The Changing Face of SupergirlA Look at the Evolution of the Girl of Steel
Once upon a time there was a comic book called Supergirl. It had a lot of problems. Frankly, it was sometimes difficult to tell if there was anything to the book except problems. Then it got better – much better. It got fun. But, when we're talking Supergirl, is a fun comic enough, or is the much-needed turnaround only just beginning?
But in spite of all that love, I'm a cynic — tip me over that edge, and I'll make sure you hear about it. And if you'd asked me a year ago to name the one book with a female protagonist that was nothing but irredeemable nonsense, I'd've answered Supergirl. Don't get me wrong; I was reading the book every month. I like irredeemable nonsense. As P. M. McRae, one of the bloggers hosted at Girl-Wonder.org, put it last July: "the adventures of a superpowered half-dressed nymphet made for fairly entertaining reading, in a pulpish sort of way — but you know, sometimes I like things that are not good for me, like Eminem and tequila shooters." I was reading, but I was also letting my friends know exactly what they were in for if they picked it up. Most of them, wiser than I, opted not to. Supergirl is a relatively new book, only in its mid-teens of issues now. The character was reintroduced from scratch in the Superman/Batman title a few years ago and then given her own book. There's also the current Supergirl and the Legion of Superheroes; the Kara Zor-El of that title is written as much closer to the classic version of the character – bright, bubbly, wide-eyed and heartbreakingly young. But Supergirl's star book was another story. One of the main problems was that it felt actively hostile to female readers. The art was full of tiny skirts billowing upwards and the flash of thong underwear – outfits the captions told us were provided to Supergirl by apple-pie mom Martha Kent and star reporter Lois Lane respectively. Every issue was just Kara encountering a different superhero team and getting into a fight with them. Then, once there was nobody left she hadn't tried to punch, Kara moved to Kandor and found lots of excuses to take her top off. Then she almost married an evil alternate-universe version of Kal-El, her cousin. Cue the ass-groping and cracks on his part about how she'd best make sure she spent lots of time under a yellow sun-lamp — to replicate the solar source of the Supers' powers — lest he, ahem, damage her on the wedding night. Ugh. But then something happened. Something new, and weird. Supergirl started to change for the better, and kept changing. The difference is pretty astonishing, considering how appalling the first life of the book sometimes was. Once upon a time, Kara toured the DC universe searching for other heroes (and always ended up fighting them). Now she's on another journey, and this time she's looking for herself. Teenage ennui with superpowers is a deeply resonant trope, and there was an era when it was the strongest story a comic could tell: Peter Parker, anyone? "We were trying to show that someone with her powers also takes with her a responsibility, whether she likes it or not. In this case, she wasn't too pleased," says Jimmy Palmiotti. Along with co-writer Justin Gray and penciller Amanda Conner, Palmiotti was part of the team behind issue #12 of the book. A joyfully whacked-out stand-alone story, the issue demonstrated how far the book had come since its unfortunate beginnings. "Responsibility," Palmiotti goes on. "Sometimes I hate it, sometimes it feels great. That's a real emotion to have, and a natural one for Kara to deal with. I can remember being a teenager and being told by my parents that life isn't all fun. Knowing I had to be home by midnight made eleven-thirty to twelve that much more valuable to me." It sounds simple enough, but Palmiotti's approach highlights the incredibly basic and hugely ground-breaking premise behind the new direction of the book. This is the story of a teenager with powers who is struggling with those powers, and that teenager is a girl. She's not someone you stare at, she's someone you identify with. She's going through the same stuff we went through at that age, no matter what gender we are, except that some of her journey has turned allegorical and put on a cape. In a lot of ways, the new life of the book is a direct turnabout from the first version. Issue #12 featured Kara going to a dance party in an attempt to escape the responsibility of being the Girl of Steel. The fun was interrupted by a lava-dwelling dinosaur who could read minds (no, really) and Terra, a teen hero with a far more serious attitude toward world-saving than that held by Kara. (The same team who worked on issue #12 are now crafting a Terra miniseries.) By having Kara interacting with, and being looked at by, people her own age, the whole tone of the subject matter was changed. It was no longer completely skeezy for a sixteen-year-old to be wearing a tiny skirt and a belly shirt and posing to be looked at, because she was doing it in an appropriate context. Kara at an all-ages rave was a lot more pleasant to look at than Kara punching Power Girl in the breast yet again. Earlier issues were rife with teasing faux-lesbian moments, but in issue #12 the same sort of deliberate display — Kara dancing with a fellow partygoer dressed as Batgirl; Kara's friend Owen slavishly demanding details of her meeting with Terra — were lighthearted, tongue-in-cheek and fun. I keep on saying it, and it keeps being true. Somehow, Supergirl got really, really fun. A fill-in issue by a guest team doesn't say much about the regular life of the book, but that's turned about too. The new direction of the book has accomplished the seemingly-impossible feat of making Supergirl someone that it's easy to sympathise with. Kara's city apartment and cantankerous pet cat tap into a fictional theme which has a lot of currency: the young adult, now finished with education (whether that ending came by way of graduation or not), unsure about their career, is setting up a life on their own for the first time. It's a particularly contemporary situation, and one not many comics incorporate as yet. Best of all, Kara's got a close female friend: Cassie, also known as Wonder Girl. The two first met in one of the earliest issues of the book, where they (surprise!) got into a fight, during which Kara dryly remarked "so much for that Amazon sisterhood." But in Supergirl version 2.0, Kara and Cassie are brought together by shared loss: Paradise Island, land of the Amazons and Kara's first home on Earth, vanished during the Crisis. Conner Kent, Kara's cousin (sort of; it's complicated. But he said she was his cousin, so we'll leave it at that) and Cassie's lover, had been killed during this same Crisis. All the girls had left was each other, but luckily this new version of the Supergirl book allowed them to have that. There's a feminist term called the Bechdel Test, from the comic Dykes to Watch Out For. The Bechdel test checks whether or not two female characters in a movie or a book have a conversation about something other than a man. It can sometimes be disheartening to realise what a tiny percentage of genre media gets a pass on this exam, but Supergirl often gets through on the strength of this friendship. It's not often that one sees closeness between teenage girls in a comic book, and it's even rarer to see it done well. "I usually start with character types," explains Joe Kelly, Supergirl's current regular writer. "I wanted Kara to have a friend who could relate to her on multiple levels, and since she ticked Power Girl off right away, Eddie [Berganza, the book's editor] suggested Wonder Girl. She seems to fit for a number of reasons, the most important to me being that she's tried to have a 'normal life' and could explain it to Kara, and that she lost so much during Crisis, so emotionally she had a deep connection to Kara — even if they lost different things. I wanted their relationship to feel the most 'real', two friends who argue and care deeply about one another, and are both messed up in the right ways."
"I really liked how Jeph Loeb (who brought Kara into the DC Universe in his book Superman/Batman) gave Kara three 'parents', so it was important for me to maintain the Batman angle — I could see why he'd appeal to her as a confidant and resource, especially once it became problematic to hang with Superman," Kelly explains. "Batman and Superman are both extremely strong and centered, but in totally opposite ways. Kara tried to follow Superman's example, and it isn't working out too well for her, so it felt right that she'd turn in the other direction — Wonder Woman took a back seat for us because of all the 52 stuff, though I really love her as a character. "Also, this is definitely a book packed with 'daddy issues', so having someone like Batman around as a counterpoint to Superman was important to me. I also really liked the idea of what Batman gets out of her. I think when she shows up, it's like someone lets a little light into the cave, even if that light is tarnished in its own way." ('Daddy issues' is putting it mildly – flashbacks to Kara's Kryptonian childhood have depicted her witnessing murder and being subjected to psychological abuse. In the first storyline of the book, Kara's father brainwashed her into being a 'nice girl' with a sinister sleeper personality instructed to kill her infant cousin. The brainwashing took place while she was naked. I'm sure there was a very good narrative rea... oh, who are we kidding.) Of Owen, also known as Captain Boomerang or Boomer, sometime-love interest/sibling-like foil of Kara, Kelly says the following: "Boomer came in because Eddie and I had discussed how Jeph wanted to have Kara date a villain at some point, if just to piss off Superman, which I thought was funny. "I wanted to play with that idea, and we started looking for a 'bad boy' for her to hang out with who might be perceived as a 'bad influence', though as things play out, I think it's the other way around! "We also wanted a guy who was a little older, but not so old that it got creepy. Kara is such a self-assured character, so much older than she appears (which of course means that there are parts of her even more immature as well!) that I thought it made sense that a guy like Boomer would want to hang out with her. At the same time, if Boomer isn't a complete creep — which I don't think he is — he's going to struggle with a wide range of feelings, which Kara can (and does) play off of, and that lays the seeds for good character conflict." Kelly does his best not to think about how important the character is — or could be — in pop culture. "When Eddie and I talked about this project, my basic pitch was: I want to do a story about a young woman out on her own for the first time under the guise of 'figuring herself out', but in reality she's just running away from her problems, and therefore will find disaster in everything she tries. Not a 'super' or 'hero' in the pitch! Supergirl is certainly iconic, and I know that there are fans who care very deeply about her, but I have to consider her a 'mixed-up kid trying to make good' first and build from there, or I got nuthin'." While Kelly's attitude to Kara's journey and her relationships is a healthy one for a writer to have when approaching a narrative in need of tensions, arcs, and character progression, the fact remains that Supergirl is an icon and a property as well as a character. A good comic is a wonderful thing, but is it enough when we're talking about a character with this much cultural weight? Girl-Wonder.org's relationship with the Supergirl title hasn't been an easy one; there's a magazine article from last year out there which features me calling it "a jailbait naughty mag," and that was me behaving. One of the main web site projects on the domain is Jessica Plummer's Super. Girl., which "is intended to study Supergirl's importance in and influence on pop culture" and hopes that the information it collects "can shed some light on how our culture views women and what exactly it means to call someone a 'Supergirl'." When a recent DC Nation column encouraged women to give the title another chance, citing the improving quality of the book and the introduction of Power Boy, a "mimbo" designed to subvert the ugly sexism so rife in other comics, Plummer was not convinced. "Stack up, DC. You don't tell us to buy the comic and then make it better. That's bass ackwards. You fix it. Then we buy it," she responded online. "I'm sorry, a 'chest window' on your 'mimbo' does not mitigate the grossness of sexualizing a 16-year-old girl." New talent coming onto the book seem highly aware of how much of an issue such problems are for a large portion of the title's readership. Penciller Ale Garza, who first tackled Kara for the Infinite Holiday Special, is about to take up the Supergirl book proper. He addressed fans' worries in his blog as soon as the announcement of his new job hit the Internet: "For all of you out there worried about me 'sex kittening' her up, I just want you to know that that's not really the way I view this character," Garza assured readers. "I see her more as a no-nonsense teen just trying to find her place in the world." He went on to compare what he hopes to do with Kara to what's been done with the girl-friendly Marvel title Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane's lead character. The way Kara's sexuality affects the Supergirl book varies widely from storyline to storyline, especially when different artists portray her. Though the new direction of the book does seem to largely avoid the worst of the problems, and be committed to putting even more distance between the bad old days and the brave new world in future issues, it's still not that long ago that Kara was bathing under Kandorian sun lamps so as to avoid a vaginal fistula. Some things are difficult to forget.
Plummer also points out that there are a variety of different costumes available for children and adults — "Sexy Supergirl, Classic Supergirl, or something in between? It's your choice." — but that the same cannot be said for the age group that Kara herself belongs to. "Teenage girls have been denied that choice. If they want to be Supergirl without being 'sexy', they will have to sew their costumes themselves. Otherwise, they're stuck with velvet and vinyl." I asked Valerie D'Orazio, writer of the "Occasional Superheroine" blog and former employee of DC Comics, what she thought of the financial viability of these two faces of Kara, the Sexy and the Classic: "I think the Supergirl-as-nymphet initially had a large short-term financial impact. But this sales success was done by seriously undermining the integrity of the property — which has long-term effects. Now, Time Warner is very keen on maintaining the integrity of Superman — there is a whole list of stuff you can't do with this character. This is done because they know that maintaining Superman's integrity is key in extending the character to other media and to license it out to manufacturers. If they were smart, they would extend this protection to Supergirl — if not for moral reasons then purely financial. "I think the smartest course of action, from a purely business and publicity standpoint, would be to toss everything out so far and revision the whole Supergirl concept as an iconic superheroine role-model for young-adult female readers. I mean, get an editorial and creative think-tank going and come up with a Plan B for this character. And get women involved — not just for a meeting here and there, but for the whole enchilada. And maybe even be really daring and shocking and have a female editor and/or writer on the book; I realize how outrageously innovative that would be, what a wacky suggestion I'm coming up with here, but maybe now's the time to take crazy chances, you know? "Now — how could such a plan be profitable? Think outside the box, past comic sales (the actual comic book sales are becoming less and less an important factor in a lot of these decisions, anyway). Such a revisioned Supergirl could be aggressively licensed for young adult novels, clothing, a Nickelodeon TV series, you name it. She could be cross-marketed with teen magazines like YM and Seventeen. She could be the icon of the strong young positive female, the same way her cousin is the icon of Truth, Justice, and the American Way. But she can't do that as a cheesy nymphet, because all that added exposure (if you would forgive the pun) would put a bigger spotlight on how disgusting this 'Superheroine Lolita' concept is anyway. "Then there is the purely moral dimension. I really believe that the reason Spider-Girl has gotten so many reprieves even in the face of slower sales is, fan campaigns aside, that Marvel recognizes the need to have such a powerful role model for teen girls in print. They recognize that there needs to be a character with all the magic of Spider-Man for these girls. And there is this need. And I think that's why there are so many readers upset with this new Supergirl." As a brand, Supergirl seems to be enjoying a resurgence, though not in the terms D'Orazio would hope for. The department store near my house is full of stickers, diaries, pencil cases and stationery featuring the Supergirl logo, and you can tell it's Supergirl and not Superman on account of the pink colouring and the occasional flowers. Even as the book steps forward in quality, the brand lags behind. A recent column in Karen Healey's Girls Read Comics (And They're Pissed), one of the blogs hosted through Girl-Wonder.org, addressed the valentines-cards subset of this new Supergirl brand: "You know what? We just don't have enough emphasis on the need for little girls to be pretty. Let's take Supergirl, switch out that assertive, gender-neutral red, white and blue for pastels and silver, and add a bunch of slogans that say things like 'Saving the world can be glamorous!' and 'Glitz and glamour!'" Healey despairs. "The cards' messages are obviously geared towards conceptions of girlishness that have nothing to do with superheroism. Supergirl is strong and beautiful, just like Superman is strong and handsome, but can you imagine a little boy getting a Superman valentine in pink and silver proclaiming the twin virtues of 'Strength + handsomeness!'?" The great disaster of this new merchandise is, as Healey points out, the way it "mindlessly emphasises the 'girl' part of Supergirl at the expense of the Super." Supergirl is getting stronger. Her comic's an entertaining book. Hand in hand with that improvement, her image needs to follow suit. There would have been no point in building a better icon when the comic itself was dreadful, but that's not the case now. If the book remains a sturdy foundation, there's no reason that the marketing side of Supergirl shouldn't be forced to evolve along with it.
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