Do Supergirl and Powergirl look identical except for their, uh, proportions?

[Robotman]

Powergirl was originally Supergirl of Earth 2. All of the Prime Earth (Pre-Crisis Earth 1) heroes look nearly identical to their Earth 2 counterparts besides some differences in age and costume. Powergirl and Supergirl are usually drawn to look quite different from one another. I've never thought of Powergirl as just being an older version of Kara but if the same rules apply to Supergirl that apply to Superman they should look like the same person.
I'm not trying to make a grand point it's just something that hit me that I hadn't thought of in my many years of reading comics.

Does anyone picture them looking the same or do you see them as having very different features?

[Prime]

The way I always saw it was that Supergirl will look just like Power Girl when she is an adult.

[jimmy]

Well Galatea, a Supergirl clone by Cadmus's in the Justice League series bore a striking resemblance to that of PowerGirl a clone who was aged a few years to very late teen early adult hood as well.

[mathew101281]

The way I always saw it was that Supergirl will look just like Power Girl when she is an adult.

I agree Powergirl is bigger more mature Supergirl. I feel that the girl in Supergirl is a direct reference to the fact that she is a girl, while Powergirl's (who has never been portrayed as anything other then a full grown woman) name uses the term girl in a more slangy way, like how some people use the term girlfriend to describe a female friend regardless of age, or the term girl power, which doesn't have an age limit. In short Supergirl is a character created for young girls to relate to while, Powergirl is an exaggerated woman both in look and personality.

[MajorHoy]

Powergirl was originally Supergirl of Earth 2. All of the Prime Earth (Pre-Crisis Earth 1) heroes look nearly identical to their Earth 2 counterparts besides some differences in age and costume.

Really?







Earth-1's Flash, Green Lantern, and The Atom seemed a little different from their Earth-2 counterparts.

[Slaughter]

They might be a concept coined in Alternate History: Alternate Timeline Brothers (or Sisters, in this case). Essentially, nearly-identical persons who have the same ancestry but aren't 100% the same person.

Althrough I think this only applies to Pre-Flashpoint Supergirl - I never saw them getting DNA tested or such. New52 Supergirl and Powergirl are definitively the same person, the AI in Kara's own fortress of solitude equivalent thought that one of the two were clones due to identical DNA and tried to have one of them killed - at first it was Powergirl, but then it shifted to Supergirl. The AI would't have made such a mistake if they weren't so identical.

Seems that they're really the same person, only Powergirl is older and has different hair. Supergirl is generally 15 or 16 since the Silver Age, while Powergirl seems to be somewhere between 20 and 25.

[K. Jones]

My thing was always you know, that Supergirl has pretty much always been like 17 years old. I mean how the hell much more "maturing" do you expect her to do? She could fill out a bit more from her willowy teenage proportions, but I imagine by 17, like most ladies, she's pretty set on things like her height and her average weight for the rest of her life. Obviously things like bust size and hips shift over time but not you know, that much.

But Power Girl has a different history than Supergirl. Similar, but definitely different. It could be a bit of nature vs. nurture, combined with the age difference, combined with some other cosmological phenomenon.

Pleasingly enough though, was back in the recent Supergirl run when they met up because the artist ... I'm not sure if it was Mahmud Asrar or Emannuella Luppachino but it was really nice art ... definitely made them look a lot alike.

[Robotman]

Really?







Earth-1's Flash, Green Lantern, and The Atom seemed a little different from their Earth-2 counterparts.

That's different. E1 and E2 GL, Flash, Atom, etc. are differnt people who have the same name and similar powers. E1 Superman looks identical to E2 Superman besides the fact that he's younger.

[superduperman]

By the time the Crisis rolled around, Supergirl was pretty much an established legal adult. She was living on her own and starring in a soap opera. I would estimate her age at the time to be about 22 or 23. Power Girl, by contrast, was probably closer to 25 or 26, estimated. Older, but not by much. Keep in mind her "proportions" were kind of an accident. She started out at normal build but I believe it was Wally Wood who kept "expanding" her body. The look kind of just stuck. Since we're talking about drawings, I'm not sure how much comparison you can do to them physically. They look like whatever they are drawn to look like. Keep in mind also that the powers of Earth 1 and Earth 2 Kryptonians function differently. Not sure if that makes much difference but we also don't know how similar in appearance the two Supermen are either. The closest approximation we got was when Superboy met the Earth 2 Clark Kent around his same age (convenient, no?) and Clark's parents commented on how similar they looked. But Superboy's powers were all fully developed while Clark's were not. Power Girl first leaped great distances but still couldn't fly for several years after arriving on Earth. The early All Star Squadron stories tried to do the same to Superman but quickly dropped it after few years. However it was still established that early in his career he couldn't fly either. Maybe the differences go beyond power levels. Maybe they look slightly different as well.

[Flash Gordon]

My thing was always you know, that Supergirl has pretty much always been like 17 years old. I mean how the hell much more "maturing" do you expect her to do? She could fill out a bit more from her willowy teenage proportions, but I imagine by 17, like most ladies, she's pretty set on things like her height and her average weight for the rest of her life. Obviously things like bust size and hips shift over time but not you know, that much.

But Power Girl has a different history than Supergirl. Similar, but definitely different. It could be a bit of nature vs. nurture, combined with the age difference, combined with some other cosmological phenomenon.

Pleasingly enough though, was back in the recent Supergirl run when they met up because the artist ... I'm not sure if it was Mahmud Asrar or Emannuella Luppachino but it was really nice art ... definitely made them look a lot alike.

It was Asrar, yeah. Great couple issues too, he totally toned down the nonsensical aspects of Powergirl and made her look like an actual character. I miss his SUPERGIRL, quite a bit more than I thought I would. I really feel the lack of a SUPERGIRL book lately. She's most likely my second favorite DC character.

Now about Powergirl, whom I'm not all that fond of, I view them as separate entities. They share a strong resemblance since Powergirl is a doppelganger but they aren't identical by any means. I always thought Earth 2 Superman should look a bit different (not wildly, mind ya) from the real Superman. Just for the sake of storytelling.

[L.R Johansson]

Now about Powergirl, whom I'm not all that fond of, I view them as separate entities. They share a strong resemblance since Powergirl is a doppelganger but they aren't identical by any means. I always thought Earth 2 Superman should look a bit different (not wildly, mind ya) from the real Superman. Just for the sake of storytelling.

Buster... Earth-2 IS the real Superman!

Bad-ass attitude, short cape, and champion of the oppressed.

And don't you forget it!

[superduperman]

It's the short cape that makes him the REAL Superman!

[Jim Kelly]

By the time the Crisis rolled around, Supergirl was pretty much an established legal adult. She was living on her own and starring in a soap opera. I would estimate her age at the time to be about 22 or 23. Power Girl, by contrast, was probably closer to 25 or 26, estimated. Older, but not by much. Keep in mind her "proportions" were kind of an accident. She started out at normal build but I believe it was Wally Wood who kept "expanding" her body. The look kind of just stuck. Since we're talking about drawings, I'm not sure how much comparison you can do to them physically. They look like whatever they are drawn to look like. Keep in mind also that the powers of Earth 1 and Earth 2 Kryptonians function differently. Not sure if that makes much difference but we also don't know how similar in appearance the two Supermen are either. The closest approximation we got was when Superboy met the Earth 2 Clark Kent around his same age (convenient, no?) and Clark's parents commented on how similar they looked. But Superboy's powers were all fully developed while Clark's were not. Power Girl first leaped great distances but still couldn't fly for several years after arriving on Earth. The early All Star Squadron stories tried to do the same to Superman but quickly dropped it after few years. However it was still established that early in his career he couldn't fly either. Maybe the differences go beyond power levels. Maybe they look slightly different as well.

It was never directly stated, but I would guess that Kara Zor-L was supposed to be the same age as Kara Zor-El (at that time in 1976). The Super-Squad was supposed to be the main selling point of the new ALL-STAR COMICS--and these three were all supposed to be young kids taking over for the old folks in the Justice Society. Gerry Conway probably thought that no readers would be interested in a group of old gassers nor one called the Justice Society--sounds so conservative. And therefore they had to add some youthful excitement with this trendy Super Squad. But Conway probably didn't think it through--because Robin had to be much older and even Star Spangled Kid (given his time travel experiences) ought to have aged a bit.

When Earth-Two Superman first started showing up (in the '60s), he was drawn to look like the Earth-One Superman. It was really only during this run of ALL-STAR COMICS that Ric Estrada, Wally Wood and Joe Staton established a retro look for the character to make the distinction from his Earth-One counterpart. However, that's purely a stylistic thing. For example, Kurt Schaffenberger's Captain Marvel looked retro (squinty eyes, bulky frame) while Don Newton's Captain Marvel looked modern--but it was the very same guy on Earth-S! So in my mind, Kal-El and Kal-L are virtually alike--they're just drawn with different styles as a kind of wink to the audience.

Power Girl and Supergirl ought to be alike and therefore their breast size should be the same. But maybe breasts on female characters are like eyes on male characters--they're not literal but figurative. So maybe the artist is trying to make a stylistic statement by drawing the breasts large. We could see this in practice circa 2001 when Ed McGuinness, Mike Wieringo, Mike McKone et al drew Superman squinty-eyed and bulky--at the same, the women began to have rounder proportions with often larger looking breat size.

And it seems to me that Power Girl works best when she's drawn by a cartoonist who has that sort of big foot style/manga style. If drawn by an artist in a photo-realistic style, Power Girl's breasts either have to appear smaller or they appear to be too large for health and safety. It's almost depressing to see Power Girl drawn that way in photo-realistic style, because she begins to look like a sad porn actress who has seen better days. Whereas, we don't take breast size so literally in comics that are drawn in high style--where other rules of perspective and anatomy are also being bent if not completely broken.

[Tracer Bullet]

Maybe Kryptonian women have muscles in their mammaries. Powergirl just works out more.

[Joe Acro]

I think it's safe to assume that not everyone on Earth-2 is the same their counterparts on Earth-1. Sure, the ones we know almost all seem the same, but clearly this isn't an exclusive thing. Power Girl is different from Supergirl. Maybe she was conceived at a different time. Perhaps there are other examples that we don't know about simply because those characters didn't appear.