Supergirl: Older or younger than Superman

[Sacred Knight]

I prefer her pre-Crisis characterization best btw, I just like the updated origin better.

[witchboy]

Kara being the older cousin makes for a fun dynamic, and the suspended animation thing is simpler than having to deal with Argo City to explain her being born later.

[Jim Kelly]

It bugs me that the Superman origin story has become so muddied. When I was watching SMALLVILLE recently this is one of the things that annoyed me the most.

The origin I understood from early times was that Jor-El and Lara were desperate. Jor-El had made a test model for the ship he was going to build, but time had run out. He wanted Lara to squeeze inside this small model with little baby Kal-El so they could escape in the last minute before everything blew up. Lara reasoned it was better to just send the baby, as the rocket would have a better chance of escaping Krypton and arriving at some other planet. So the rocket took off and everything went ka-boom.

Piling on a whole lot of other bric-a-brac undermines that basic story. Apparently the House of El had bags of time to prepare for the end of their planet and there were armies of folks who had access to advanced technology that could save them all. You've lost me. That's not the story I signed up for.

[Sutekh]

Like the older on Krypton, stasis, younger on Earth origin. It's a accurate hard science fiction concept that adds to the strangeness of Superman's world. Your older-younger cousin is the type of science fiction thing that Superman can pull off.

Ditto. I like that she's actually lived as a Kryptonian, among Kryptonians, and has memories of that, while Kal, who may be physically older, only knows of Krypton from memory downloads and history files. It also makes her the fish-out-of-water on Earth, with Kal being the one who grew up *here* and understands all the nuances of life as a human. That's a fun dynamic, each one taking turns being the experienced 'older cousin,' and the other being kind of new and inexperienced at the stuff that the other has lived experience with.

[Netherman14]

Physically younger, mentally older. Because suspended animation.

[Stanlos]

It bugs me that the Superman origin story has become so muddied. When I was watching SMALLVILLE recently this is one of the things that annoyed me the most.

The origin I understood from early times was that Jor-El and Lara were desperate. Jor-El had made a test model for the ship he was going to build, but time had run out. He wanted Lara to squeeze inside this small model with little baby Kal-El so they could escape in the last minute before everything blew up. Lara reasoned it was better to just send the baby, as the rocket would have a better chance of escaping Krypton and arriving at some other planet. So the rocket took off and everything went ka-boom.

Piling on a whole lot of other bric-a-brac undermines that basic story. Apparently the House of El had bags of time to prepare for the end of their planet and there were armies of folks who had access to advanced technology that could save them all. You've lost me. That's not the story I signed up for.

This is Sooooooooo true and one of the most confusing things to me. I don't know if it came with the Donner film or what, but people keep adding this Jesus/John3:16 nonsense when it was quite clear it was an act of survival not a gift to humanity #Because.

On the opposite spectrum, Snellville and Loebs Supergirl run kept adding adding sinister conquest/military elements that only serve to convoluted things.

These and the Everyone Knows Kryptonians Get Buffed Under A Yellow Sun thing are really inconsistent

[Bored at 3:00AM]

I love the revised origin of her being tween who was sent to Earth to take care of her infant cousin, but her ship was knocked off course during Krypton's destruction.

That's such a nice tweak to her origin that gives a much more interesting and meaty backstory for both Kara and Kal.

The Argo City origin works fine too, and I think Johns did a good job of spitting the difference between the two origins by incorporating Brainiac's force fields.

[Jim Kelly]

Funnily enough, the topic title states the paradox--Supergirl: older or younger than Superman. Yup, she is older or younger than Superman in the modern version.

It's kind of like the thing they used to say about Ringo--he is the oldest and the youngest Beatle. By birth date, he was the oldest, but because he was the last to join the group, he was the youngest.

[Zero Hunter]

I think having Supergirl actually raised on Krypton as a child is an important part of making her different from Superman. It should make her view on things different as she should be much more alien than Clark every will be. The thrown into stasis version to me is the best version because it takes away Argo city which was one of the bad silver age ideas that needs to be left there.

[Incognito]

Prefer Supergirl physically younger but mentally older than Superman. I like that she was raised on Krypton which keeps her distinct from Superman who was also born on Krypton but raised on Earth.

[Jim Kelly]

Prefer Supergirl physically younger but mentally older than Superman. I like that she was raised on Krypton which keeps her distinct from Superman who was also born on Krypton but raised on Earth.

I'm not up on the latest Kara Zor-El lore. How can she be mentally older? I thought she was in stasis or some such thing, so she didn't age a day. Are you saying that she was aware the whole time--awake and mentally advancing even as she stayed paralyzed--like someone in a locked in state? What a horror tale!

I prefer Superman not to know the truth about Krypton. All the information he gets is from unreliable narrators. The A.I. could be corrupted by B.R.A.I.N.I.A.C. People he meets who purport to be from Krypton or to have visited the planet might be lying and have their own agenda. Any memories he has are not to be trusted. Kal-El can never really know for certain what his lost homeworld was truly like. And that's the source of his angst. Always searching for something that never can be found.

[Adekis]

She's not mentally "older", she's just "earlier" - which since Kryptonian culture didn't really advance beyond the planet's death for the most part, there's not really a sense of difference there the way there'd be if a teenager from Earth in the '80s showed up today and started living with her 30 year old cousin. All the culture shock is planetary, rather than temporal, unlike, I don't know, Captain America.

The main difference between them, apart from Kara's youth, is just that Kal experiences Krypton as an archaeological thing with very few actual memories to go on, and constantly trying to learn more about a world he never got to experience, whereas for Kara, Krypton was The Entire World until suddenly... it was gone.

I will say, I didn't read up on Silver Age Supergirl all that much until I was already familiar with the pre-Flashpoint version, so Argo City is a little weird to me. Just a city floating through space in a glass dome, Jetsons style? Not bad, but jarring if you're used to the pre-Flashpoint take of suspended animation. I don't often prefer revised origin stories, but I think in Kara's case, I definitely like the newer variant better.

[Jim Kelly]

Supergirl has always been a character with difficult origins--because in a world where Superman is the only survivor of Krypton, it then becomes a chore later to introduce another character just like him, without doing damage to the continuity.

The Supergirl of 1958--created by Otto Binder and Dick Sprang (with Stan Kaye inks) for SUPERMAN 123 (August 1958)--"The Girl of Steel"--is a self-sacrificing magical answer to one of Jimmy Olsen's wishes.

The Supergirl of 1959--created by Otto Binder and Al Plastino for ACTION COMICS 252 (May 1959)--"The Supergirl from Krypton"--somehow has to exist after the planet has been destroyed and be younger than Superman, so she can't have been born on Krypton, obviously. They have to write around these difficulties and answer even more continuity questions from the fans. So it gets complicated. But they clearly wanted her to be a girl--not a young woman--because there's a lot about her adventures that's meant to appeal to girls (back when comics still took girls into consideration as part of their market). They seem to have struggled figuring out what to do with her when she aged up.

The Supergirl of 1988 (Matrix)--created by John Byrne (with Karl Kesel inks) for SUPERMAN 16 (April 1988)--"He Only Laughs When I Hurt"--cannot be from Krypton, because the Byrne revamp maintains that no one else but Kal-El survived (no exceptions). So to get a Supergirl into the Superman world takes a lot (a lot) of effort. And these difficulties with Matrix just seem to get compounded annually like interest.

Which leads to the Supergirl of 1996--created by Peter David and Gary Frank (with Cam Smith inks) for SUPERGIRL 1 (September 1996)--"Body and Soul"--where they are trying to bring back elements of pre-Crisis and fusing those with the Matrix Supergirl. You could furnish a modest-sized house with all the bric-a-brac this version incorporates.

The Supergirl of 2003--created by Steven T. Seagle and Scott McDaniel (with Andy Owen inks) for SUPERMAN: THE 10 CENT ADVENTURE 1 (March 2003)--"Truth--is simply Cir-El/Mia the daughter of Clark and Lois from the future, except later she's a Trojan Horse created by Brainiac.

The Supergirl of 2004--created by Jeph Loeb and Michael Turner for SUPERMAN/BATMAN 8 (May 2004)--"Alone"--is (Power Girl aside) an attempt to revive the idea of Kara Zor-El. But again, there's that problem of how to make her exist, when by rights she shouldn't exist, because Kal-El is the lone survivor of Krypton. So again the story has to do back-flips to get her into existence without upsetting the apple cart. Some of the pre-Crisis continuity for Supergirls bleeds back into this version. Just like the Argo City of old, this Argo City survived the destruction of Krypton--Zor-El and Alura were then abducted into Kandor by Brainiac. In pre-Crisis continuity Zor-El and Allura went into the Survival Zone when Argo City perished and later were reunited with their daughter--and went into the bottle city on their own accord.

[Osiris-Rex]

I like the idea that Kara was raised as a Kryptonian while Kal-El was raised as an Earthling. It doesn't really matter whether Kara was born on Krypton or Argo City. The important thing for me is
that Kara has the first hand knowledge of Kryptonian culture and that she is biologically younger than Kal-El, whether she was born later or existed in suspended animation for decades. So I guess
either way works for me. Being born on Krypton raises the question of if there were two rockets, why just two? And why only big enough to hold children? If it was easy enough to build more than
one rocket, why stop at two?

[OpaqueGiraffe17]

I like the idea that Kara was raised as a Kryptonian while Kal-El was raised as an Earthling. It doesn't really matter whether Kara was born on Krypton or Argo City. The important thing for me is
that Kara has the first hand knowledge of Kryptonian culture and that she is biologically younger than Kal-El, whether she was born later or existed in suspended animation for decades. So I guess
either way works for me. Being born on Krypton raises the question of if there were two rockets, why just two? And why only big enough to hold children? If it was easy enough to build more than
one rocket, why stop at two?

well by the same logic, if there was one rocket (kal-el's) then why not 2? or 3? or enough for krypton's entire populace?
I figure Jor-El was percieved as a apokoliptic conspiracy theorist, but he just happened to actually be right. So he had just enough time and resources to build a one-person rocket, and maybe also enough to get through to his brother (who he may not have gotten along with but family is family) and scape enough for one more rocket.