of the Pre-Crisis Supergirl who was also a Kara from Argo City, even if it was a different Argo City on a different planet?

You see how quickly such things can escalate? In April of 2005, I started typing out a piece explaining, from memory, what I thought I already knew about the various Supergirls, Superwomen, etc., Pre- and Post-Crisis. The early version was sadly incomplete because I knew I didn't know everything, but it was only a rough draft. I had a vague idea that eventually I might end up with a more “comprehensive” discussion of the subject, and after I had written and posted it, in the future I could simply post a hyperlink to it whenever newcomers on my favorite comic book forums started asking such questions as I listed above.

In early June of 2005, I got involved in an online discussion that somehow prompted me to dig out the old material on my hard drive and start sprucing it up, researching the subject further, splicing in new material, and organizing things into a comprehensive timeline showing the sequence of First Appearances of each relevant character. In several cases, I mention Final Appearances as well. (In some cases, the First and Final Appearances “in continuity” were one and the same!)

Who is a relevant character? I decided to do my best to cover any female character who has ever been connected with Superman continuity while doing one or more of the following things in at least one DC comic book story that was supposedly “in continuity” at the time it was published (even if it was later retconned away, explicitly or implicitly):

A) Calling herself Supergirl
B) Calling herself Super-Girl
C) Calling herself Superwoman
D) Calling herself Power Girl
E) Calling herself Kara

Obviously there are some characters who fall into more than one of those categories. And out of the goodness of my heart, I've even thrown in a couple of characters who didn't quite fit any of the above categories, but were strongly suspected by the readers to be mysterious versions of one “Supergirl” character or another. You'll see what I mean as we go along. [Note for the 2nd Draft: I have also thrown in one “Supergrrl” for good measure.]

I should mention that for my purposes I am ignoring people who strike me as mere “impostors.” If there was once a story in which an actress played the role of “Supergirl” in a TV show or movie, or a Silver Age story in which Lex Luthor built a robot double to impersonate Supergirl for a few hours (and I have no idea if that ever happened or not!), I’m not counting that at the moment. (The Supergirl Robot that Brainiac 5 built in Superboy #204 has been brought to my attention, but for the moment I’m leaving her out of the Timeline as well. I do mention, below, the first appearance of the very first Supergirl Robot of the Silver Age, and I figure that will have to do.)

On a similar note:At this time, I have no intention of going into the details of any variation of “Supergirl” or any similar character who has been  presented to us in movies or television shows. Likewise, I am ignoring anybody who only existed in Imaginary Stories, Elseworlds projects, or other “out of continuity” printed material. Sticking to “comic book continuity” characters is enough for now!

I interpreted “First Appearance” to suit my own purposes. If someone is supposed to have been the “same character” all along (both before and after Crisis, for instance), but got a huge retcon or reboot that replaced the old origin story with a radically different new one, then I usually mention the first mention of the new origin story as essentially being the First Appearance of a new version of a character. Likewise, my Timeline doesn't mention the first appearance of reporter Lois Lane because she didn't meet the criteria I gave above when she first appeared, but I do list two later comics as both being First Appearances in Continuity of the “Lois Lane as Superwoman” concept one way or another. That includes the story in which she first believed she had superpowers that justified her wearing a red and blue costume and calling herself Superwoman, and a later story in which for the first time she really had superpowers that justified her wearing a red and blue costume and calling herself Superwoman.

2. The Timeline of First and Final Appearances

CAVEAT LECTOR (Let the Reader Beware): This is only a Second Draft of the Timeline, and may not be the Final Word on the subject. At this point in my First Draft, I said: “I have done the best I could, but I feel certain I have not done it perfectly. Please speak up if you know of a relevant fact or character I completely overlooked, or if you spot a clear mistake in my quick description of a particular character or story. In many cases I am dependent upon online summaries of stories I have never read, and I am painfully aware that my efforts to paraphrase second-hand information leave plenty of room for error.”

Many readers took me at my word and offered constructive criticism regarding things they felt I should add or modify, and much of their feedback is reflected in this Second Draft. I believe this revised Timeline comes significantly closer to perfection as a result, but the sentiment quoted above still stands if you see room for further improvement. Be warned, however, that it may take awhile to see the results of your feedback. This Second Draft is being released a mere week after the First Draft, in an effort to correct the most noticeable errors and omissions as quickly as possible, but I’m in no hurry to move on to a Third Draft and it may be a long time before I decide I’ve gotten enough additional feedback to require going to all that trouble.

And now, on to the main event!

THE TIMELINE

1947. Superman #45. Lois Lane is convinced she has gained powers comparable to Superman's by magic. (She hasn't. Superman was moving at super-speed to do her stunts and make it seem that way. Long story.) By the end of the story she voluntarily relinquishes the powers she thinks she has because they seem to be out of control and are thus hurting her social life with men who are afraid to get too close to her. But during the story, she had indeed called herself Superwoman and worn an appropriate costume.

Note: There was a previous dream sequence story in 1943 in which Lois had dreamed she got a blood transfusion from the Man of Steel and became a Superwoman, but as a dream, that “Superwoman” appearance was basically “out of continuity.” This story, on the other hand, was apparently the first “in continuity” story in which any female character wore a costume and publicly called herself Superwoman, powers or no powers. So I count this as the First Appearance in continuity of a Superwoman, even if the “powers” were fake.

1949. Superboy #5. Superboy meets this really neat blond girl who calls herself Lucy Regent and is an incredibly skilled athlete. Although she has no powers, at one point she wears a costume modeled on his and calls herself Supergirl as part of a show the two of them put on together at a festival. Superboy is quite smitten by her, it seems, but unfortunately it turns out that she is actually Lucy, rightful Queen of Borgonia, and the story ends with Lucy staying in her native land to take up her duties as Queen after a villainous usurper has been defeated with Superboy's help.  (Lucy was never been heard from again in any other story, so this was her First and Final Appearance.)

Note: I have learned from feedback that this story must have happened on Earth-1 (even though Earth-1 as a concept would not be mentioned in any comic book until the story "Flash of Two Worlds" in 1961) because it was eventually decided at DC that all the Superboy stories were Earth-1 material by default no matter when they were published; the Earth-2 Superman had reached maturity before creating a costumed identity for himself and surprising everyone with his superpowered feats (as shown in the original Superman story in Action Comics #1.)

1951. Action Comics #156. Lois Lane temporarily receives powers which prompt her to create a Superwoman costume for herself (again!). The costume she came up with was very similar to one that Kara Zor-El later wore as Supergirl. Lois even wore a blond wig to disguise her hair color - going for a secret identity, apparently, which she had not bothered with in her previous “Superwoman” adventure in the story I mentioned above. This was apparently the First Appearance of any costumed female calling herself Superwoman and wearing an appropriate costume “in continuity,” and actually having superpowers to go with the costume.

I am told that Lois Lane and Lana Lang each got superpowers (always temporary!) in various other stories in the old days, but I'm not clear on how often the Superwoman name was explicitly used, and I have not heard that it was ever used by Lana.

1958. Superman #123. A trial balloon story written by Otto Binder. Jimmy Olsen uses magic to wish a “Super-Girl” into existence, but it doesn't work out so well and he finally wishes her back into oblivion (apparently to “save her life” after potentially lethal exposure to Kryptonite), and she's been gone ever since. She appeared to be a blond teenager and wore a blue and red costume, modeled on Superman's of course, and quite similar to one of the variations that Supergirl ended up wearing later. Favorable response from their readers persuades DC it's worth the trouble to create a more permanent character along similar lines, to be officially added to Superman's supporting cast as a cute young female version of himself.

Note: I am told that for many years afterward, whenever this story was subsequently reprinted in other comics, the color scheme of the magically-created Super-Girl’s appearance was modified. Her formerly blue-and-red costume became orange-and-green (or yellow-and-green? – I have conflicting information from different sources) and her blond hair became red hair, quite similar to that of Jimmy Olsen. Presumably this was done to accentuate the fact that she was a different person who should not be identified with the Kara Zor-El Supergirl, but frankly, it sounds like overkill to me. A quick little caption from the editor warning people that this was a different, one-shot character in this reprint story would do just as well, wouldn’t it?

I’ve also heard that more “modern” reprints have preserved the original red-and-blue-costume-with-blond-hair color scheme. I don’t know where those “modern” reprints occurred, however. Possibly in one of the Superman Archives volumes?

1959. Action Comics #252. The first story about the character who is still fondly remembered by such nicknames as “The First Supergirl,” “The Original Supergirl,” “The Silver Age Supergirl,” “The Classic Supergirl,” “The Real Supergirl,” “The Real Kara Zor-El,” and so on and so forth. (Some of those nicknames for her totally overlook the brief literary career of Lucy Regent in 1949, but nobody seems to mind.)

This story is written by Otto Binder. Kara Zor-El is rocketed to Earth from Argo City (a Kryptonian city that survived the explosion of the planet but has now perished anyway). When Superman first meets her, she is already wearing a blue-and-red costume modeled on his own, except that instead of blue shirt and blue pants with red shorts over the pants, she basically wears a blue dress. Over the next 26 years or so, she will change her exact look from time to time, but always maintaining a strong resemblance to Superman's traditional outfit.

She wants to call herself Supergirl. She is a blue-eyed blond; Superman's cute little cousin he never knew he had. (She is the daughter of Zor-El, who was the brother of Superman's daddy Jor-El, you see.) Superman ends up helping her create a secret identity as Linda Lee, a brown-haired girl (when wearing a wig) who was recently orphaned in a natural disaster, and checks her into an orphanage. In a later story, her “secret identity” name changes to Linda Lee Danvers after she is adopted by Mr. and Mrs. Danvers.

Note: It appears that various Pre-Crisis stories, sometimes via dialogue spoken “in continuity” and sometimes in events that were depicted in certain “Imaginary Stories” of the Silver Age, nailed down the idea that Superman fully expected that someday Supergirl would naturally change her alias to Superwoman when she felt the time was right, just as he had previously made the transition from Superboy to Superman at his own pace. This change never actually happened as a permanent condition “in continuity,” however - it was merely anticipated. And below I will list at least one case where Kara was referred to as Superwoman very briefly, with no lasting impact. (There may have been other cases after that one.)  

1959. Action Comics #256. First appearance of a lifelike Supergirl Robot. It becomes important to have one after a fellow orphan at the Midvale Orphanage named Dick Wilson (later known as “Dick Malverne” after he was adopted) captures a “Supergirl” on film and even suspects a connection with Linda Lee. Superman hastily creates a Supergirl Robot to give Linda an alibi and then to reveal itself as a robotic device in order to “disprove” that any flesh-and-blood “Supergirl” exists at all!

(In the early years of Kara Zor-El’s activities as his helper, Superman’s firm policy was to keep her existence a secret from the general public.)

Since the robot wears the same costume and answers to the name of Supergirl, with the real Supergirl’s knowledge and consent, I figure it deserves a quick entry on this Timeline.

Note: I have no idea how many robot doubles of Supergirl and/or her secret identity (Linda Lee, later Linda Danvers) Superman ended up manufacturing over the years. I don’t know how many of them “died” in the line of duty, either. I don’t know how often anyone else tried to manufacture a Supergirl robot for reasons good or bad – although I know of one sad case including Brainiac 5. But I figure if you’ve seen one Supergirl robot, you’ve seen them all, so I’m only mentioning the first appearance of the first Supergirl Robot and that will just have to be enough.  

1960. Action Comics #267. First appearance of Kara Zor-El as a mature Superwoman “in continuity,” although only for a brief time. Supergirl is invited to try out for membership in the 30th Century Legion of Super-Heroes. She successfully performs the task which is set for her, but in the process she is exposed to a piece of Red Kryptonite which causes her to physically age to look like she's twentysomething years old, apparently. Full-grown. Online sources are not clear on whether she then describes herself as “Superwoman” or whether the Legionnaires testing her simply call her that as a way of making a point - the key point (from their point of view) being that no matter how impressive her performance in the test, she's obviously disqualified for membership at this time because of her adult status. Their club has a strict age limit, you see. She can try again next year, however. After she returns home to the 20th Century, the Red K effect wears off and she reverts back to her juvenile self.

(One would think that the Legionnaires would be aware of the very temporary effect of Red K after the times they had previously worked with Superboy. One would also think they would realize that just because Supergirl (temporarily) looked very mature for her age didn't necessarily mean her age had actually changed. On the other hand, the first publication of this story stated the Legionnaires testing her were the lookalike-children of Legionnaires whom her cousin Kal-El had adventured with in his Superboy years, so perhaps the kids weren't as up-to-date on the technicalities of Red K as their parents would have been. At any rate, their status as second-generation Legionnaires was later retconned away and has apparently been changed by rewritten dialogue in reprints of this story - the version of the Legion that Supergirl ended up successfully joining in a later story, after the next time she went through a testing procedure, was the exact same version as the one that Superboy hung out with in his spare time, not one offset by a couple of decades.)

1960. Superman #140. The first Bizarro-Supergirl makes her debut. Her First and Final Appearance, as it turns out – at the end of the story she dies from exposure to Blue Kryptonite. (Blue K is what you get when you use the duplicator device that creates Bizarros
on a piece of Green K instead of on a person. The Blue K acts on a Bizarro Kryptonian’s metabolism the same way the Green K acts on a regular Kryptonian’s.)

1962. Action Comics #289. Superman meets and falls in love with Luma Lynai, the Superwoman of the planet Staryl. But it all falls apart. Probably just as well, because physically Luma was the spit'n'image of Superman's juvenile cousin Kara, except taller and fully mature, and that could have gotten very weird after Kara was a grown woman and looked exactly like her cousin's wife.

You see, Superman had said something to his precocious cousin Kara about how if he ever married, he would like it be to someone much like her, although of course Kal-El and Kara could never marry because Kryptonian Law forbade matings between first cousins (genetically speaking, a very sensible policy, I might add, and one that I believe is also reflected in the laws of at least some parts of the United States, and probably in various other places around the world).

Kara was determined to play matchmaker, however, and took the part about how he'd like to someday marry someone like herself way too literally (I suspect Superman was talking about psychological characteristics rather than physical ones) and decided this was a good time to use the Supercomputer in the Fortress of Solitude to somehow search the rest of the universe for qualified candidates to become her cousin's spouse. Judging by results, she must have input roughly these parameters for the search: “Humanoid female, my skin, my hair, my eyes, my facial features, my superpowers or very similar ones, superheroic activities, but several years older than I am, old enough to get married.” (Modest, wasn't she? Only a near-copy of herself, except with a different genetic background and already a full-grown woman, could possibly be worthy of the great honor of marrying Kara's cousin! Sigmund Freud would have a field day with this scenario!)

So the computer found what Supergirl described as a “Superwoman duplicate of me,” and Superman dutifully took his cousin's advice and flew off to meet Luma Lynai (who even wore an S-emblem, though not identical to his, on her chest and on her cape by a wild coincidence). They got along very well and flew back to Earth to get married - except that it turned out to their mutual horror that yellow solar radiation was poisonous to Luma, whose own metabolism was super-powered because of the orange sun of Staryl. Superman actually offered to emigrate from Earth to Staryl so they could be together, but Luma insisted Earth needed him more than she did, and that was the end of another fine romance.

As far as I can tell, Luma never actually was featured in another story, although she was subsequently referred to in flashbacks and such on a few occasions, so this was for all practical purposes her Final Appearance as well as her First.

1964. Justice League of America #29. We meet the Earth-3 Superwoman, a member of the Crime Syndicate of America, blue eyes, black hair, who is presented to us as the evil analog of Wonder Woman. No relation to any version of Superman; she simply is superstrong and happens to use the adjective “Super” in her name.

1966. Action Comics #336. The second Bizarro-Supergirl makes her debut. This one is different from the run-of-the-mill Bizarros. As the story begins (continued from a previous issue), the real Supergirl has been rendered ugly by a villain and is experimenting with various things that might be able to reverse the effect. When she uses the Bizarro-creating duplicator on herself, what she ends up with is an atypical Bizarro Supergirl. The new Bizarro-Supergirl a) looks like a lovely teenage girl, just as the original Supergirl normally would, and b) speaks English with decent grammar, unlike other Bizarro characters, but c) is rather dim-witted. This was apparently both the First and Final appearance of this particular Supergirl knockoff.

1969. Adventure Comics #387. First appearance of a parallel-world Supergirl who apparently looks something like a werewolf (as does every other human and Kryptonian in her universe, evidently).

On our beloved Earth-1, the Silver Age Supergirl takes a serum that is meant to confer immunity to Kryptonite radiation, but it has some unpleasant side effects. She ends up looking much like a werewolf – hairy wolfish face, hairy hands. By an astonishing coincidence, Supergirl’s analog in a parallel universe has been having the same experience in reverse – the serum she gulped down has made her lose all that body hair and now she looks like a freak, by local cultural standards. A fortuitous explosion permits the two of them to meet and compare notes. Somehow, it all works out in the end (thanks to the efforts of the scientists, both named Dr. Sanford, who had brewed the original serums) and both Supergirls end up looking “normal” again. This was the First and Final Appearance of the Wolf-Faced  Supergirl (to coin a new name for her).

1975. All-Star Comics #58. Power Girl first appears and, I gather, soon afterward becomes a member of the JSA on Earth-2. Her Kryptonian name is Kara Zor-L (which is pronounced exactly the same as Kara Zor-El, as near as I can tell). As far as the basic origin story is concerned, she is essentially the Earth-2 equivalent of Supergirl, with a few modifications. Kara Zor-L was aunched from a doomed Krypton in a spaceship at the same time her cousin Kal-L was, but for some reason her vessel took decades longer to reach Earth than his did, with her in suspended animation during the trip. As a result, she was still a very young woman in the 1970s, at a time when he was definitely getting middle-aged. This gives us a bizarre situation where Earth-2, the “older generation” parallel world that contains the Golden Age heroes, is suddenly doing its own “knockoff” of a character first introduced on the “younger generation” parallel world of Earth-1, instead of the other way around as it had always been done before.

Power Girl is a blue-eyed blond, but differs in some ways from the Earth-1 Supergirl as she had been presented up until that time. She may be older and definitely shows a  more voluptuous figure (and generally seems more willing to dress in ways that emphasize whatever she's got.) She is also said to have a more aggressive, even defiant, attitude. Her costume does not even resemble Superman's - mostly white, with blue cape and boots.  By an astonishing coincidence, her costume bears a marked similarity to that of Luma Lynai, above, except that the things that were green in Luma's costume have been changed to blue.  (Exception: I believe Luma wore a green cape. Power Girl's is red.)

There is a rumor that writer Gerry Conway originally tried to get the Power Girl character concept approved by the DC editorial staff as the daughter of the Golden Age, Earth-2 versions of Superman and Lois Lane . . . but the idea was shot down. Possibly someone felt that having two very similar characters on parallel worlds, one Superman's daughter and one the other Superman's first cousin, would just get too darn confusing for the fans?

According to the Wikipedia entry, the original artist to draw her, Wally Wood, started her out with large breasts and intended to see how far he could push it. He allegedly planned to keep increasing her bra size a bit more in each consecutive issue to see how exaggerated things could get before someone on DC's editorial staff would finally catch on and tell him to stop. It appears that Wally moved on to other things after a mere eight issues, however, so I guess we'll never know just long he could have gotten away with it. Be that as it may, ever since then, Power Girl (whatever her origin story) has been notorious among fans for her large breasts, even when compared to various other superheroines who run around in skintight costumes.

1980. Superman #349. First and only appearance of a very obscure Superwoman who may not have really being a living, breathing being per se. This one will take some explaining. In a story by Marty Pasko, Superman finds himself on what appears to be a parallel world of his own beloved Earth, a world where every male character he knows is represented by a female equivalent, and vice versa. He discovers that Clara Kent works at the Daily Planet (alongside Jenny Olsen and Louis Lane) and that a black-haired Superwoman fights crime in Metropolis - but he is very startled to eventually realize that Clara Kent and Superwoman are two separate people here. This anomaly damages the theory that this world is simply a gender-reversed parallel version of Earth-1, and he eventually figures out that he's still on the real Earth-1, as magically modified by Mr. Mxyzptlk for the occasion!

This would then qualify as the First (and Last) Appearance of a high-powered Superwoman character who must have been a magically-created simulacrum as far as I can tell, rather than a normal person, human or Kryptonian. (Whereas most of the other characters Superman met in this story were allegedly their usual selves, briefly magically transformed into the opposite gender from the default condition, without being allowed to remember things had ever been any different. I admit I could be wrong about this Superwoman's origins - I haven't actually read the story.)

This particular Superwoman basically looked like a black-haired, blue-eyed woman who had taken the exact design of Superman’s traditional outfit and merely had it retailored to suit her feminine anatomy. No skirts, wigs, facemasks, shift in color schemes, or other noteworthy variations from the usual appearance of the costume - it was merely clinging to a differently-shaped body than what we normally expect.

1982. Superman Family #215-216. The Kara Zor-El Supergirl has a two-part teamup with Louise-L, a Supergirl of the far future (around the year A.D. 502,000). When visiting Louise-L's era, Kara is much weaker because the sun has faded quite a bit to an orange shade. On the other hand, when visiting our era, Louise-L finds her powers greatly magnified because of the much stronger and yellower sunlight we enjoy these days. Louise-L refuses to explain whether or not she is descended from Kara Zor-El, and at the end of the story she mindwipes Kara to remove any knowledge of Louise-L and the future she inhabits. As far as I know, the Louise-L Supergirl never made any further “in continuity” appearances, Pre- or Post-Crisis.

1982. Superman Family #220. First appearance of Liandly of Rolez, the Super-Girl of Earth-2, in a story by E. Nelson Bridwell. Liandly comes from another dimensional reality and has remarkable superpowers; nothing Kryptonian about her. The Earth-2 Lois and Clark befriended her and even helped her create a secret identity as “Linda Lee.” To confuse the issue, this story published in the early 80s is retroactively set sometime in the 1950s, as one of the "Mr. and Mrs. Superman" stories that dealt with adventures in the lives of the Golden Age versions of Lois and Clark when they were a fairly young married couple. An online illustration that's supposed to be of Liandly shows us as having long blond hair and wearing a costume that looks something like an orange one-piece swimsuit with a few other accessories. As far as I know, this was the First and Last appearance of this character, and only the second (and last!) time that any “in continuity” character has been presented to us as using the name Super-Girl with a hyphen in the middle.

Note: Liandly is almost an anagram of Linda Lee (if you replace the double E with a Y), and Rolez is an anagram of Zor-El.

1983. Supergirl #10. First appearance of six miniature, doll-sized clones of the Pre-Crisis Supergirl, created by a villain called Professor Drake. Each of the clones has her full powers and memories, but gang up to fight her in the next couple of issues. Eventually, they permanently lose their powers when Supergirl manages to expose the entire six-pack of them to a piece of Gold Kryptonite while keeping herself shielded from its radiation. She then places them in a “stasis field” in Superman’s Fortress of Solitude and basically forgets about them for awhile. (Stay tuned – we’ll get back to that in a minute!)

I mention the clones here, but I don't intend to list them as six separate Supergirls at the end of this post, because it seems that they never spoke at all during their engagement with the real Supergirl, so they weren't actually calling themselves The Supergirl Six-Pack or anything like that.

1983. DC Comics Presents Annual #2. Kristin Wells,  previously a character in a printed novel about Superman (Miracle Monday by Elliot S! Maggin, who also wrote this story), travels back in time to meet Clark Kent again. She is a 29th Century historian in search of the last great secret identity of the 20th Century superheroes, all the others having long since been solved and entered into the textbooks of her era. There was a female crimefighter called Superwoman who was scheduled to make her grand debut right around “now” according to those same textbooks . . . Maggin played a few mind games with us, planting hints that the prototype Superwoman costume might belong to Lois Lane or Linda Danvers, but surprise surprise, it turned out it was actually Kristin Wells (red hair, blue eyes) who ended up wearing that costume, using futuristic technology to simulate various superhuman powers. Those included: flight, superstrength, time travel, the ability to create space/time warps that amounted to being able to teleport great distances, and also intangibility.

1984. Supergirl #19. A life-sized “clone” of Supergirl, comprised of a miraculous merger of the six doll-sized clones of her mentioned above, temporarily takes over the role of Linda Danvers and considers herself to be the true Supergirl for a brief time (despite the annoying lack of powers, thanks to the Gold K exposure previously mentioned). Somehow, the similarity in brain structure, memories and thought patterns, etc., apparently creates a psychic bond between Kara I and Kara II such that the clone is able to temporarily blank out Supergirl's memories of her Linda Danvers secret identity. Once this gets straightened out, the real Supergirl offers to help her de-powered lifesize duplicate build a new identity elsewhere to live as a normal human being. As far as I know, that character was never heard from again, and I don't think we ever even knew what her new name was going to be.

In a subsequent lettercol (at the back of Supergirl #23, reacting to mail re: #19), Paul Kupperberg, the Supergirl writer at the time, referred to the merged-clones-lifesize-copy by both of these names: Kara II and Linda II. After all, she had the appropriate genes and memories, didn’t she?

1985. Crisis on Infinite Earths occurs as a 12-part series with crossovers into other titles, and the culling begins.

Crisis on Infinite Earths #1. The Superwoman of Earth-3 dies onstage. So does her entire world of Earth-3, which is eventually erased from the Post-Crisis continuity.

Crisis on Infinite Earths #7. The Supergirl of Earth-1 dies onstage and later gets erased from  continuity.

In fact, all previous stories centered around “Superman Family” characters get erased from continuity in the Post-Crisis Era, including various characters mentioned above (but not Power Girl, as it turns out. She escapes oblivion by being simply retconned out of the Superman Family entirely. We'll get to her in a minute).

1985. DC Comics Presents Annual #4. Elliot S! Maggin wraps up the saga of the Kristin Wells Superwoman. She travels back to the 20th Century, somehow gets amnesia for awhile, and spends several years as a superhero in the late 20th Century having the distinguished career that she had “already” studied as a historian in the 29th Century, then finally returns to her native era where her boyfriend has been faithfully waiting for her (it was some years from his point of view, as well). I believe this was meant to be her Final Appearance and official retirement from the whole costumed crimefighter bit in a story that was clearly in Pre-Crisis continuity.

1985. Legion of Super-Heroes #14 (second regular monthly series of that title). While the Crisis limited series is still being published, writer Paul Levitz and penciller Steve Lightle introduce a “new” character who keeps her entire body covered with her red and white costume, except for a mane of golden hair, and calls herself “Sensor Girl.” For several issues her precise powers and background remain a mystery to all but one of her fellow Legionnaires (and the readers), although occasional hints are dropped to the effect that she might be an old, familiar face underneath that white facemask she wears. For instance, one or two things she says suggest that she already knows a fair amount about the other Legionnaires, as if she might have worked with some of them before (which the Pre-Crisis Supergirl had done several times). Veteran Legionnaire Brainiac 5 (the “good” Brainiac) had long had a hopeless crush on the Pre-Crisis Supergirl, and in these stories written by Paul Levitz, Brainy still remembered her vividly and hoped desperately that this masked “Sensor Girl” character would turn out to be her.

Sensor Girl gets mentioned here because it is alleged that revealing her to be Kara Zor-El, the late, lamented Supergirl, possibly amnesiac and with her powers now pretty much limited to super-senses rather than the whole package of strength, speed, invulnerability, etc., was exactly what Paul Levitz originally hoped to build up to, but DC wouldn't let him get away with it and he had to reveal Sensor Girl as someone else, finally. (Apparently it took a little time for the Post-Crisis policy of “There are no surviving Kryptonians but Superman, and his cousin Supergirl never existed in the first place and never will!” to be firmly established, clearly explained to everyone at DC, and aggressively enforced.)

1987. Secret Origins #11. Power Girl's “new and improved” Post-Crisis origin story is paraded before us to explain why she still exists in the modern DCU if if the policy is that the Rebooted Superman has no living Kryptonian relatives, period. Her name is still Kara, and her “secret identity” in the modern USA is “Karen Starr,” and she still has similar powers to those of Kal-El's. But the similarity is now pure coincidence; there's no genetic relationship at all. Power Girl now just happens to be the granddaughter of the great wizard Arion of Atlantis. About 45,000 years ago his evil brother,  Garn Daanuth,  tried to possess her the way a demon would.

Kara learns this when she goes back to look at the spaceship she arrived in, and finds its actually a magical artifact with a recording of Arion's personality to explain things to her now. His solution to the attempted possession of her 45,000 years ago involved shoving the little girl named Kara inside a magic crystal and leaving her in suspended animation for 45,000 years, during which she aged several years into her late teens, emerging in the modern era of the DCU.

By an astonishing coincidence, at the time she emerged she had developed superpowers very similar to those of the Post-Crisis Superman. A recording of her grandfather's personality eventually (in this story, a few years after her arrival in 20th Century Earth) offers the opinion that her unexpected powers resulted from a combination of three things: Some experimental modifications Arion had previously made in her genes (we don't know exactly what the purpose of that had been), the exposure to Garn Daanuth's essence when he briefly melded with her, and the 45,000 years she spent sleeping inside the crystal which was a very potent magical artifact.

Arion was able to see into the future well enough to see that her powers would resemble those of Superman, and for some reason decided it was a great idea to magically brainwash her to think she was Superman's long-lost cousin from Krypton at first. Arion's argument was that the true story of her origins would have just been too difficult for her to accept right away. (No, I don't quite follow his logic on that point either - but remember, Paul Kupperberg was desperately trying to salvage as much as he could of the Pre-Crisis Power Girl continuity in which everyone she knew had thought she was Kara Zor-L, cousin of the Earth-2 Superman.)

Incidentally, this story starts out with her brooding over how what she remembers of her own past is being the cousin of the Earth-2 Superman, Kal-L, who no longer exists Post-Crisis, yet her continued existence has strange implications if she was supposed to be a blood relative of his. In the immediate wake of Crisis, some writers and editors let their characters remember, for awhile, nearly everything that had happened in "Crisis on Infinite Earths" including such things as the death of the old Supergirl and the knowledge that Earth-1 and Earth-2 had been merged, with some characters being erased from existence as a result in order to avoid duplication. Marv Wolfman had wanted no one at all to remember the Crisis and what the Multiverse had looked like before the Crisis ever happened, but he was overruled in the short run . . . but seems to have gotten his way in the long run on most of that - writers generally quit referring to the Crisis, or if they did refer to it, only as something that DCU heroes remembered had been a terrible threat to their own Earth but did not remember had caused the destruction of a zillion other parallel Earths. Accordingly, I strongly doubt that the Power Girl of the last 15 years or so has ever mentioned any recollection of good old Earth-2 - she presumably remembers a time when she thought she was the long-lost cousin of the modern Superman, that's all. (I think. Maybe. Don't hold me to that!)

Note: We are informed in this story that Kara, growing up as a little girl 45,000 years ago, had a brother named Khatar. He was later established to have been a Hawkman avatar, although I don’t know that Power Girl and the current incarnation of Hawkman feel any particular sense of kinship with one another on that basis. (In the JSA TPB collections I’ve read, I don’t recall the subject even coming up.)

2nd Note: I am told that a third origin for Power Girl is supposed to be coming out this year, apparently in the pages of JLA: Classified, and rumors are flying about what it will be, but I have no intention of committing myself on that subject in this Timeline until after the entire thing has been published and there’s been time for the smoke to clear and for us to see exactly what her new “in continuity” origin story is supposed to be, and whether or not it actually makes any sense.

1988. Superman #16 (second series). The Post-Crisis Superman meets a blue-eyed blond in a Supergirl costume “for the first time.” This new Post-Crisis “Supergirl” eventually turns out to be Matrix (no relation to the movie trilogy starring Keanu Reaves), an artificial lifeform created by the brilliant Alexander Luthor of a parallel world (er, I mean of a pocket universe, since DC had officially gotten rid of “parallel worlds” in Crisis). Her powers include flight, invisibility, psychokinetic blasts, super-strength, and shapeshifting. Her appearance as a gorgeous, full-figured blue-eyed blond in a Supergirl costume is just one possible shape she can take, rather than being her “natural” appearance.  This Supergirl later ends up living with Ma and Pa Kent on the farm in Kansas for awhile, and they sometimes call her “Mae” as a more normal-sounding nickname derived from “Matrix.” Somewhere along the line Superman starts calling her his adopted sister.

(In contrast, the Superboy who was created in a test tube when Superman was “dead” only got to be taken into the family as Clark's adopted cousin.)

1989. Christmas with the Superheroes #2. In a story written by the very talented Alan Brennert, Boston Brand (Deadman), the professional peeping tom and mind-controller who (for some odd reason) is normally considered a hero rather than a villain, is trying to “celebrate” Christmas by taking over other people's bodies - spending their money on gifts for his old friends, etc. He finally feels ashamed of himself and vacates the body he had taken over in order to enjoy the sensation of attending a family-and-friends Christmas dinner. While he's getting all angst-ridden about his lot in life (or in death, or in afterlife, or whatever the correct word is for his condition), a beautiful blond woman, who can see and hear and touch his ghostly form, and thus is probably some sort of ghost herself, suddenly pops up with a few words of patient counsel and good humor, saying in part: “We don't do it for the glory. We don't do it for the recognition. We do it because it needs to be done. Because, if we don't, no one else will. And we do it even if no one knows what we've done. Even if no one knows we exist. Even if no one remembers we ever existed.”

When he asks her name, she says as she walks away: “My name is Kara. Though I doubt that'll mean anything to you.”

(She was right. It didn't. But then, Brennert wasn't just talking to Boston Brand through Kara's dialogue; he was trying to give a bit of comfort to diehard fans of Kara Zor-El with this final tribute to the nobility of her character.)

Since the Sensor Girl thing fell through, we could argue that this was the first Post-Crisis Appearance of the Pre-Crisis Supergirl. Presumably, the writer only got away with it because Kara seemed to be in much the same position that Boston was - a lonely, insubstantial ghost whom no one else could see or hear or knew anything about.

Note: I am told that Mark Waid, who then held an editorial position at DC, approved this story by Alan Brennert, but subsequently got in hot water over it with editor Mike Carlin, who didn’t notice what was going on (a possible, subtle “violation” of the Sacred Rule that the Pre-Crisis Supergirl no long existed and never had existed, period!) until it was too late to stop it.  Shortly after that, Waid lost his job on the editorial staff.

2nd Note : It is possible that this Kara should be identified with a mysterious, ghostly Kara who will be listed on this Timeline in a 2000 entry. No promises, though!

1992. Justice League Quarterly #8. First appearance of the Post-Crisis Retconned Version of the old Earth-3 Superwoman, although she is already long dead when she is “first mentioned” here. Hal Jordan looks at some faces on a screen and explains that five natives of the Antimatter Universe inhabited by the Weaponeers of Qward had somehow managed to turn themselves into super-powered near-duplicates of prominent heroes of the DCU, way back in the early days of the League. These baddies were, in fact, more powerful than the originals - so that it took the combined efforts of the JLA and the JSA to finally subdue them. (This is a clear effort to try to save some of the old “Crisis on Earth-3” storyline from the Silver Age that first introduced the evil characters Superwoman, Ultraman, Power Ring, Owlman, and Johnny Quick.)

(As near as I can tell, prior to this story, DC fans had spent about seven years believing that the obliteration of Earth-3 and its denizens in the opening pages of Crisis on Infinite Earths meant that the Crime Syndicate of America had never existed in any way, shape, or form in Post-Crisis continuity. That was certainly my own impression for many years, until I heard about this retcon.)

1995. Superman Versus Aliens . Superman meets a girl named Kara who speaks Kryptonian and hails from a town called Argo City in this miniseries that is a crossover between DC and Dark Horse. In keeping with DC's firm Post-Crisis policy that Superman is the Only Surviving Kryptonian, writer Dan Jurgens makes this particular teenage Kara a native of a culture from the planet Odiline, whose humanoid inhabitants of many generations earlier had been so overwhelmed by what they heard from a traveling interstellar cleric about the glories of Krypton that they apparently tossed their own cultural background out the window and started using the Kryptonian language and culture for everything they did. In the environment in which Superman meets Kara, she has no superpowers. Since she does not actually have a Kryptonian metabolism, the subject of what powers she might develop after exposure to the yellow sunlight here on Planet Earth remains an open question. She and Superman fight the evil Aliens together, and at some point Superman tells her he's come to think of her as “family.”

At the end of the story, he thinks she's dead, but the reader is told she got away in an escape pod, thereby leaving the door wide open for sequels - in theory. This story was written by Dan Jurgens, who then took the trouble to insert dialogue referring to this storyline in Superman #117 (second series), apparently believing that this would help slip the crossover story “into continuity” since it had now been referenced in one of Superman's regular ongoing titles. In addition, http://www.supermanhomepage.com/other/kryptonian-cybernet/kc23.txt reports that Jurgens dropped some hints about his plans for follow-up in an AOL chat in 1996:

Second, he hinted at some plans on continuing the tale begun in SUPERMAN VERSUS ALIENS!  Dark Horse Comics has asked him for a sequel to the wildly popular mini-series, but he did not indicate whether or not it would happen.  However, he did reiterate the fact that SUPERMAN VS ALIENS took place inside current Superman continuity, and the story *will* have repercussions on the Superman titles in the future.  In fact, he specifically mentioned that he has very special plans for Kara, the teenage girl introduced in the series!

I am willing to take it on faith that Jurgens did, in fact, have big plans for the Kara he had created as an “almost-Kryptonian” whom Superman had come to feel a family fondness for despite the trifling detail that they were from different species. But it's obvious that for one reason or another, those plans never materialized, and at this point, a decade after that miniseries, it seems unlikely (but not impossible!) that they ever will.

1996. Adventures of Superman #638. Dana Dearden, having gained impressive magical powers and fashioned a costume for herself (basically a green bodysuit with bits of purple here and there) presents herself as the new Superwoman. Apparently she was a Superman stalker in her heart. She had been obsessively convinced that once she had the powers to make herself a worthy mate for Superman, he would just naturally take her into his arms and marry her. It doesn’t work. The media ends up calling her Obsession, by which name she will be referred to on other occasions, but Superwoman was the name she had chosen for herself.

1996. Supergirl #1 (third regular series with that title). In a story written by Peter David (who ended up writing everything except #13 of this series until its cancellation), Linda Danvers - more or less - wakes up with memory problems and soon realizes that her present existence is the result of a recent merger of the minds and bodies of the Matrix Supergirl and the Post-Crisis Linda Danvers who was dead or dying from mortal injuries at the moment Matrix somehow merged with her in an effort to save her. The new human “half” of this Supergirl had the exact same name as the “secret identity” the Pre-Crisis Supergirl had used for many years, but that was just Peter David's attempt to throw a bone to fans of the Pre-Crisis Supergirl; this Linda was a new and different character who was now making her First Appearance and had no previous connection to Superman continuity. Eventually the hybrid being composed of these two became known as an “Earth-Born Angel” or “Earth Angel,” lacking two of the previous Matrix Supergirl powers - general shapeshifting and invisibility - but still retaining the ability to switch back and forth from the blond-haired, blue-eyed Supergirl form to the Linda form, and gaining some strange new powers over time.

The pre-merger Linda Danvers was shorter and more slender than the form that the Matrix Supergirl normally used, and had brown hair and brown eyes. The merged Supergirl, when in her Linda form, still looks like Linda except she has blue eyes instead of brown ones. (A doctor who is unaware of the background here gives post-merger “Linda” a physical and says she's fine except for the odd change in eye color, which could have been caused by extreme stress. I hadn't even known that was possible.)

1998. Supergirl #1,000,000. In a one-shot story written by Peter David, we meet a brown-haired little girl called R'E'L who lives 1,000,000 months in the future. I am told that she was immensely powerful but seemed not very bright; in fact utterly clueless as to how to use her powers responsibly. More of a horror than a hero, in other words. I am told that at the time, this girl never had face-to-face encounters with any of the “modern era” superheroes of the DCU during the DC 1,000,0000 event. But I mention her here because several of her contemporaries were having face-to-face encounters with “modern era” heroes at “the same time” which sort of establishes them “in continuity,” and by extension, the same could be said of her. Stay tuned for a second sighting of her, below, that was more squarely “in continuity” or seemed that way at the time.

1998. Elseworld's Finest: Supergirl & Batgirl. Written by Barbara Kesel. First appearance of a Supergirl in a world where nobody ever heard of Superman or Batman. As near as I can tell, this Supergirl is still very much like the Silver Age Supergirl – Kara Zor-El of Argo City, which survived the explosion of Krypton for a while; blond, blue-eyed, young, sincere, rather naïve. (I haven’t actually read this Elseworlds story, so I’m going on hearsay.) However, she lives in a world where the old JSA is still the main superhero group to join, and where Barbara Gordon is the embittered, obsessive-compulsive crimefighter Batgirl because her parents died when courageous police officer James Gordon tried to protect the Wayne family from a mugger, and got himself and his wife shot in the process. (Decades later, zillionaire playboy Bruce Wayne is sufficiently grateful for Jim Gordon’s sacrifice that he subsidizes Barbara’s vigilante activities, but of course he feels no particular need to get his own hands dirty.)  

Normally, as an “out of continuity” variation of a character, this Elseworld’s Finest Supergirl wouldn’t even be mentioned in my Timeline. But a year later, she was dragged into a connection with the regular continuity via the wonders of Hypertime when the mainstream DCU Superboy visited her native timeline. (See entry for Supergrrl, below.)

1999. Legends of the DC Universe: Crisis on Infinite Earths #1.

This story was done about 14 years after the original 12-part Crisis on Infinite Earths series. It was written by Marv Wolfman. It is meant to occur between the events of #4 and #5 of the original series, so some fans refer to it as Crisis 4.5.

For our purposes, the key point is that it includes the First and Final Appearance of a parallel-world Supergirl on Earth-D (a world which also makes its first and final appearance herein). This Supergirl is a Kryptonian, as is the Earth-D Superman, but they both look African rather than Caucasian, and they are a happily married couple who landed on Earth as adults about three years prior to this story. This Supergirl is still called Kara, but presumably not Kara Zor-El, since her husband is named Kal-El and there’s no mention of their being cousins. Both the Earth-D Superman and Supergirl die by the end of the issue, as does their entire universe, except for some refugees whom members of the JLA were able to transport to safety through the dimensional barriers before the end came. (Naturally, after the Crisis had concluded, everyone would have forgotten there ever was an Earth-D.)

Even after I was reminded of this particular Supergirl, I considered not mentioning her because she was only retconned into Pre-Crisis continuity about 13 years after the Post-Crisis era properly began at DC. But I finally decided to go ahead and make room for her, even though her existence was already automatically “out of continuity” by the time we first heard about her!

1999. JLA: Earth-2, a graphic novel written by Grant Morrison, introduces us to his “reverse” Earth-2, which despite the name is basically a reboot of the nasty place we called Earth-3 in the Pre-Crisis DC Multiverse. It is actually an evil version of Earth in an Anti-Matter Universe, however - but not, so far as I can tell, the same universe inhabited by the Qwardians. Morrison's reboot includes introducing (or reintroducing) the concept of an evil Superwoman who is Amazonian in heritage rather than Kryptonian or Qwardian. To play mindgames with us, however, this one uses the name of “Lois Lane” as her secret identity. She has continued to encounter Superman and other heroes of the Mainstream Earth of the DCU since that time.

Note: To the best of my knowledge, Morrison's “reboot” of the Crime Syndicate of America in this graphic novel has retconned away the previous Post-Crisis Retcon about the old CSA as coming from the Antimatter Dimension of Qward, inasmuch as nobody in JLA-Earth-2 says, “Gee, I wonder if these people called Ultraman, Superwoman, Power Ring, Johnny Quick, and Owlman are any connection to the super-powered quintet with the same codenames whom we fought many and many a year ago in the early days of the JLA?”

1999. Superboy #61. During the “Hyper-Tension” story arc, Superboy meets a female character in an alternate timeline who refers to herself as “Supergrrl” and is apparently the functional equivalent of himself; genetically created by the local version of Project Cadmus. I am told that she comes from a timeline that is either the same as that of the previous story Elseworlds Finest: Supergirl & Batgirl, or else is very similar to it in key respects. (See an entry under 1998, above.)

I have not actually read Superboy #61, but I get the impression that the Kara Zor-El Supergirl from Elseworlds Finest: Supergirl & Batgirl also gets at least a cameo here, making this (arguably) her First Appearance “in continuity” and her second appearance in any published comic book.

2000. Adventures of Superman #574. Obsession, aka Superwoman, aka Dana Dearden, dies in battle, having thrown herself into harm's way to protect Superman.

2000. Young Justice #21. At the end of the issue, a rocket ship lands in the modern day and R'E'L, the future Supergirl from the 1,000,000 event emerges. The only person handy to greet her is Klarion the Witch Boy, who had just recently stirred up an awful lot of trouble in the “Sins of Youth” Fifth Week Event.

What did the two of them do after that? We never found out. Nonetheless, taken at face value, the final page of that issue means that this future Supergirl, R'E'L, has been forcibly inserted into the “modern continuity,” living “here and now on Planet Earth,” of the DCU. Although I hear rumors that Grant Morrison is basically rebooting Klarion the Witch Boy as part of his “Seven Soldiers of Victory” miniseries this year and I hear that Morrison is basically taking the position that “Sins of Youth” never happened. Period. (Which is probably a good idea on his part!)

2000. Supergirl #49. The Matrix/Linda Danvers “Earth Angel” Supergirl has been getting guidance from time to time from a sort of ghostly voice who now, at the end of this issue, says she has had many names but is most fond of "Kara." I am not clear on when that voice had first spoken, but we do get a look at a sort of spectral figure here (apparently for the first time). I gather that the name Kara means absolutely nothing to either half of the Matrix/Linda Supergirl at the time. Is she a ghostly remnant of the officially-erased-from-continuity Kara Zor-El who died in Crisis in 1985? Is she the same “ghostly Kara” who once gave Boston Brand a pep talk in that story I listed from 1989? Is she both? How would I know?

If we treat this Kara as a brand new character for the sake of argument, then Supergirl #49 was her First Appearance - at least in any sort of visible form offered for our examination, I think, even if her voice had been "heard" in previous issues.

She apparently remained an utter enigma to Linda Danvers, inasmuch as Linda never even makes any connection between this “Kara” and a “Kara Zor-El from an alternate timeline” when she meets the latter a couple of years later (we’ll get to that one in a minute).

2000. Supergirl #50. The “Earth Angel” Supergirl (the result of the Linda/Matrix merger) gets split into two different people again, both of them Supergirls in one way or another. The one who gets the lion's share of time onstage for the next two years or so is the Linda Danvers Supergirl, who now has superpowers of her own, but much weaker than they were during her Merged-with-Matrix phase. Linda does not have any inherent shapechanging abilities, however, and so she has to start wearing a blond wig over her brown hair to conceal her identity. Meanwhile, the Matrix Supergirl (or Earth Angel Supergirl, or whatever the heck she's called) is being held prisoner in the Garden of Eden by Lilith.  

2001. Supergirl #62. Buzz (a Supergirl bad guy who had tried to reform, but it didn't take, as I understand it) and Two-Face combine forces to somehow manufacture a Supergirl duplicate that turns out to be a Bizarro-Supergirl.

2002. Supergirl #74. The Matrix Supergirl merges with someone called Twilight, and the resulting combo becomes an Angel of Fire. The Angel of Fire is somehow able to beef up Supergirl Linda's powers to approximately where they were at the beginning of this series, six years earlier. Linda Danvers intends to carry on as the current Supergirl, while I'm not sure if the “Angel of Fire” has ever popped up again anywhere in continuity. This may well have been the Final Appearance of the Matrix Supergirl (in her new role a
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« Reply #1 on: June 17, 2005, 01:01:42 AM »

Now that's a 1st post, I am going to make this one a sticky and bid ye welcome Smiley
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« Reply #2 on: June 17, 2005, 06:58:12 AM »

Wow.  I'm going to have to take an afternoon and go over that again.
Thanks!
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« Reply #3 on: June 17, 2005, 02:55:42 PM »

Great job!
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« Reply #4 on: June 17, 2005, 03:14:27 PM »

Nice article...

Lucy (the queen of that one country) from the Superboy story exists on Earth-1, since that's where all Superboy stories took place (the Earth-2 Superman was never Superboy); it just seems as if the more familiar Silver Age stories and subsequent issues almost never referred back to the Golden Age-era Superboy stories from "More Fun Comics", "Adventure Comics", and the pre-mid-50's Superboy comics...

Power Girl was launched from Earth at the same time as her cousin, but her ship took longer to reach Earth, arriving 60 years after Superman did.
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« Reply #5 on: June 18, 2005, 03:50:26 AM »

Quote from: "Super Monkey"
Now that's a 1st post, I am going to make this one a sticky and bid ye welcome Smiley




I've visited this site before, off and on over the last year or so, but never felt the need to register on this forum. You see, although I can be as nostalgic as the next fan about the old Silver Age Superman mythos in principle, in practice I don't really spend much time discussing Superman or Supergirl comics, old or new, as a general rule. I am more prone to write general observations about common occurrences in superhero continuity, pieces that draw examples freely from the width and breadth of both the DC and Marvel Universes as I see fit Smiley



But I did end up examining some of the materials on superman.nu in the course of my research for this Timeline, so it seemed only fair to give something back by registering myself and then posting a copy of the first draft.



Besides, I'm only human. Having gone to all that trouble, I wanted as many interested people as possible to see the fruit of my labors, hence I posted it on quite a few forums at once Smiley And I was serious in my "Caveat Lector" paragraph when I recognized it was too much to hope that I'd gotten everything right on the first try on such a tangled subject, hence I was soliciting constructive criticism so the next draft would be a bit closer to "perfect."



The current plan is that the "second draft" or "second edition" will simply be cut-and-pasted to replace the text of the current "first draft" in about a week or so, after everyone on various forums has had time to read this, respond with any constructive criticism that's handy, and then after I've had time to go over their suggestions, double-check some facts, and write new material (and revise old material) for various parts of the timeline as required. How long it will be before I find it necessary to do a "third draft" is a complete mystery at the moment, but I intend to at least make the "second draft" happen pretty quickly to clear up the more obvious errors, omissions, etc., that people bring to my attention.



So far, I believe you're the first and only person to offer to make this a sticky. I'm honored Smiley
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« Reply #6 on: June 18, 2005, 04:10:32 AM »

Quote from: "Johnny Nevada"
Nice article...

Lucy (the queen of that one country) from the Superboy story exists on Earth-1, since that's where all Superboy stories took place (the Earth-2 Superman was never Superboy); it just seems as if the more familiar Silver Age stories and subsequent issues almost never referred back to the Golden Age-era Superboy stories from "More Fun Comics", "Adventure Comics", and the pre-mid-50's Superboy comics...

Power Girl was launched from Earth at the same time as her cousin, but her ship took longer to reach Earth, arriving 60 years after Superman did.


I had not realized that anything published as early as 1949 was to be taken as strictly Earth-1 continuity after the Earth-1/Earth-2 concept was formally introduced years later.

I knew vaguely that the Silver Age is frequently considered to have begun with the coming of Barry Allen, the Silver Age Flash (eventually revealed in a later story as the Earth-1 Flash) in 1956. I also knew that the dividing line is much fuzzier for Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman, none of whom were Obviously Rebooted with new and different versions who had radically different costumes, secret identities, and even hair colors than the previous Golden Age versions.

Live and learn! I'll remove any reference to Lucy Regent as an Earth-2 character in my second draft, in about a week.

I'll also fix the bit about Power Girl. I think I must have assumed that her situation was parallel to that of the Silver Age Supergirl, instead of being a traveler who came to Earth straight from a dying Krypton - except for a few unfortunate delays along the way (what's a few decades between friends?) - the way the newest version of Supergirl claims to have done.
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« Reply #7 on: June 18, 2005, 05:16:10 AM »

Can't be sure, but does any of that cover the appearance of the Kara from the so-called imaginary story, "Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?"
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Superman created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster
The LIVING LEGENDS of SUPERMAN! Adventures of Superman Volume 1!
Return to SUPERMAN THROUGH THE AGES!
The Complete Supply Depot for all your Superman needs!