Casualties of Retcon - Power Girl

The "DC Explosion" produced a number of titles and concepts that, although short-lived, would create an enduring and loyal body of readers eager to see more of a number of new celebrities within DC's universe. DC's Power Girl achieved a quick popularity that seemed to promise a future prosperity for the character; although she represented an "Earth-2" doppelganger of the more senior Supergirl, her appeal did not derive from the coattails of that tenuous, if better-established, character.

She combined, in one package, elements that would endear several different groups of readers. She enjoyed powers similar to the "Earth-2" Superman, which put her in the league of the big players without the absurd omnipotence invested in DC's main, "Earth-1" version of Superman. Add to this a much more assertive personality than readers might recall in the Supergirl character, whose concept contained years of baggage from Supergirl playing meek team roles and acting as an unrecognized runner-up to Superman. Power Girl did not, like a sixties version of Supergirl, sit at a table and sigh about her problems. She waded in and knocked heads with the best of them. Combine this with a (generally) visually appealing treatment, in spite of (some readers would say "because of") Wally Wood's tendency to greatly inflate her breasts until they seemed to contain a good half of her mass.

Power Girl represented Supergirl done right, free of the fifties romance comics influences, the learned helplessness, the unheroic (though not invalid) emphasis on feelings and sociability. One might suspect her creators of attempting to approach a Supergirl-like character with the vitality of an early-sixties Marvel hero and without the burdensome and tiresome sex-role baggage that frequently rendered superheroines of the sixties little more than wives-in-training or "rescue objects" waiting for a hero to unstrap them from the mad scientist's table.

Come Crisis on Infinite Earths, DC would throw away most of the appealing elements of the character and leave little more than the costume, the breasts, and the fists.

The Original Concept

Supergirl for years had suffered from a treatment first as "Superman's secret weapon" and then as Superman's perpetual protege. The character would wilt under ten years of such treatment, and the blandness of this burden stuck with the character even as writers realized such an approach limited the character and also buried the concept under a baggage of condescention and mentoring.

Power Girl never had to bother with any of that. Rather than appearing on earth as an insecure adolescent feeling a need for guidance, Power Girl came to earth as a twentyish adult who had received a complete Kryptonian education as she matured in the space ship that brought her to earth in the mid-seventies, theoretically some sixty years after Superman had similarly arrived on the planet. She needed no mentoring. She came ready to knock heads, confident in her abilities, and not particularly beholden to any established superhero (or superheroine).

In the context of the intergenerational Justice Society, she worked, and probably enjoyed more popularity in her prime than the original Supergirl ever received. The choice of her name reflected the slightness of the connnection that bound her to her cousin Superman; given the success of her electronic learning while in transit, she might logically have offered to Superman someone to mentor him in things Kryptonian.

The Superman Shakeup

Superman, however, needed some retrofitting. His editors had realized this almost twenty years previously, as the success of the upstart Marvel Comics company made DC begin to rethink editorial habits that seemed to become more obsolescent with each month's titles. DC had failed to deliver on a promised large change in the Superman character in 1968. The only real change he actually got that year included some new talent working on his titles, including the excellent pencils of Ross Andru in Action Comics. DC never completely gave up on the idea of updating the character, but failed to gather the nerve to actually change anything; one sees the weight of tradition in DC's mistreatment of Dennis O'Neil's work on the character. O'Neil attempted to make the character more engaging by stripping him of much of his superfluous power and getting rid of the mountains of Kryptonite held by his enemies.

Come 1985, the year of Crisis, Superman remained essentially as if nothing had changed since 1963. The only concessions DC had made to changing editorial standards of the day involved a quiet hushing-up of the sillier elements surrounding the character (including the inumerable rogue Kryptonians; the swarms of "super-pets;" and suchlike).

The character had become stagnant, and DC wanted to strip him down to his most minimum essence: a personality, a costume, some powers, and some backup characters. John Byrne, much inclined to the minimalist vision of Superman himself in those days, received the responsibilities and hacked away almost the entirety of his Silver Age baggage. Away Byrne stripped the Bottle City of Kandor, the Phantom Zone, the Baskin-Robbins 32 Flavors of Kryptonite; the improbable Superman robots; all the other Kryptonians; and Superman's early history as Superboy.

Superman became the only Kryptonian, and this would leave writers without the original explanation for Power Girl. She did not belong in the Superman line, and writers would have to compose a new vision of her origins.

The New Concept

After Crisis on Infinite Earths, DC could have done almost anything with the Power Girl character that they wanted. They could have made her a Daxamite (like Mon-El/Lar Gand and LSH Supergirl replacement Andromeda/Laurel Gand). They could have made her a Thoronite, like the grown-up character who provided a template for the Mon-El character. They could have given her powers by dumping her in chemicals, hitting her with lightning, exposing her to radiation, or raising her on the surface of a collapsed star. They could have even left her Kryptonian.

DC instead chose to connect her to Arion, a character from a seventies sorcery comic. Arion lived tens of thousands of years before our modern historical era, perhaps in Atlantis, and had, for a short while, supported his own title, which had gone the way of all of DC's sword-and-sorcery line. While the Arion character had some appeal and certainly some storytelling life left to him, one must wonder why editors saw fit to connect Power Girl to this character instead of to established magical characters like Dr. Fate, the original Hawkman, the original Green Lantern, or the Spectre.

Some strange insight, however, motivated DC to make Power Girl the last survivor of the old Atlantean civilization that produced Arion, who placed her in suspended animation to revive in our own day. She therefore represents the Last Daughter of Atlantis in precisely the way Superman represents the Last Son of Krypton.

In the process of inflicting upon her this awkward and inconsistent origin, the writers did little to connect her more plausibly with her roots. If stripping her of her Kryptonian nature forced writers to strip away peculiarly Kryptonian powers (like the sense powers, the "heat vision" and the like), she did not gain abilities to suggest her wizardly lineage. Mainly she acquired an ugly emblem on her belt buckle.

Slouching toward Obscurity

One could suspect that DC did not really intend to try with the Power Girl character after the revised DC universe began to appear, in a limited way, in titles like Superman and Justice League. The comics between Crisis and 1990 frequently seemed to mark time, awaiting the revision of the characters; Wonder Woman, Hawkman, and the Atom would wait some time before DC got around to reworking their concepts, with, sometimes, dubious positive effect.

DC gave Power Girl her own title, but seemed unable to find a way to treat the character to make her interesting. This lack becomes the more annoying in light of the character's appeal, circa 1976; she represented a heavy hitter among a younger generation of superheroes with connections to the superheroes of the Golden Age. She became bland, insecure, confused, in need of guidance both in fighting and in some new sorcerous senses affixed to her (with a nailgun, and the seam showed).

She entertained a minor place in the Justice League (Europe) back in the days when that title, like Marvel's Avengers, had spread beyond the confines of a single book. This portrayal, however, retained little of her original essence (the basic flying headbuster that has done well across many, many comics titles). Rather than returning to form, however, she spent more time repelling the unwanted sexual advances of the annoying Wally West Flash, or engaging in thoughtful spats of conversation with other second-stringers, or being kind to stray animals. One might suspect that someone had renamed the character "Nurturing Girl" and forgotten to tell the readers.

It took the likes of Mark Waid (who can fix or mess up anything, depending on what he wants to do) to point out the problem within the pages of the Kingdom Come series, a work that dealt with the future role of DC's established heroes. Power Woman, her more mature self, did not bother with self-criticism, mood swings, small talk, or other such elements more likely to adorn the pages of stories about the defunct Supergirl. She behaved, instead, like she had early in her career: She waded in, ready to do some damage with her fists, even unto an intemperance that sometimes required Superman to intervene to slow her down.

Depth and sensitivity make a character valid, but using self-pity and weakness as these tools sometimes ill-becomes a character. Marvel has invested its character the Thing with considerable depth and sensitivity in the context of his ability to break down walls; DC has managed several effective treatments of its character Ultra Boy that also might provide an informative model for portraying the character better. Enough examples exist to debunk the notion that strength precludes sensitivity or depth, and Power Girl's future as a character probably rests upon writers and editors who refuse to allow the character to mope when she really needs to go break something.

One sees desperation and exhaustion in DC's misuse of the character during the Zero Hour: Crisis in Time cross-over event, where writers made her immaculately conceive and give birth to an infant. A subsequent story detailed that Arion, her ancestor, arranged for a demon named "Scarabus" (because stories like this Scarabus to death) to impregnate her so that she could give birth to a messianic child. This child, however, had the decency to depart to do messianic things somewhere else, perhaps partly in shame for participating in such an uninspired plot.

One may notice, by this point, that DC seems willing to try anything but the core character, including sacreligious treatments of the character as mother to another disposable comic book messiah. A writer who wishes to treat the Virgin Birth as source material, however, might look to which characters played the most active roles and which ones played support; if one must appropriate a character's biography in this manner, it would do well to appropriate the right one.