Powergirl shouldn’t have been made a kryptonian again.

[Harpsikord]

Like I said, it's easy enough to give her some daylight from Supergirl. Actually, of the two, PG has been the consistent hero, while SG has veered from bland, to okay, to very unlikable and borderline psychopath and supervillain. So on the scale of things, PG's problems are minor and more easily fixable if DC just buys in and puts someone with a plan for the character to work on writing her.

That doesn't mean that 1. Supergirl isn't the more viable property in comparison to Power Girl and 2. that having two different Kara's around doesn't create a ton of headache inducing problems. And I'm not trying to advocate that Power Girl be gotten rid of; contrary-wise all I'm suggesting is that they make her a different Kryptonian. She doesn't NEED to be Kara anymore, and probably the only time that it made sense was during the period where she was the only Kara that was in comics at the time.

Hell, keep her general appearance the same, just give her a different name and change her from (also) the last daughter of Krypton. Maybe she's a survivor from Kandor, or maybe she comes from the future. Hell - given the stuff going on currently in Bendis' Legion, where Supergirl was featured as a politician in the far future, what if she's the time-lost daughter of Kara?

[Robanker]

Pretty sure solidifying her as Kryptonian saved her from the Hawk problem of being the bragging rights grail of having fixed their particular Gordian knot. Everyone kept making it worse trying to fix it. Being the ancestor of a long-dead Atlantian with a spontaneous pregnancy was dooming PG to obscurity.

She had her most popular stint ever after being reintroduced in JSA and later being reestablished as a Kryptonian.


Moreover, losing the Last Daughter of a Doomed Universe angle robs her of so much. She deals with a trauma Clark or Kara can't comprehend.

Like Kara, she remembers her lost world. Unlike Kara, Karen remembers every person she now sees every day, only they don't remember her memories with them because they never happened here. She had to essentially start over twice, and yet she generally keeps moving forward. More than any Kryptonian, Karen has dealt with loss and come out stronger for it.

But by all means, lol porn boobs Supergirl. Ugh.

I'll be honest, I've been a fan of PG longer than Supergirl because Sterling Gates made Kara work for me. She changes her characterization pretty much every three-to-five years and it's just so all over the place I have no idea who she really is. It really bums me out that Karen gets tossed around or mangled to prop up Supergirl in these threads just because DC doesn't know how to market Supergirl. Even on DC Superhero Girls, Supergirl is just Power Girl in a Supergirl costume.

[SiegePerilous02]

I think she works fine as a Kryptonian.

Most of her problems stem from just being redundant on the same Earth as Kara. Because she's literally Kara, just an alternate version. The mainstream Super mythos doesn't really need her.

[KNIGHT OF THE LAKE]

They should just lean into her being the cousin of the OG Superman from a deceased universe

[Vakanai]

Now I want to see Benoist in the Powergirl costume...

[sifighter]

They should just lean into her being the cousin of the OG Superman from a deceased universe

Yeah it’s not that hard a thing to understand, it’s literally Supergirl of another world went by Powergirl instead and survived the end of her universe. I think people now a days can understand alternate universes, there in all kinds of fiction and I think people will be fine.

[Doctor Bifrost]

My opinion was, after Crisis on Infinite Earths, they should have kept Earth-2 (for JSA/All-Star Squadron and Infinity, Inc. stories), Earth-1 (with the JLA characters a little older - married with children - and the Titans coming into their own as the primary active superheroes), and created an Earth-0 (Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman just starting out, the JLA soon to be formed).

Earth-0 would be the main world. Travel between these worlds would be rare and difficult. New worlds - like Earth-S, for the Shazam characters - would be introduced slowly, over time, with careful consideration.

I really liked CoIE. But smooshing all the worlds together at the end, and trying to keep as much as you could (and more), whether the details fit together or not, made for a very messy fictional setting.

Instead we get an attempt to give Power Girl (who had, simply and understandably, been the Kara Zor-El of Earth-2) a whole new origin involving the sorcerer Arion, whose backstory really doesn't fit together with what we know of Power Girl, and at the same time they attempt to "keep in continuity" as many Power Girl stories as they can, so we need this whole other layer that says she spent many years thinking she was a Kryptonian, but wasn't. This massively overcomplicates her history.

And, of course, the Huntress. Donna Troy. Hawkman and Hawkgirl/Hawkwoman. Complications over Alan Scott/Green Lantern. Who is the mother of Infinity, Inc.'s Fury, anyway? (Confession: on that last one I won't complain. I think Roy Thomas did a fantastic job - at the last minute! - of creating a GA Fury and connecting her to II's Fury, and that it all came out better than the original. Until they full-on character-assassinated the GA Fury in later issues of Wonder Woman. But this was a rare case.)

Characters are created within a milieu, and their backstory should fit that milieu. If you put them in a different narrative setting, and warp their origin to try to make it fit, and don't do a very, very careful job of it, you can wind up with a poorly defined character whose story doesn't really cohere.

Power Girl made most sense as the Kara Zor-El of Earth-2. Everything since has seemed like throwing spaghetti against a wall and seeing what sticks.

[superduperman]

I could go for a Galatea type situation where she starts out as an evil Supergirl clone who turns good. Then you still have the logical Kryptonian connection and powers.

[achilles]

Pretty sure solidifying her as Kryptonian saved her from the Hawk problem of being the bragging rights grail of having fixed their particular Gordian knot. Everyone kept making it worse trying to fix it. Being the ancestor of a long-dead Atlantian with a spontaneous pregnancy was dooming PG to obscurity.

She had her most popular stint ever after being reintroduced in JSA and later being reestablished as a Kryptonian.


Moreover, losing the Last Daughter of a Doomed Universe angle robs her of so much. She deals with a trauma Clark or Kara can't comprehend.

Like Kara, she remembers her lost world. Unlike Kara, Karen remembers every person she now sees every day, only they don't remember her memories with them because they never happened here. She had to essentially start over twice, and yet she generally keeps moving forward. More than any Kryptonian, Karen has dealt with loss and come out stronger for it.

But by all means, lol porn boobs Supergirl. Ugh.

I'll be honest, I've been a fan of PG longer than Supergirl because Sterling Gates made Kara work for me. She changes her characterization pretty much every three-to-five years and it's just so all over the place I have no idea who she really is. It really bums me out that Karen gets tossed around or mangled to prop up Supergirl in these threads just because DC doesn't know how to market Supergirl. Even on DC Superhero Girls, Supergirl is just Power Girl in a Supergirl costume.

The problem is they never really used that. It was just there, but not much used as part of any plot. We never found out what that Krypton was really like, and back in that day she was a baby when she left so she never really had a problem with losing Krypton 2. Losing Earth 2 would have hurt...but she didn't really, did she? After all, bar Helena Wayne, most of her JSA friends were with her.

If they go that way, which seems likely, they need to do a bit of work on her, giving her a concrete background that makes us as readers feel her loss. She needs to have a background on Krypton 2 as well as Earth 2, and an interesting one. We need to see her on that Krypton as someone old enough to feel its loss. Remember, this origin does have some drawbacks, and some people will never accept her as long as she's an alternate Supergirl. So they need to actually work that Krypton 2/Earth 2 thing enough to outweigh those drawbacks.

[godisawesome]

Karen, when done right, is a very different character from Kara. That’s the most important part - getting the attitude right and making sure Karen Starr the businesswoman is a strong element of the civilian side of the story does 90% of the work of making the character work.

There *is*, admittedly, a bit of an actual redundancy issue if she’s a Superhirl from a parallel Earth that’s not radically different from the main-line one; I usually don’t think the “redundancy” complaint should be taken seriously, but if it’s a parallel universe character to a main-line one that has a notorious track record of having writers struggle with her... it becomes an issue then.

The Earth 2 version works well whenever her world is gone and she can’t go back... but she admittedly doesn’t seem like a character who is served by the angst of that either.

If I *had* to change up her story a bit, I have two ideas: Karen Starr is the last Earth 2 refugee, but came to our world at an extremely young age and thus considers “our” dimension her home, or she’ the earliest successful attempt to clone a Kryptonian (in this case Supergirl), in some ways acting as basically a big sister to Kon-El, but due to odd circumstances, wound up more mature than her progenitor.

In both cases, I’d have Karen be raised by STAR labs scientist for whatever her adolescence was, with the idea being that for once, the scientists keeping a child secret was a good thing, as she’s mature enough to resist with them when Waller/the DEO/etc. find out about her and try to use her as a weapon. So her public ID thing, successful businesswoman career, and outgoing attitude are all derived from having been shut up in a laboratory for years, but raised by good foster parents, leading to her being a well educated social butterfly not afraid to use some celebrity when given a chance for it.

And she’d take “Starr” as her last name in honor of Starr Labs.

[Factor]

She's excellent as a Kryptonian. Though for all the writers reference this as opposed to actually using it as a story point, they might as well not have bothered, aside from a power level point of view.

Honestly, just leave her a Kryptonian, related to Superman in some close way, and give her an actual background on Krypton, whichever version you use, and give her an actual niche....her problem is that right now she doesn't do anything different than Superman and Supergirl. She just does it at a remove from the Superman Family, which she sometimes if part of, but more often is simply ignored.

A defined niche within the DCU that no one else has, and can capture interest among fans, a backstory that makes her different, and some good solo stories are all she needs.

Being from Earth-2 should be her niche.
A super-character with deep multiversal connections who's a JSA mainstay?
The rest of the Superfamily don't have that.
What she needs are good writers who're willing to explore what't distinct about her and move on from the "Supergirl with a boob window" depiction.

[Agent Z]

I think the issue is less with her being a Kryptonian and more with the fact that she's a duplicate Kara Zor-(E)L, especially when the other option is the second most popular character of a massively popular comic book franchise. There's no room for Power Girl when Supergirl exists.

Now, if they infused some of Power Girl's energy into Supergirl and allowed there to be a new Power Girl or vice versa (tho with the show it seems unlikely to happen vice versa) it would probably be fine.

Kara hasn't been a part of Dick Grayson's generation since she died in the original Crisis. That needs to be fixed.

Kara and Dick never had much of a connection in the first place. I don't even think she ever counted as part of his generation when she seemed older than him when she debuted.

[Agent Z]

Karen could be part of a team or organization that deals with multiverse related crimes.

[Aahz]

Honestly I don't think they should have kept her around post crisis.

Her changed origin was just confusing and it is not like they did much with her.

Letting her die in Crisis and have Supergirl survive would imo have been a better choise. And would have made Supergirl much less confusing.

[Agent Z]

Honestly I don't think they should have kept her around post crisis.

Her changed origin was just confusing and it is not like they did much with her.

Letting her die in Crisis and have Supergirl survive would imo have been a better choise. And would have made Supergirl much less confusing.

DC can make a character confusing all by themselves without killing off another one.