Another look at SUPERGIRL

[JulianPerez]

Ah, interesting, thanks, DTO.

It was already known that the subsequent Bryne reboot would eliminate all Kryptonians except Superman, the "Sole Survivor". So Supergirl simply HAD to die, and thus she was on the top of the Crisis "hit parade" from Day One. In contrast, Marv admitted to me that he was surprised when DC asked him to kill off Barry Allen -- that casualty was rather unexpected.

What exactly is the timeline on the reboot and Crisis and all that? As in, how early was it that they decided to go with Byrne for a reboot, when the ideas that became the reboot formed, and when was CRISIS planned?

Because I get a definite feeling that CRISIS wasn't planned out with knowledge of the Byrne reboot in advance - for instance, Superman seen after the worlds unite in CRISIS #11 was clearly the Earth-1 Superman. The whole business with Wonder Woman and her Crisis fate implies they knew they were going to do something with her, but if they wanted to do a Captain Marvel reboot, why is it Captain Marvel was shown in a panel on the reunited earth?

According to Marv, while Supergirl was a familiar and much-beloved character, many of her most ardent fans fondly remembered her Action Comics days -- nearly a quarter century before the Crisis. These older fans weren't the demographics that DC was aiming for at the time, while the younger readers who bought more comics weren't so strongly attached to Supergirl. (And thanks to DC producing some truly wretched Supergirl stories, Kara was seen as being unable to carry her own title.)

I don't know if that's entirely fair of the Big Bad Wolf to say. Supergirl had some pretty good stories in the SUPERMAN FAMILY book in the seventies: for instance, that one by Elliot Maggin where she fights an Aztec Princess after she moved to Florida. And that Legion story on Weber's World with the Emerald Empress in the early eighties.

[Great Rao]

What exactly is the timeline on the reboot and Crisis and all that? As in, how early was it that they decided to go with Byrne for a reboot, when the ideas that became the reboot formed, and when was CRISIS planned?

I don't know the details, but given that the pre-Byrne, E-1 Superman was around for a good while - maybe even a year - after Crisis and before the Byrne reboot, I'd say that at the time of Crisis, DC had no idea yet what the revamp was going to entail.  There is some Superman specific behind the scenes info here.

[dto]

Hmm... according to that timeline, Byrne signed on in the summer of 1985, when the Crisis was already in progress.  But perhaps the "Sole Survivor" mandate was more DC's idea prior to Bryne's arrival.  It was well known that DC staffers long joked that NOBODY died on Krypton EXCEPT Jor-El and Lara.  And there were also rumors that DC president/publisher Jenette Kahn personally hated the Supergirl character (though I've never seen any solid confirmation of this).

As for the time lag between Crisis and the Bryne reboot, recall that Wonder Woman was also very late -- DC had to publish a Pre-Crisis multi-issue retrospective called The Legend of Wonder Woman to fill this gap and satisfy contractual obligations with the Marston Estate.  (Batman had a "soft reboot" nearly a year after the Crisis, too.)  One big problem was that some editors used the Crisis to make sweeping changes, while others tried to ignore it -- and there was initial confusion on what exactly remained canon and what "never happened".  That's the reason why some titles were rebooted/relaunched months after the Crisis, and others reluctantly changed only when upper DC management demanded it (such as the Legion of Super-Heroes attempt to save Superboy and Supergirl's legacies).

I might be wrong, but I recall reading somewhere that Wolfman wanted to KILL the Earth-1 Superman so he could be cleanly rebooted like Wonder Woman, but DC balked.  It could be because they were still "fine-tuning" the Bryne reboot, and because the Crisis had consumed so much creative resources that DC needed to "take a break" with "filler stories" until they could forge ahead anew.  Killing Superman meant that he needed to be immediately rebooted right after Crisis #12, and DC simply wasn't ready to do this.