Lorendiac
Active Member
1. Introduction: Why I Wrote This
2. The Timeline of First and Final Appearances
3. Short Lists of The Different Users of Each Relevant Name
1. Introduction: Why I Wrote This
In various online forums where I hang out for comic-book-related discussions, people keep asking perfectly reasonable questions such as:
“Who is the current Supergirl? How is she different from the last Supergirl? (And the one before that, and the one before that?)”
“Just how many Supergirls have there been in the comic books, anyway?”
“Why so many?”
“Are they all related to Superman?”
The problem is that there’s no simple “sound bite” of an answer that can honestly and accurately answer such questions in one minute or less, even if you actually have all relevant facts at the tip of your tongue (which I certainly didn't when I started writing this).
For instance, if you start trying to delve into these subjects in a way that is not just shallow and superficial but really meant to clear things up, then you’ve got to talk about the differences between Pre-Crisis and Post-Crisis continuity if you’re going to make a clean sweep in explaining just how many Supergirls there have ever been, and why the one who held the job for over a quarter-century is no longer with us.
And since Power Girl started out as a parallel-world analog of the Silver Age Supergirl about thirty years ago, shouldn’t she at least get an honorable mention in any in-depth discussion of The Many Supergirls even though she’s never claimed the name “Supergirl” in her life? What about the various females who have called themselves “Superwoman” instead of “Supergirl”? Mightn’t a fan who wants to know about the Supergirls appreciate having the Superwomen sorted out for him as well, at no extra charge? What about Kara of Argo City in the Superman Versus Aliens miniseries ten years ago, who never called herself “Supergirl” but was obviously designed to strongly remind us of the Pre-Crisis Supergirl who was also a Kara from Argo City, even if it was a different Argo City on a different planet?
You see how quickly such things can escalate? A couple of months ago I started typing out a piece explaining, from memory, what I thought I already knew about the various Supergirls, Superwomen, etc., Pre- and Post-Crisis. The early version was sadly incomplete because I knew I didn’t know everything, but it was only a rough draft. I had a vague idea that eventually I might end up with a more “comprehensive” discussion of the subject, and after I had written and posted it, in the future I could simply post a hyperlink to it whenever newcomers on my favorite comic book forums started asking such questions as I listed above.
Last week, I got involved in an online discussion that somehow prompted me to dig out the old material on my hard drive and start sprucing it up, researching the subject further, splicing in new material, and organizing things into a comprehensive timeline showing the sequence of First Appearances of each relevant character. In several cases, I mention Final Appearances as well. (In a couple of cases, the First and Final Appearances “in continuity” were one and the same!)
Who is a relevant character? I decided to do my best to cover any female character who has ever been connected with Superman continuity while doing one or more of the following things in at least one DC comic book story that was supposedly "in continuity" at the time it was published (even if it was later retconned away, explicitly or implicitly):
A) Calling herself Supergirl
B) Calling herself Super-Girl
C) Calling herself Superwoman
D) Calling herself Power Girl
E) Calling herself Kara
Obviously there are some characters who fall into more than one of those categories. And out of the goodness of my heart, I've even thrown in a couple of characters who didn't fit any of the above categories, but were strongly suspected by the readers to be mysterious versions of one "Supergirl" character or another. You'll see what I mean as we go along.
(I have no intention of going into the details of any variation of "Supergirl" or any similar character who has only presented to us in movies or television shows. Sticking to "comic book continuity" characters is enough for now!)
I interpreted “First Appearance” to suit my own purposes. If someone is supposed to have been the “same character” all along (both before and after Crisis, for instance), but got a huge retcon or reboot that replaced the old origin story with a radically different new one, then I usually mention the first mention of the new origin story as essentially being the First Appearance of a new version of a character. Likewise, my Timeline doesn’t mention the first appearance of reporter Lois Lane because she didn’t meet the criteria I gave above when she first appeared, but I do list two later comics as both being First Appearances in Continuity of the “Lois Lane as Superwoman” concept one way or another. That includes the story in which she first believed she had superpowers that justified her wearing a red and blue costume and calling herself Superwoman, and a later story in which for the first time she really had superpowers that justified her wearing a red and blue costume and calling herself Superwoman.
2. The Timeline of First and Final Appearances
CAVEAT LECTOR (Let the Reader Beware): This is only a first draft. I have done the best I could, but I feel certain I have not done it perfectly. Please speak up if you know of a relevant fact or character I completely overlooked, or if you spot a clear mistake in my quick description of a particular character or story. In many cases I am dependent upon online summaries of stories I have never read, and I am painfully aware that my efforts to paraphrase second-hand information leave plenty of room for error.
THE TIMELINE
1947. Superman #45. Lois Lane ends up believing she has gained powers comparable to Superman's by magic. (She hasn't. Superman was moving at super-speed to do her stunts and make it seem that way. Long story.) By the end of the story she has voluntarily relinquished the powers she thinks she has because they seem to be out of control. But during the story, she had indeed called herself Superwoman and worn an appropriate costume.
Note: There was a dream sequence story in 1943 in which Lois had dreamed she got a blood transfusion from the Man of Steel and became a Superwoman, but as a dream, that "Superwoman" appearance was basically "out of continuity." This story, on the other hand, was apparently the first "in continuity" story in which Lois or any other female character wore a costume and called herself Superwoman, powers or no powers. So I count this as the First Appearance in continuity of a Superwoman.
1949. Superboy #5. Superboy meets this really neat blond girl who calls herself Lucy Regent and is an incredibly skilled athlete. Although she has no powers, at one point she wears a costume modeled on his and calls herself Supergirl as part of a show the two of them put on together at a festival. Superboy is quite smitten by her, it seems, but unfortunately it turns out that she is actually Lucy, rightful Queen of Borgonia, and the story ends with Lucy staying in her native land to take up her duties as Queen after a villainous usurper has been defeated with Superboy's help. (Lucy was never been heard from again in any other story.)
1951. Action Comics #156. Lois Lane temporarily receives powers which prompt her to create a Superwoman costume for herself (again!). I am told that the costume she came up with was very similar to what was later used for Kara Zor-El as Supergirl. Lois even wore a blond wig to disguise her hair color - going for a secret identity, apparently, which she had not bothered with in her previous "Superwoman" adventure in the story I mentioned above. This was apparently the First Appearance of any costumed female calling herself Superwoman and wearing an appropriate costume "in continuity," and actually having superpowers to go with the costume.
I am told that Lois Lane and Lana Lang each got superpowers (always temporary!) in various other stories in the old days, but I'm not clear on how often the Superwoman name was explicitly used, and I have not heard that it was ever used by Lana.
1958. Superman #123. A trial balloon story. Jimmy Olsen uses magic to wish a "Super-Girl" into existence, but it doesn't work out so well and he finally wishes her back into oblivion (apparently to "save her life" after potentially lethal exposure to Kryptonite), and she's been gone ever since. She was a blond and wore a blue and red costume, modeled on Superman's of course, and quite similar to one of the variations that Supergirl ended up wearing later. Favorable response from their readers persuades DC it's worth the trouble to create a more permanent character along similar lines, to be officially added to Superman's supporting cast as a cute young female version of himself.
(As far as I know, that exact name, "Super-Girl" with a hyphen in the middle, has only been used for an "in continuity" character on that single occasion in 1958.)
1959. Action Comics #252. The first story about the character who has became fondly remembered by such nicknames as "The First Supergirl," "The Original Supergirl," "The Silver Age Supergirl," "the Classic Supergirl," "The Real Supergirl," "The Real Kara Zor-El," and so on and so forth. (Some of those nicknames for her totally overlook the brief career of Lucy Regent, but Lucy was probably on Earth-2 instead of Earth-1 anyway.)
Kara Zor-El is rocketed to Earth from Argo City (a Kryptonian city that survived the explosion of the planet but has now perished anyway). When Superman first meets her, she is already wearing a blue-and-red costume modeled on his own, except that instead of blue shirt and blue pants with red shorts over the pants, she basically wears a blue dress. Over the next 26 years or so, she wil change her exact look from time to time, but always maintaining a strong resemblance to Superman's traditional outfit.
She wants to call herself Supergirl. She is a blue-eyed blond; Superman's cute little cousin he never knew he had. (She is the daughter of Zor-El, who was the brother of Superman's daddy Jor-El, you see.) Superman ends up helping her create a secret identity as Linda Lee, a brown-haired girl (when wearing a wig) who was recently orphaned in a natural disaster, and checks her into an orphanage. In a later story, her "secret identity" name changes to Linda Lee Danvers after she is adopted by Mr. and Mrs. Danvers.
Note: It appears that various Pre-Crisis stories, sometimes via dialogue spoken "in continuity" and sometimes in events that were depicted in certain "Imaginary Stories" of the Silver Age, nailed down the idea that Superman fully expected that someday Supergirl would naturally change her alias to Superwoman when she felt the time was right, just as he had previously made the transition from Superboy to Superman at his own pace. This change never actually happened "in continuity," however - it was merely anticipated.
1962. Action Comics #289. Superman meets and falls in love with Luma Lynai, the Superwoman of the planet Staryl. But it all falls apart. You see, Superman had said something to his precocious cousin Kara about how if he ever married, he would like it be to someone much like her, although of course Kal-El and Kara could never marry because Kryptonian Law forbade matings between first cousins (genetically speaking, a very sensible policy, I might add, and one that I believe is also reflected in the laws of at least some parts of the United States, and probably in various other places around the world).
Kara was determined to play matchmaker, however, and took the part about how he'd like to someday marry someone like herself way too literally (I suspect Superman was talking about psychological characteristics rather than physical ones) and decided this was a good time to use the Supercomputer in the Fortress of Solitude to somehow search the rest of the universe for qualified candidates to become her cousin's spouse. Judging by results, she must have input roughly these parameters for the search: "Humanoid female, my skin, my hair, my eyes, my facial features, my superpowers or very similar ones, superheroic activities, but several years older than I am, old enough to get married." (Modest, wasn't she? Only a near-copy of herself, except with a different genetic background and already a full-grown woman, could possibly be worthy of the great honor of marrying Kara's cousin! Sigmund Freud would have a field day with this scenario!)
So the computer found what Supergirl described as a "Superwoman duplicate of me," and Superman dutifully took his cousin's advice and flew off to meet Luma Lynai (who even wore an S-emblem, though not identical to his, on her chest and on her cape by a wild coincidence). They got along very well and flew back to Earth to get married - except that it turned out to their mutual horror that yellow solar radiation was poisonous to Luma, whose own metabolism was super-powered because of the orange sun of Staryl. Superman actually offered to emigrate from Earth to Staryl so they could be together, but Luma insisted Earth needed him more than she did, and that was the end of another fine romance.
As far as I can tell, Luma never actually was featured in another story, although she was subsequently referred to in flashbacks and such on a few occasions, so this was for all practical purposes her Final Appearance as well as her First.
1964. Justice League of America #29. We meet the Earth-3 Superwoman, blue eyes, black hair, who is presented to us as the evil analog of Wonder Woman. No relation to any version of Superman; she simply is superstrong and happens to use the adjective "Super" in her name.
1975. All-Star Comics #58. Power Girl first appears and, I gather, soon afterward becomes a member of the JSA on Earth-2. Her Kryptonian name is Kara Zor-L (which is pronounced exactly the same as Kara Zor-El, as near as I can tell). As far as the basic origin story is concerned, she is essentially the Earth-2 equivalent of Supergirl, a first cousin of the Superman of her timeline who was rocketed to Earth many years after he was, thus giving us a bizarre situation where the "older generation" parallel world that contains the Golden Age heroes is suddenly doing its own "knockoff" of a character first introduced on the "younger generation" parallel world of Earth-1, instead of the other way around.
Power Girl is a blue-eyed blond, but differs in some ways from Supergirl as she had been presented up until that time. She may be older and definitely shows a more voluptuous figure (and/or is more willing to dress in ways that emphasize whatever she's got.) She is also said to have a more aggressive, even defiant, attitude. Her costume does not even resemble Superman's - mostly white, with blue cape and boots. By an astonishing coincidence, her costume bears a marked similarity to that of Luma Lynai, above, except that the things that were green in Luma's costume have been changed to blue.
There is a rumor that writer Gerry Conway originally tried to get the Power Girl character concept approved by the DC editorial staff as the daughter of the Golden Age, Earth-2 versions of Superman and Lois Lane . . . but the idea was shot down. Possibly someone felt that having two very similar characters on parallel worlds, one Superman's daughter and one the other Superman's first cousin, would just get too darn confusing for the fans?
According to the Wikipedia entry, the original artist to draw her, Wally Wood, started her out with large breasts and intended to see how far he could push it. He allegedly planned to keep increasing her bra size a bit more in each consecutive issue to see how exaggerated things could get before someone on DC's editorial staff finally caught on and told him to stop. It appears that Wally moved on to other things after a mere eight issues, however, so I guess we'll never know just long he could have gotten away with it. Be that as it may, ever since then, Power Girl (whatever her origin story) has been notorious among fans for her large breasts, even when compared to various other superheroines who run around in skintight costumes.
1982. Superman Family #215-216. The Kara Zor-El Supergirl has a two-part teamup with Louise-L, a Supergirl of the far future (around the year A.D. 502,000). When visiting Louise-L's era, Kara is much weaker because the sun has faded quite a bit to an orange shade. On the other hand, when visiting our era, Louise-L finds her powers greatly magnified because of the much stronger and yellower sunlight we enjoy these days. Louise-L refuses to explain whether or not she is descended from Kara Zor-El, and at the end of the story she mindwipes Kara to remove any knowledge of Louise-L and the future she inhabits. As far as I know, the Louise-L Supergirl never made any further "in continuity" appearances, Pre- or Post-Crisis.
1983. DC Comics Presents Annual #2. Kristin Wells, previously a character in a printed novel about Superman (Miracle Monday by Elliot S! Maggin, who also wrote this story), travels back in time to meet Clark Kent again. She is a 29th Century historian in search of the last great secret identity of the 20th Century superheroes, all the others having long since been solved and entered into the textbooks of her era. There was a female crimefighter called Superwoman who was scheduled to make her grand debut right around "now" according to those same textbooks . . . Maggin played a few mind games with us, planting hints that the prototype Superwoman costume might belong to Lois Lane or Linda Danvers, but surprise surprise, it turned out it was actually Kristin Wells who ended up wearing that costume, using futuristic technology to simulate various superhuman powers. Those included: flight, superstrength, time travel, the ability to create space/time warps that amounted to being able to teleport great distances, and also intangibility.
1985. Crisis on Infinite Earths occurs as a 12-part series with crossovers into other titles, and the culling begins.
Crisis on Infinite Earths #1. The Superwoman of Earth-3 dies onstage. So does her entire world of Earth-3, which is eventually erased from the Post-Crisis continuity.
Crisis on Infinite Earths #7. The Supergirl of Earth-1 dies onstage and later gets erased from continuity.
In fact, all previous stories centered around "Superman Family" characters get erased from continuity in the Post-Crisis Era, including various characters mentioned above (but not Power Girl, as it turns out. She escapes oblivion by being simply retconned out of the Superman Family entirely. We'll get to her in a minute).
1985. DC Comics Presents Annual #4. Elliot S! Maggin wraps up the saga of the Kristin Wells Superwoman. She travels back to the 20th Century, somehow gets amnesia for awhile, and spends several years as a superhero in the late 20th Century having the distinguished career that she had "already" studied as a historian in the 29th Century, then finally returns to her native era where her boyfriend has been faithfully waiting for her (it was some years from his point of view, as well). I believe this was meant to be her Final Appearance and official retirement from the whole costumed crimefighter bit in a story that was clearly in Pre-Crisis continuity.
1985.Legion of Super-Heroes #14 (second series). While the Crisis limited series is still being published, writer Paul Levitz and penciller Steve Lightle introduce a "new" character who keeps her entire body covered with her red and white costume, except for a mane of golden hair, and calls herself "Sensor Girl." For several issues her precise powers and background remain a mystery to all but one of her fellow Legionnaires (and the readers), although occasional hints are dropped to the effect that she might be an old, familiar face underneath that white facemask she wears. For instance, one or two things she says suggest that she already knows a fair amount about the other Legionnaires, as if she might have worked with some of them before (which the Pre-Crisis Supergirl had done several times). Veteran Legionnaire Brainiac-5 (the "good" Brainiac) had long had a hopeless crush on the Pre-Crisis Supergirl, and in these stories written by Paul Levitz, Brainy still remembered her vividly and hoped desperately that this masked "Sensor Girl" character would turn out to be her.
Sensor Girl gets mentioned here because it is alleged that revealing her to be Kara Zor-El, the late, lamented Supergirl, possibly amnesiac and with her powers now pretty much limited to super-senses rather than the whole package of strength, speed, invulnerability, etc., was exactly what Paul Levitz originally hoped to build up to, but DC wouldn't let him get away with it and he had to reveal Sensor Girl as someone else, finally. (Apparently it took a little time for the Post-Crisis policy of "There are no surviving Kryptonians but Superman, and his cousin Supergirl never existed in the first place and never will!" to be firmly established, clearly explained to everyone at DC, and aggressively enforced.)
1987. Secret Origins #11. Power Girl's "new and improved" Post-Crisis origin story is paraded before us to explain why she still exists if if the policy is that the Rebooted Superman has no living Kryptonian relatives, period. Her name is still Kara, and her "secret identity" in the modern USA is "Karen Starr," and she still has similar powers to those of Kal-El's. But the similarity is now pure coincidence; there's no genetic relationship at all. Power Girl now just happens to be the granddaughter of the great wizard Arion of Atlantis (who, about 45,000 years ago, placed her in suspended animation and then found a way to send her forward through time to the modern era for some reason), and his magic has endowed his descendant a wide range of superpowers which just happen to bear an uncanny resemblance to those of Superman, with the result that we are now told that prior to the "present day" there was a time when she once mistakenly believed herself to be a long-lost Kryptonian relative of Superman's, but by now she knows better.
1988. Superman #16 (second series). The Post-Crisis Superman meets a blue-eyed blond in a Supergirl costume "for the first time." This new Post-Crisis "Supergirl" eventually turns out to be Matrix (no relation to the movie trilogy starring Keanu Reaves), an artificial lifeform created by the brilliant Alexander Luthor of a parallel world (er, I mean of a pocket universe, since DC had officially gotten rid of "parallel worlds" in Crisis). Her powers include flight, invisibility, psychokinetic blasts, super-strength, and shapeshifting. Her appearance as a gorgeous, full-figured blue-eyed blond in a Supergirl costume is just one possible shape she can take, rather than being her "natural" appearance. This Supergirl ends up living with Ma and Pa Kent on the farm in Kansas for awhile, and they sometimes call her "Mae" as a more normal-sounding nickname derived from "Matrix." Somewhere along the line Superman starts calling her his adopted sister.
(In contrast, the Superboy who was created in a test tube when Superman was "dead" only got to be taken into the family as Clark's adopted cousin.)
1989. Christmas with the Superheroes #2. In a story written by the very talented Alan Brennert, Boston Brand (Deadman), the professional peeping tom and mind-controller who (for some odd reason) is normally considered a hero rather than a villain, is trying to "celebrate" Christmas by taking over other people's bodies - spending their money on gifts for his old friends, etc. He finally feels ashamed of himself and vacates the body he had taken over in order to enjoy the sensation of attending a family-and-friends Christmas dinner. While he's getting all angst-ridden about his lot in life (or in death, or in afterlife, or whatever the correct word is for his condition), a beautiful blond woman, who can see and hear and touch his ghostly form, and thus is almost certainly some sort of ghost herself, suddenly pops up with a few words of patient counsel and good humor, saying in part: "We don't do it for the glory. We don't do it for the recognition. We do it because it needs to be done. Because, if we don't, no one else will. And we do it even if no one knows what we've done. Even if no one knows we exist. Even if no one remembers we ever existed."
When he asks her name, she says as she walks away: "My name is Kara. Though I doubt that'll mean anything to you."
(She was right. It didn't. But then, Brennert wasn't just talking to Boston Brand through Kara's dialogue; he was trying to give a bit of comfort to diehard fans of Kara Zor-El with this final tribute to the nobility of her character.)
Since the Sensor Girl thing fell through, we could argue that this was the first Post-Crisis Appearance of the Pre-Crisis Supergirl, although as far as I know there's never been any sort of follow-up to that story. Presumably, the writer only got away with it because Kara seemed to be in much the same position that Boston was - a lonely, insubstantial ghost whom no one else could see or hear or knew anything about.
1992.Justice League Quarterly #8. First appearance of the Post-Crisis Retconned Version of the old Earth-3 Superwoman. Hal Jordan looks at some faces on a screen and explains that five natives of the Antimatter Universe inhabited by the Weaponeers of Qward had somehow managed to turn themselves into super-powered near-duplicates of prominent heroes of the DCU, way back in the early days of the League. These baddies were, in fact, more powerful than the originals - so that it took the combined efforts of the JLA and the JSA to finally subdue them. (This is a clear effort to try to save some of the old "Crisis on Earth-3" storyline from the Silver Age that first introduced the evil characters Superwoman, Ultraman, Power Ring, Owlman, and Johnny Quick.)
(As near as I can tell, prior to this story, DC fans had spent about seven years believing that the obliteration of Earth-3 and its denizens in the opening pages of Crisis on Infinite Earths meant that the Crime Syndicate of America had never existed in any way, shape, or form in Post-Crisis continuity. That was certainly my own impression for many years, until I heard about this retcon.)
1995. Superman Versus Aliens . Superman meets a girl named Kara who speaks Kryptonian and hails from a town called Argo City in this miniseries that is a crossover between DC and Dark Horse. In keeping with DC's firm Post-Crisis policy that Superman is the Only Surviving Kryptonian, writer Dan Jurgens makes this particular teenage Kara a native of a culture from the planet Odiline, whose humanoid inhabitants of many generations earlier had been so overwhelmed by what they heard from a traveling interstellar cleric about the glories of Krypton that they apparently tossed their own cultural background out the window and started using the Kryptonian language and culture for everything they did. In the environment in which Superman meets Kara, she has no superpowers. Since she does not actually have a Kryptonian metabolism, what powers she might develop after exposure to the yellow sunlight here on Planet Earth remains an open question. She and Superman fight the evil Aliens together, and at some point Superman tells her he's come to think of her as "family."
At the end of the story, he thinks she's dead, but the reader is told she got away in an escape pod, thereby leaving the door wide open for sequels - in theory. This story was written by Dan Jurgens, who then took the trouble to insert dialogue referring to this storyline in Superman #117 (second series), apparently believing that this would help slip the crossover story "into continuity" since it had now
been referenced in one of Superman's regular ongoing titles. In addition, http://www.supermanhomepage.com/other/kryptonian-cybernet/kc23.txt reports that Jurgens dropped some hints about his plans for follow-up in an AOL chat in 1996:
1996. Adventures of Superman #638. Dana Dearden, having gained impressive magical powers and fashioned a costume for herself (basically a green bodysuit with bits of purple here and there) presents herself as the new Superwoman. Apparently she was a Superman stalker in her heart. She had been obsessively convinced that once she had the powers to make herself a worthy mate for Superman, he would just naturally take her into his arms and marry her. Didn't work. The media ends up calling her Obsession, by which name she will be referred to on other occasions, but Superwoman was the name she had chosen for herself.
1996. Supergirl #1 (third regular series of that title; this series was written entirely by Peter David as it turned out). Linda Danvers - more or less - wakes up with memory problems and soon realizes that her present existence is the result of a recent merger of the minds and bodies of the Matrix Supergirl and the Post-Crisis Linda Danvers who was dead or dying from mortal injuries at the moment Matrix somehow merged with her in an effort to save her. The new human "half" of this Supergirl had the exact same name as the "secret identity" the Pre-Crisis Supergirl had used for many years, but that was just Peter David's attempt to throw a bone to fans of the Silver Age Supergirl; this Linda was a new and different character who had never appeared before and had no previous connection to Superman continuity. Eventually the hybrid being composed of these two became known as an "Earth-Born Angel" or "Earth Angel," lacking the previous Matrix Supergirl powers of general shapeshifting and invisibilty, but still retaining the ability to switch back and forth from the Matrix form to the Linda form, and gaining some strange new powers over time.
The pre-merger Linda Danvers was shorter and more slender than the form that the Matrix Supergirl normally used, and had brown hair and brown eyes. The merged Supergirl, when in her Linda form, still looks like Linda except she has blue eyes instead of brown ones. (A doctor who is unaware of the odd background here gives post-merger "Linda" a physical and says she's fine except for the odd change in eye color, which could have been caused by extreme stress. I hadn't even known that was possible.)
1998. Supergirl #1,000,000. In a one-shot story written by Peter David, we meet a brown-haired little girl called R'E'L who lives 1,000,000 months in the future. I am told that she was immensely powerful but seemed not very bright; in fact utterly clueless as to how to use her powers responsibly. More of a horror than a hero, in other words. I am told that at the time, this girl never had face-to-face encounters with any of the "modern era" superheroes of the DCU during the DC 1,000,0000 event. But I mention her here because several of her contemporaries were having face-to-face encounters with "modern era" heroes at "the same time" which sort of establishes them "in continuity," and by extension, the same could be said of her. Stay tuned for a second sighting of her, below, that was more squarely "in continuity" or seemed that way at the time.
1999. JLA: Earth-2, a graphic novel written by Grant Morrison, introduces us to his "reverse" Earth-2, which despite the name is basically a reboot of the nasty place we called Earth-3 in the Pre-Crisis DC Multiverse. It is actually an evil version of Earth in an Anti-Matter Universe, however - but not, so far as I can tell, the same universe inhabited by the Qwardians. Morrison's reboot includes introducing (or reintroducing) the concept of an evil Superwoman who is Amazonian in heritage rather than Kryptonian or Qwardian. To play mindgames with us, however, this one uses the name of "Lois Lane" as her secret identity. She has continued to encounter Superman and other heroes of the Mainstream Earth of the DCU since that time.
Note: To the best of my knowledge, Morrison's "reboot" of the Crime Syndicate of America in this graphic novel has retconned away the previous Post-Crisis Retcon about the old CSA as coming from the Antimatter Dimension of Qward, inasmuch as nobody in "JLA-Earth-2" says, "Gee, I wonder if these people called Ultraman, Superwoman, Power Ring, Johnny Quick, and Owlman are any connection to the super-powered quintet with the same codenames whom we fought many and many a year ago in the early days of the JLA?"
2000. Adventures of Superman #574. Obsession, aka Superwoman, aka Dana Dearden, dies in battle, having thrown herself into harm's way to protect Superman.
2000. Young Justice #21. At the end of the issue, a rocket ship lands in the modern day and R'E'L, the future Supergirl from the 1,000,000 event emerges. The only person handy to greet her is Klarion the Witch Boy, who had just recently stirred up an awful lot of trouble in the "Sins of Youth" Fifth Week Event.
What did the two of them do after that? We never found out. Nonetheless, taken at face value, the final page of that issue means that this future Supergirl, R'E'L, has been forcibly inserted into the "modern continuity," living "here and now on Planet Earth," of the DCU. Although I hear rumors that Grant Morrison is basically rebooting Klarion the Witch Boy as part of his "Seven Soldiers of Victory" miniseries this year and I hear that Morrison is basically taking the position that "Sins of Youth" never happened. Period. (Which is probably a good idea on his part!)
2000. Supergirl #50. The "Earth Angel" Supergirl (the result of the Linda/Matrix merger) gets split into two different people again, both of them Supergirls in one way or another. The one who gets the lion's share of time onstage for the next two years or so is the Linda Danvers Supergirl, who now has superpowers of her own, but much weaker than they were during her Merged-with-Matrix phase. Linda does not have any inherent shapechanging abilities, however, and so she has to start wearing a blond wig over her brown hair to conceal her identity.Meanwhile, the Matrix Supergirl (or Earth Angel Supergirl, or whatever the heck she's called) is being held prisoner in the Garden of Eden by Lilith.
2002. Supergirl #74. The Matrix Supergirl merges with someone called Twilight, and the resulting combo becomes an Angel of Fire. The Angel of Fire is somehow able to beef up Supergirl Linda's powers to approximately where they were at the beginning of this series, six years earlier. Linda Danvers intends to carry on as the current Supergirl, while I'm not sure if the "Angel of Fire" has ever popped up again anywhere in continuity. This may well have been the Final Appearance of the Matrix Supergirl (in her new role as 1/2 of the new Angel of Fire character).
2002. Supergirl #75. Linda Danvers, aka Supergirl, meets Kara Zor-El, aka Supergirl, an incredibly cute, wholesome, and sensitive blue-eyed blond girl making her Very First Appearance in the Post-Crisis Continuity (think: "Pollyanna with Superman's powers"). This Kara is basically from an alternate timeline that closely corresponds to the happy-ending, full-of-good-cheer, hardly-anybody-ever-dies-a-violent-death world depicted in Superman comics of the Silver Age. However, since this version of Kara then spent several issues in the mainstream DCU, I figure that makes her "in continuity" in the same way that Matrix Supergirl became "in continuity" despite having been created in a pocket universe.
By the end of a six-part story arc, Kara Zor-El has been bounced back to her native universe and will presumably die in Crisis, and Linda Danvers, after experiences which I don't propose to spoil for you entirely if you haven't read the TPB collection Supergirl: Many Happy Returns, finally abandons the Supergirl role and basically vanishes into comic book limbo.
2003. Superman: The 10-Cent Adventure. Cir-El, aka Supergirl, pops up in the modern Superman continuity. Although she is a mystery at first, she eventually claims to be the future daughter of Clark Kent and Lois Lane, come back from the future. Cir-El has black hair and wears a dark costume with a different style of S-insignia on it. She also has an alternate persona: Mia, a homeless woman, if I've got this right.
2003. Peter David's creator-owned Fallen Angel title starts coming out, featuring a female protagonist whom many readers promptly suspect to be his take on the further adventures of Linda Danvers following her retirement from the Supergirl role. It helps that she is called "Lee," which could be a reference to how the original Supergirl was Linda Lee (later Linda Lee Danvers) and/or to how the Post-Crisis Linda came from Leesburg.
Note: I am told that it has just recently become crystal-clear that "Lee" in Fallen Angel is not Linda Danvers after all. Which came as no great surprise, really, given that Peter David claimed to own Fallen Angel, but definitely did not own any of the characters he had used in his run on the "Supergirl" title. Ever since I first heard about this, it seemed to me that legally, David could never "reveal" that Lee was in fact Linda Danvers. The best he could do was drop vague hints and refuse to squarely disprove it so that readers could believe whatever they wanted to believe. But it appears that eventually he did choose to squarely disprove it, for whatever reasons.
2004. Superman #200 (second series.) The Cir-El Supergirl dies, having previously, in other issues, a) passed a DNA test to prove she is Superman's daughter, and then b) been revealed to not be any relation to Superman at all. (Don't go trusting those slipshod DCU DNA tests anytime soon! Superboy has gone through similar nonsense over the years!)
2004. Superman/Batman #7. Written by Jeph Loeb. Superman and Batman meet Kara Zor-El. A blue-eyed blond teenage girl who allegedly has been in suspended animation for many years while a spaceship was carrying her to Earth from Krypton. She was (I believe she eventually says in a later issue, in fluent Kryptonian, and later in English after she masters it) originally intended to arrive simultaneously with her younger cousin, baby Kal-El, and help raise him, but her ship got delayed for many years and now Superman is thirty-something while she's probably less than half his age. By the time the story arc is over, she is wearing a bare-midriff Supergirl costume. (Which is, at the very least, a huge improvement over what she was wearing in the early scenes of the story arc: Nothing!)
At any rate, upon first meeting her, Superman does not immediately say, "Ah, then you must be this timeline's equivalent of the Kara Zor-El whom my good friend, the Linda Danvers Supergirl, recently encountered. She told me all about that." In fact, neither Superman nor Batman confuse the issue by mentioning any other "Kara" and/or "Supergirl" person they have ever seen or heard of. They react as if the idea of a girl named Kara, and/or a girl with powers very similar to Superman's, is a Strange New Experience for everyone.
This particular Kara is supposed to be the star of a new monthly title, starting in the very near future, written by Jeph Loeb. How long will it last? Is she really Superman's cousin? What will become her distinctive personality traits? I have no idea, but for the moment, she is supposedly The Current Supergirl (until further notice!).
3. Short Lists of The Different Users of Each Relevant Name
Here's the funny thing - no matter how hard you try to explain it to them, there are still some people who get just a trifle confused about exactly which character you mean when you casually refer to "Supergirl" or "Superwoman" or "Power Girl" or "Superman's cute blond cousin." Isn't that peculiar? Don't they realize how hard DC works to make these things user-friendly for new readers?
In an effort to sort it all out for you, I offer these lists of who has used which names, more or less in chronological order.
Super-Girl
1. An imaginary character in one story, created out of thin air, then disintegrated and forgotten. The story would have automatically been wiped out by Crisis anyway. As far as I know, the name "Super-Girl" (with a hyphen) has never been recycled.
Supergirl
1. Lucy Regent, Queen of Borgonia (presumably erased from continuity)
2. Kara Zor-El of Earth-1 (killed in Crisis, and then erased from history to boot.)
3. Louise-L of half a million years in the future (presumably erased from continuity)
4. Matrix, an artificial lifeform created by Alexander Luthor in a pocket universe.
5. The Matrix/Linda Danvers merged entity (who no longer exists as a separate entity, having been redivided.)
6. R'E'L of one million months in the future, who traveled back to the modern era in Young Justice #21 and hasn't been heard from since.
7. The Linda Danvers Supergirl who had "reduced" powers after being split away from Matrix. (Still alive, but no longer calling herself Supergirl these days, and with her powers restored to a higher level.)
8. Arguably the Matrix/Twilight merged entity known as an Angel of Fire could still lay claim to the name Supergirl, although I don't know if she ever bothered to do so.
9. Kara Zor-El of an alternate timeline that I tentatively think of as "Earth-Silver Age." (Sent back home and presumably died or will die in Crisis, or her local version of Crisis, or whatever.)
10. Cir-El, who started out allegedly being the time-traveling daughter of Lois and Clark, but was actually a genetically modified fake. (Dead)
11. Kara Zor-El, the New Kid on the Block who has not yet received a great deal of character development.
Superwoman
1. Lois Lane on various occasions (those occasions were all erased by Crisis, although the rebooted Lois is still with us).
2. Luma Lynai of the planet Staryl (although I'm not absolutely clear on whether she normally called herself Superwoman in her daily activities, or if that was just the way Supergirl described her - at any rate, Crisis presumably erased her too).
3. The evil analog of Wonder Woman from Earth-3 (killed in Crisis)
4. Kristin Wells (presumably erased from history by Crisis - her appearances as Superwoman were definitely erased, but Kristin Wells the historian might "still" live in the 29th Century of the modern DCU for all I know!)
5. The evil artificially empowered near-duplicate of Wonder Woman from the Antimatter Universe of Qward, this new origin story being meant as a retcon to salvage the gist of some of the Pre-Crisis stories about the various members of the Crime Syndicate of America from Earth-3. This version of Superwoman had still died during the Crisis, evidently. (Presumably this one was retconned away by #7, below.)
6. Dana Dearden, also known as Obsession, a Superman stalker who was convinced they were meant to be happy couple. (Died.)
7. The evil analog of Wonder Woman and of Lois Lane, from the modern Antimatter Universe Earth-2.
Power Girl
1. Kara Zor-L, the cousin of the Golden Age Superman (Kal-L), from the Earth-2 universe in Pre-Crisis continuity
2. Kara, aka Karen Starr, the Post-Crisis version of the character, the granddaughter of Arion of Atlantis, who is allegedly more-or-less the "same" character who worked with the JSA from time to time in some Pre-Crisis stories.
And if we look for anybody Superman has ever met who used the first name Kara, we have:
Kara
1. Kara Zor-El of Earth-1, the Silver Age Supergirl (erased by Crisis).
2. Kara Zor-L of Earth-2, aka Karen Starr, the first Power Girl.
3. Kara, aka Karen Starr, the post-Crisis Power Girl (using that name whether or not, at any given time, she thinks she is a) Superman's cousin, b) Arion's granddaughter, or c) None of the above).
4. Kara, the mysterious ghost who appeared in a single Deadman story and might be some lingering echo of the officially-erased-from-continuity Kara Zor-El, lthough she never actually said so. (For all we know, she could also be the ghost of that nice German girl, Kara Hausenpfeffer of Earth-46038, whose name and homeworld I just invented to illustrate a point - one of the zillions of unnamed casualties of Crisis from when all those other parallel earths were getting the ax.)
5. Kara of Argo City, of the planet Odiline, the blond teenage girl who fought bravely alongside Superman in Superman Versus Aliens, whom Dan Jurgens insisted he was going to use again, but never did.
6. Kara Zor-El of the "Earth-Silver Age" alternate timeline, the girl in the Peter David "Many Happy Returns" story arc. (Bounced back to her native timeline and presumably will die/did die in Crisis.)
7. Kara Zor-El, the one who has just recently been inserted into modern DCU continuity, and what will become of her is anybody's guess.
So by my reckoning, we have:
1 Super-Girl
11 Supergirls
7 Superwomen
2 Power Girls (though you may feel that completely redoing the origin doesn't constitute a "new" character?)
7 Karas
With considerable overlap among those categories, of course.
(Here's my advice: The next time anyone tries to tell you that the purpose of killing off Supergirl in Crisis and retconning her out of existence to boot was to greatly simplify Superman's family tree and his general continuity in years to come, just laugh!)
2. The Timeline of First and Final Appearances
3. Short Lists of The Different Users of Each Relevant Name
1. Introduction: Why I Wrote This
In various online forums where I hang out for comic-book-related discussions, people keep asking perfectly reasonable questions such as:
“Who is the current Supergirl? How is she different from the last Supergirl? (And the one before that, and the one before that?)”
“Just how many Supergirls have there been in the comic books, anyway?”
“Why so many?”
“Are they all related to Superman?”
The problem is that there’s no simple “sound bite” of an answer that can honestly and accurately answer such questions in one minute or less, even if you actually have all relevant facts at the tip of your tongue (which I certainly didn't when I started writing this).
For instance, if you start trying to delve into these subjects in a way that is not just shallow and superficial but really meant to clear things up, then you’ve got to talk about the differences between Pre-Crisis and Post-Crisis continuity if you’re going to make a clean sweep in explaining just how many Supergirls there have ever been, and why the one who held the job for over a quarter-century is no longer with us.
And since Power Girl started out as a parallel-world analog of the Silver Age Supergirl about thirty years ago, shouldn’t she at least get an honorable mention in any in-depth discussion of The Many Supergirls even though she’s never claimed the name “Supergirl” in her life? What about the various females who have called themselves “Superwoman” instead of “Supergirl”? Mightn’t a fan who wants to know about the Supergirls appreciate having the Superwomen sorted out for him as well, at no extra charge? What about Kara of Argo City in the Superman Versus Aliens miniseries ten years ago, who never called herself “Supergirl” but was obviously designed to strongly remind us of the Pre-Crisis Supergirl who was also a Kara from Argo City, even if it was a different Argo City on a different planet?
You see how quickly such things can escalate? A couple of months ago I started typing out a piece explaining, from memory, what I thought I already knew about the various Supergirls, Superwomen, etc., Pre- and Post-Crisis. The early version was sadly incomplete because I knew I didn’t know everything, but it was only a rough draft. I had a vague idea that eventually I might end up with a more “comprehensive” discussion of the subject, and after I had written and posted it, in the future I could simply post a hyperlink to it whenever newcomers on my favorite comic book forums started asking such questions as I listed above.
Last week, I got involved in an online discussion that somehow prompted me to dig out the old material on my hard drive and start sprucing it up, researching the subject further, splicing in new material, and organizing things into a comprehensive timeline showing the sequence of First Appearances of each relevant character. In several cases, I mention Final Appearances as well. (In a couple of cases, the First and Final Appearances “in continuity” were one and the same!)
Who is a relevant character? I decided to do my best to cover any female character who has ever been connected with Superman continuity while doing one or more of the following things in at least one DC comic book story that was supposedly "in continuity" at the time it was published (even if it was later retconned away, explicitly or implicitly):
A) Calling herself Supergirl
B) Calling herself Super-Girl
C) Calling herself Superwoman
D) Calling herself Power Girl
E) Calling herself Kara
Obviously there are some characters who fall into more than one of those categories. And out of the goodness of my heart, I've even thrown in a couple of characters who didn't fit any of the above categories, but were strongly suspected by the readers to be mysterious versions of one "Supergirl" character or another. You'll see what I mean as we go along.
(I have no intention of going into the details of any variation of "Supergirl" or any similar character who has only presented to us in movies or television shows. Sticking to "comic book continuity" characters is enough for now!)
I interpreted “First Appearance” to suit my own purposes. If someone is supposed to have been the “same character” all along (both before and after Crisis, for instance), but got a huge retcon or reboot that replaced the old origin story with a radically different new one, then I usually mention the first mention of the new origin story as essentially being the First Appearance of a new version of a character. Likewise, my Timeline doesn’t mention the first appearance of reporter Lois Lane because she didn’t meet the criteria I gave above when she first appeared, but I do list two later comics as both being First Appearances in Continuity of the “Lois Lane as Superwoman” concept one way or another. That includes the story in which she first believed she had superpowers that justified her wearing a red and blue costume and calling herself Superwoman, and a later story in which for the first time she really had superpowers that justified her wearing a red and blue costume and calling herself Superwoman.
2. The Timeline of First and Final Appearances
CAVEAT LECTOR (Let the Reader Beware): This is only a first draft. I have done the best I could, but I feel certain I have not done it perfectly. Please speak up if you know of a relevant fact or character I completely overlooked, or if you spot a clear mistake in my quick description of a particular character or story. In many cases I am dependent upon online summaries of stories I have never read, and I am painfully aware that my efforts to paraphrase second-hand information leave plenty of room for error.
THE TIMELINE
1947. Superman #45. Lois Lane ends up believing she has gained powers comparable to Superman's by magic. (She hasn't. Superman was moving at super-speed to do her stunts and make it seem that way. Long story.) By the end of the story she has voluntarily relinquished the powers she thinks she has because they seem to be out of control. But during the story, she had indeed called herself Superwoman and worn an appropriate costume.
Note: There was a dream sequence story in 1943 in which Lois had dreamed she got a blood transfusion from the Man of Steel and became a Superwoman, but as a dream, that "Superwoman" appearance was basically "out of continuity." This story, on the other hand, was apparently the first "in continuity" story in which Lois or any other female character wore a costume and called herself Superwoman, powers or no powers. So I count this as the First Appearance in continuity of a Superwoman.
1949. Superboy #5. Superboy meets this really neat blond girl who calls herself Lucy Regent and is an incredibly skilled athlete. Although she has no powers, at one point she wears a costume modeled on his and calls herself Supergirl as part of a show the two of them put on together at a festival. Superboy is quite smitten by her, it seems, but unfortunately it turns out that she is actually Lucy, rightful Queen of Borgonia, and the story ends with Lucy staying in her native land to take up her duties as Queen after a villainous usurper has been defeated with Superboy's help. (Lucy was never been heard from again in any other story.)
1951. Action Comics #156. Lois Lane temporarily receives powers which prompt her to create a Superwoman costume for herself (again!). I am told that the costume she came up with was very similar to what was later used for Kara Zor-El as Supergirl. Lois even wore a blond wig to disguise her hair color - going for a secret identity, apparently, which she had not bothered with in her previous "Superwoman" adventure in the story I mentioned above. This was apparently the First Appearance of any costumed female calling herself Superwoman and wearing an appropriate costume "in continuity," and actually having superpowers to go with the costume.
I am told that Lois Lane and Lana Lang each got superpowers (always temporary!) in various other stories in the old days, but I'm not clear on how often the Superwoman name was explicitly used, and I have not heard that it was ever used by Lana.
1958. Superman #123. A trial balloon story. Jimmy Olsen uses magic to wish a "Super-Girl" into existence, but it doesn't work out so well and he finally wishes her back into oblivion (apparently to "save her life" after potentially lethal exposure to Kryptonite), and she's been gone ever since. She was a blond and wore a blue and red costume, modeled on Superman's of course, and quite similar to one of the variations that Supergirl ended up wearing later. Favorable response from their readers persuades DC it's worth the trouble to create a more permanent character along similar lines, to be officially added to Superman's supporting cast as a cute young female version of himself.
(As far as I know, that exact name, "Super-Girl" with a hyphen in the middle, has only been used for an "in continuity" character on that single occasion in 1958.)
1959. Action Comics #252. The first story about the character who has became fondly remembered by such nicknames as "The First Supergirl," "The Original Supergirl," "The Silver Age Supergirl," "the Classic Supergirl," "The Real Supergirl," "The Real Kara Zor-El," and so on and so forth. (Some of those nicknames for her totally overlook the brief career of Lucy Regent, but Lucy was probably on Earth-2 instead of Earth-1 anyway.)
Kara Zor-El is rocketed to Earth from Argo City (a Kryptonian city that survived the explosion of the planet but has now perished anyway). When Superman first meets her, she is already wearing a blue-and-red costume modeled on his own, except that instead of blue shirt and blue pants with red shorts over the pants, she basically wears a blue dress. Over the next 26 years or so, she wil change her exact look from time to time, but always maintaining a strong resemblance to Superman's traditional outfit.
She wants to call herself Supergirl. She is a blue-eyed blond; Superman's cute little cousin he never knew he had. (She is the daughter of Zor-El, who was the brother of Superman's daddy Jor-El, you see.) Superman ends up helping her create a secret identity as Linda Lee, a brown-haired girl (when wearing a wig) who was recently orphaned in a natural disaster, and checks her into an orphanage. In a later story, her "secret identity" name changes to Linda Lee Danvers after she is adopted by Mr. and Mrs. Danvers.
Note: It appears that various Pre-Crisis stories, sometimes via dialogue spoken "in continuity" and sometimes in events that were depicted in certain "Imaginary Stories" of the Silver Age, nailed down the idea that Superman fully expected that someday Supergirl would naturally change her alias to Superwoman when she felt the time was right, just as he had previously made the transition from Superboy to Superman at his own pace. This change never actually happened "in continuity," however - it was merely anticipated.
1962. Action Comics #289. Superman meets and falls in love with Luma Lynai, the Superwoman of the planet Staryl. But it all falls apart. You see, Superman had said something to his precocious cousin Kara about how if he ever married, he would like it be to someone much like her, although of course Kal-El and Kara could never marry because Kryptonian Law forbade matings between first cousins (genetically speaking, a very sensible policy, I might add, and one that I believe is also reflected in the laws of at least some parts of the United States, and probably in various other places around the world).
Kara was determined to play matchmaker, however, and took the part about how he'd like to someday marry someone like herself way too literally (I suspect Superman was talking about psychological characteristics rather than physical ones) and decided this was a good time to use the Supercomputer in the Fortress of Solitude to somehow search the rest of the universe for qualified candidates to become her cousin's spouse. Judging by results, she must have input roughly these parameters for the search: "Humanoid female, my skin, my hair, my eyes, my facial features, my superpowers or very similar ones, superheroic activities, but several years older than I am, old enough to get married." (Modest, wasn't she? Only a near-copy of herself, except with a different genetic background and already a full-grown woman, could possibly be worthy of the great honor of marrying Kara's cousin! Sigmund Freud would have a field day with this scenario!)
So the computer found what Supergirl described as a "Superwoman duplicate of me," and Superman dutifully took his cousin's advice and flew off to meet Luma Lynai (who even wore an S-emblem, though not identical to his, on her chest and on her cape by a wild coincidence). They got along very well and flew back to Earth to get married - except that it turned out to their mutual horror that yellow solar radiation was poisonous to Luma, whose own metabolism was super-powered because of the orange sun of Staryl. Superman actually offered to emigrate from Earth to Staryl so they could be together, but Luma insisted Earth needed him more than she did, and that was the end of another fine romance.
As far as I can tell, Luma never actually was featured in another story, although she was subsequently referred to in flashbacks and such on a few occasions, so this was for all practical purposes her Final Appearance as well as her First.
1964. Justice League of America #29. We meet the Earth-3 Superwoman, blue eyes, black hair, who is presented to us as the evil analog of Wonder Woman. No relation to any version of Superman; she simply is superstrong and happens to use the adjective "Super" in her name.
1975. All-Star Comics #58. Power Girl first appears and, I gather, soon afterward becomes a member of the JSA on Earth-2. Her Kryptonian name is Kara Zor-L (which is pronounced exactly the same as Kara Zor-El, as near as I can tell). As far as the basic origin story is concerned, she is essentially the Earth-2 equivalent of Supergirl, a first cousin of the Superman of her timeline who was rocketed to Earth many years after he was, thus giving us a bizarre situation where the "older generation" parallel world that contains the Golden Age heroes is suddenly doing its own "knockoff" of a character first introduced on the "younger generation" parallel world of Earth-1, instead of the other way around.
Power Girl is a blue-eyed blond, but differs in some ways from Supergirl as she had been presented up until that time. She may be older and definitely shows a more voluptuous figure (and/or is more willing to dress in ways that emphasize whatever she's got.) She is also said to have a more aggressive, even defiant, attitude. Her costume does not even resemble Superman's - mostly white, with blue cape and boots. By an astonishing coincidence, her costume bears a marked similarity to that of Luma Lynai, above, except that the things that were green in Luma's costume have been changed to blue.
There is a rumor that writer Gerry Conway originally tried to get the Power Girl character concept approved by the DC editorial staff as the daughter of the Golden Age, Earth-2 versions of Superman and Lois Lane . . . but the idea was shot down. Possibly someone felt that having two very similar characters on parallel worlds, one Superman's daughter and one the other Superman's first cousin, would just get too darn confusing for the fans?
According to the Wikipedia entry, the original artist to draw her, Wally Wood, started her out with large breasts and intended to see how far he could push it. He allegedly planned to keep increasing her bra size a bit more in each consecutive issue to see how exaggerated things could get before someone on DC's editorial staff finally caught on and told him to stop. It appears that Wally moved on to other things after a mere eight issues, however, so I guess we'll never know just long he could have gotten away with it. Be that as it may, ever since then, Power Girl (whatever her origin story) has been notorious among fans for her large breasts, even when compared to various other superheroines who run around in skintight costumes.
1982. Superman Family #215-216. The Kara Zor-El Supergirl has a two-part teamup with Louise-L, a Supergirl of the far future (around the year A.D. 502,000). When visiting Louise-L's era, Kara is much weaker because the sun has faded quite a bit to an orange shade. On the other hand, when visiting our era, Louise-L finds her powers greatly magnified because of the much stronger and yellower sunlight we enjoy these days. Louise-L refuses to explain whether or not she is descended from Kara Zor-El, and at the end of the story she mindwipes Kara to remove any knowledge of Louise-L and the future she inhabits. As far as I know, the Louise-L Supergirl never made any further "in continuity" appearances, Pre- or Post-Crisis.
1983. DC Comics Presents Annual #2. Kristin Wells, previously a character in a printed novel about Superman (Miracle Monday by Elliot S! Maggin, who also wrote this story), travels back in time to meet Clark Kent again. She is a 29th Century historian in search of the last great secret identity of the 20th Century superheroes, all the others having long since been solved and entered into the textbooks of her era. There was a female crimefighter called Superwoman who was scheduled to make her grand debut right around "now" according to those same textbooks . . . Maggin played a few mind games with us, planting hints that the prototype Superwoman costume might belong to Lois Lane or Linda Danvers, but surprise surprise, it turned out it was actually Kristin Wells who ended up wearing that costume, using futuristic technology to simulate various superhuman powers. Those included: flight, superstrength, time travel, the ability to create space/time warps that amounted to being able to teleport great distances, and also intangibility.
1985. Crisis on Infinite Earths occurs as a 12-part series with crossovers into other titles, and the culling begins.
Crisis on Infinite Earths #1. The Superwoman of Earth-3 dies onstage. So does her entire world of Earth-3, which is eventually erased from the Post-Crisis continuity.
Crisis on Infinite Earths #7. The Supergirl of Earth-1 dies onstage and later gets erased from continuity.
In fact, all previous stories centered around "Superman Family" characters get erased from continuity in the Post-Crisis Era, including various characters mentioned above (but not Power Girl, as it turns out. She escapes oblivion by being simply retconned out of the Superman Family entirely. We'll get to her in a minute).
1985. DC Comics Presents Annual #4. Elliot S! Maggin wraps up the saga of the Kristin Wells Superwoman. She travels back to the 20th Century, somehow gets amnesia for awhile, and spends several years as a superhero in the late 20th Century having the distinguished career that she had "already" studied as a historian in the 29th Century, then finally returns to her native era where her boyfriend has been faithfully waiting for her (it was some years from his point of view, as well). I believe this was meant to be her Final Appearance and official retirement from the whole costumed crimefighter bit in a story that was clearly in Pre-Crisis continuity.
1985.Legion of Super-Heroes #14 (second series). While the Crisis limited series is still being published, writer Paul Levitz and penciller Steve Lightle introduce a "new" character who keeps her entire body covered with her red and white costume, except for a mane of golden hair, and calls herself "Sensor Girl." For several issues her precise powers and background remain a mystery to all but one of her fellow Legionnaires (and the readers), although occasional hints are dropped to the effect that she might be an old, familiar face underneath that white facemask she wears. For instance, one or two things she says suggest that she already knows a fair amount about the other Legionnaires, as if she might have worked with some of them before (which the Pre-Crisis Supergirl had done several times). Veteran Legionnaire Brainiac-5 (the "good" Brainiac) had long had a hopeless crush on the Pre-Crisis Supergirl, and in these stories written by Paul Levitz, Brainy still remembered her vividly and hoped desperately that this masked "Sensor Girl" character would turn out to be her.
Sensor Girl gets mentioned here because it is alleged that revealing her to be Kara Zor-El, the late, lamented Supergirl, possibly amnesiac and with her powers now pretty much limited to super-senses rather than the whole package of strength, speed, invulnerability, etc., was exactly what Paul Levitz originally hoped to build up to, but DC wouldn't let him get away with it and he had to reveal Sensor Girl as someone else, finally. (Apparently it took a little time for the Post-Crisis policy of "There are no surviving Kryptonians but Superman, and his cousin Supergirl never existed in the first place and never will!" to be firmly established, clearly explained to everyone at DC, and aggressively enforced.)
1987. Secret Origins #11. Power Girl's "new and improved" Post-Crisis origin story is paraded before us to explain why she still exists if if the policy is that the Rebooted Superman has no living Kryptonian relatives, period. Her name is still Kara, and her "secret identity" in the modern USA is "Karen Starr," and she still has similar powers to those of Kal-El's. But the similarity is now pure coincidence; there's no genetic relationship at all. Power Girl now just happens to be the granddaughter of the great wizard Arion of Atlantis (who, about 45,000 years ago, placed her in suspended animation and then found a way to send her forward through time to the modern era for some reason), and his magic has endowed his descendant a wide range of superpowers which just happen to bear an uncanny resemblance to those of Superman, with the result that we are now told that prior to the "present day" there was a time when she once mistakenly believed herself to be a long-lost Kryptonian relative of Superman's, but by now she knows better.
1988. Superman #16 (second series). The Post-Crisis Superman meets a blue-eyed blond in a Supergirl costume "for the first time." This new Post-Crisis "Supergirl" eventually turns out to be Matrix (no relation to the movie trilogy starring Keanu Reaves), an artificial lifeform created by the brilliant Alexander Luthor of a parallel world (er, I mean of a pocket universe, since DC had officially gotten rid of "parallel worlds" in Crisis). Her powers include flight, invisibility, psychokinetic blasts, super-strength, and shapeshifting. Her appearance as a gorgeous, full-figured blue-eyed blond in a Supergirl costume is just one possible shape she can take, rather than being her "natural" appearance. This Supergirl ends up living with Ma and Pa Kent on the farm in Kansas for awhile, and they sometimes call her "Mae" as a more normal-sounding nickname derived from "Matrix." Somewhere along the line Superman starts calling her his adopted sister.
(In contrast, the Superboy who was created in a test tube when Superman was "dead" only got to be taken into the family as Clark's adopted cousin.)
1989. Christmas with the Superheroes #2. In a story written by the very talented Alan Brennert, Boston Brand (Deadman), the professional peeping tom and mind-controller who (for some odd reason) is normally considered a hero rather than a villain, is trying to "celebrate" Christmas by taking over other people's bodies - spending their money on gifts for his old friends, etc. He finally feels ashamed of himself and vacates the body he had taken over in order to enjoy the sensation of attending a family-and-friends Christmas dinner. While he's getting all angst-ridden about his lot in life (or in death, or in afterlife, or whatever the correct word is for his condition), a beautiful blond woman, who can see and hear and touch his ghostly form, and thus is almost certainly some sort of ghost herself, suddenly pops up with a few words of patient counsel and good humor, saying in part: "We don't do it for the glory. We don't do it for the recognition. We do it because it needs to be done. Because, if we don't, no one else will. And we do it even if no one knows what we've done. Even if no one knows we exist. Even if no one remembers we ever existed."
When he asks her name, she says as she walks away: "My name is Kara. Though I doubt that'll mean anything to you."
(She was right. It didn't. But then, Brennert wasn't just talking to Boston Brand through Kara's dialogue; he was trying to give a bit of comfort to diehard fans of Kara Zor-El with this final tribute to the nobility of her character.)
Since the Sensor Girl thing fell through, we could argue that this was the first Post-Crisis Appearance of the Pre-Crisis Supergirl, although as far as I know there's never been any sort of follow-up to that story. Presumably, the writer only got away with it because Kara seemed to be in much the same position that Boston was - a lonely, insubstantial ghost whom no one else could see or hear or knew anything about.
1992.Justice League Quarterly #8. First appearance of the Post-Crisis Retconned Version of the old Earth-3 Superwoman. Hal Jordan looks at some faces on a screen and explains that five natives of the Antimatter Universe inhabited by the Weaponeers of Qward had somehow managed to turn themselves into super-powered near-duplicates of prominent heroes of the DCU, way back in the early days of the League. These baddies were, in fact, more powerful than the originals - so that it took the combined efforts of the JLA and the JSA to finally subdue them. (This is a clear effort to try to save some of the old "Crisis on Earth-3" storyline from the Silver Age that first introduced the evil characters Superwoman, Ultraman, Power Ring, Owlman, and Johnny Quick.)
(As near as I can tell, prior to this story, DC fans had spent about seven years believing that the obliteration of Earth-3 and its denizens in the opening pages of Crisis on Infinite Earths meant that the Crime Syndicate of America had never existed in any way, shape, or form in Post-Crisis continuity. That was certainly my own impression for many years, until I heard about this retcon.)
1995. Superman Versus Aliens . Superman meets a girl named Kara who speaks Kryptonian and hails from a town called Argo City in this miniseries that is a crossover between DC and Dark Horse. In keeping with DC's firm Post-Crisis policy that Superman is the Only Surviving Kryptonian, writer Dan Jurgens makes this particular teenage Kara a native of a culture from the planet Odiline, whose humanoid inhabitants of many generations earlier had been so overwhelmed by what they heard from a traveling interstellar cleric about the glories of Krypton that they apparently tossed their own cultural background out the window and started using the Kryptonian language and culture for everything they did. In the environment in which Superman meets Kara, she has no superpowers. Since she does not actually have a Kryptonian metabolism, what powers she might develop after exposure to the yellow sunlight here on Planet Earth remains an open question. She and Superman fight the evil Aliens together, and at some point Superman tells her he's come to think of her as "family."
At the end of the story, he thinks she's dead, but the reader is told she got away in an escape pod, thereby leaving the door wide open for sequels - in theory. This story was written by Dan Jurgens, who then took the trouble to insert dialogue referring to this storyline in Superman #117 (second series), apparently believing that this would help slip the crossover story "into continuity" since it had now
been referenced in one of Superman's regular ongoing titles. In addition, http://www.supermanhomepage.com/other/kryptonian-cybernet/kc23.txt reports that Jurgens dropped some hints about his plans for follow-up in an AOL chat in 1996:
I am willing to take it on faith that Jurgens did, in fact, have big plans for the Kara he had created as an "almost-Kryptonian" whom Superman had come to feel a family fondness for despite the trifling detail that they were from different species. But it's obvious that for one reason or another, those plans never materialized, and at this point, a decade after that miniseries, it seems unlikely (but not impossible!) that they ever will.Second, he hinted at some plans on continuing the tale begun in SUPERMAN VERSUS ALIENS! Dark Horse Comics has asked him for a sequel to the wildly popular mini-series, but he did not indicate whether or not it would happen. However, he did reiterate the fact that SUPERMAN VS ALIENS took place inside current Superman continuity, and the story *will* have repercussions on the Superman titles in the future. In fact, he specifically mentioned that he has very special plans for Kara, the teenage girl introduced in the series!
1996. Adventures of Superman #638. Dana Dearden, having gained impressive magical powers and fashioned a costume for herself (basically a green bodysuit with bits of purple here and there) presents herself as the new Superwoman. Apparently she was a Superman stalker in her heart. She had been obsessively convinced that once she had the powers to make herself a worthy mate for Superman, he would just naturally take her into his arms and marry her. Didn't work. The media ends up calling her Obsession, by which name she will be referred to on other occasions, but Superwoman was the name she had chosen for herself.
1996. Supergirl #1 (third regular series of that title; this series was written entirely by Peter David as it turned out). Linda Danvers - more or less - wakes up with memory problems and soon realizes that her present existence is the result of a recent merger of the minds and bodies of the Matrix Supergirl and the Post-Crisis Linda Danvers who was dead or dying from mortal injuries at the moment Matrix somehow merged with her in an effort to save her. The new human "half" of this Supergirl had the exact same name as the "secret identity" the Pre-Crisis Supergirl had used for many years, but that was just Peter David's attempt to throw a bone to fans of the Silver Age Supergirl; this Linda was a new and different character who had never appeared before and had no previous connection to Superman continuity. Eventually the hybrid being composed of these two became known as an "Earth-Born Angel" or "Earth Angel," lacking the previous Matrix Supergirl powers of general shapeshifting and invisibilty, but still retaining the ability to switch back and forth from the Matrix form to the Linda form, and gaining some strange new powers over time.
The pre-merger Linda Danvers was shorter and more slender than the form that the Matrix Supergirl normally used, and had brown hair and brown eyes. The merged Supergirl, when in her Linda form, still looks like Linda except she has blue eyes instead of brown ones. (A doctor who is unaware of the odd background here gives post-merger "Linda" a physical and says she's fine except for the odd change in eye color, which could have been caused by extreme stress. I hadn't even known that was possible.)
1998. Supergirl #1,000,000. In a one-shot story written by Peter David, we meet a brown-haired little girl called R'E'L who lives 1,000,000 months in the future. I am told that she was immensely powerful but seemed not very bright; in fact utterly clueless as to how to use her powers responsibly. More of a horror than a hero, in other words. I am told that at the time, this girl never had face-to-face encounters with any of the "modern era" superheroes of the DCU during the DC 1,000,0000 event. But I mention her here because several of her contemporaries were having face-to-face encounters with "modern era" heroes at "the same time" which sort of establishes them "in continuity," and by extension, the same could be said of her. Stay tuned for a second sighting of her, below, that was more squarely "in continuity" or seemed that way at the time.
1999. JLA: Earth-2, a graphic novel written by Grant Morrison, introduces us to his "reverse" Earth-2, which despite the name is basically a reboot of the nasty place we called Earth-3 in the Pre-Crisis DC Multiverse. It is actually an evil version of Earth in an Anti-Matter Universe, however - but not, so far as I can tell, the same universe inhabited by the Qwardians. Morrison's reboot includes introducing (or reintroducing) the concept of an evil Superwoman who is Amazonian in heritage rather than Kryptonian or Qwardian. To play mindgames with us, however, this one uses the name of "Lois Lane" as her secret identity. She has continued to encounter Superman and other heroes of the Mainstream Earth of the DCU since that time.
Note: To the best of my knowledge, Morrison's "reboot" of the Crime Syndicate of America in this graphic novel has retconned away the previous Post-Crisis Retcon about the old CSA as coming from the Antimatter Dimension of Qward, inasmuch as nobody in "JLA-Earth-2" says, "Gee, I wonder if these people called Ultraman, Superwoman, Power Ring, Johnny Quick, and Owlman are any connection to the super-powered quintet with the same codenames whom we fought many and many a year ago in the early days of the JLA?"
2000. Adventures of Superman #574. Obsession, aka Superwoman, aka Dana Dearden, dies in battle, having thrown herself into harm's way to protect Superman.
2000. Young Justice #21. At the end of the issue, a rocket ship lands in the modern day and R'E'L, the future Supergirl from the 1,000,000 event emerges. The only person handy to greet her is Klarion the Witch Boy, who had just recently stirred up an awful lot of trouble in the "Sins of Youth" Fifth Week Event.
What did the two of them do after that? We never found out. Nonetheless, taken at face value, the final page of that issue means that this future Supergirl, R'E'L, has been forcibly inserted into the "modern continuity," living "here and now on Planet Earth," of the DCU. Although I hear rumors that Grant Morrison is basically rebooting Klarion the Witch Boy as part of his "Seven Soldiers of Victory" miniseries this year and I hear that Morrison is basically taking the position that "Sins of Youth" never happened. Period. (Which is probably a good idea on his part!)
2000. Supergirl #50. The "Earth Angel" Supergirl (the result of the Linda/Matrix merger) gets split into two different people again, both of them Supergirls in one way or another. The one who gets the lion's share of time onstage for the next two years or so is the Linda Danvers Supergirl, who now has superpowers of her own, but much weaker than they were during her Merged-with-Matrix phase. Linda does not have any inherent shapechanging abilities, however, and so she has to start wearing a blond wig over her brown hair to conceal her identity.Meanwhile, the Matrix Supergirl (or Earth Angel Supergirl, or whatever the heck she's called) is being held prisoner in the Garden of Eden by Lilith.
2002. Supergirl #74. The Matrix Supergirl merges with someone called Twilight, and the resulting combo becomes an Angel of Fire. The Angel of Fire is somehow able to beef up Supergirl Linda's powers to approximately where they were at the beginning of this series, six years earlier. Linda Danvers intends to carry on as the current Supergirl, while I'm not sure if the "Angel of Fire" has ever popped up again anywhere in continuity. This may well have been the Final Appearance of the Matrix Supergirl (in her new role as 1/2 of the new Angel of Fire character).
2002. Supergirl #75. Linda Danvers, aka Supergirl, meets Kara Zor-El, aka Supergirl, an incredibly cute, wholesome, and sensitive blue-eyed blond girl making her Very First Appearance in the Post-Crisis Continuity (think: "Pollyanna with Superman's powers"). This Kara is basically from an alternate timeline that closely corresponds to the happy-ending, full-of-good-cheer, hardly-anybody-ever-dies-a-violent-death world depicted in Superman comics of the Silver Age. However, since this version of Kara then spent several issues in the mainstream DCU, I figure that makes her "in continuity" in the same way that Matrix Supergirl became "in continuity" despite having been created in a pocket universe.
By the end of a six-part story arc, Kara Zor-El has been bounced back to her native universe and will presumably die in Crisis, and Linda Danvers, after experiences which I don't propose to spoil for you entirely if you haven't read the TPB collection Supergirl: Many Happy Returns, finally abandons the Supergirl role and basically vanishes into comic book limbo.
2003. Superman: The 10-Cent Adventure. Cir-El, aka Supergirl, pops up in the modern Superman continuity. Although she is a mystery at first, she eventually claims to be the future daughter of Clark Kent and Lois Lane, come back from the future. Cir-El has black hair and wears a dark costume with a different style of S-insignia on it. She also has an alternate persona: Mia, a homeless woman, if I've got this right.
2003. Peter David's creator-owned Fallen Angel title starts coming out, featuring a female protagonist whom many readers promptly suspect to be his take on the further adventures of Linda Danvers following her retirement from the Supergirl role. It helps that she is called "Lee," which could be a reference to how the original Supergirl was Linda Lee (later Linda Lee Danvers) and/or to how the Post-Crisis Linda came from Leesburg.
Note: I am told that it has just recently become crystal-clear that "Lee" in Fallen Angel is not Linda Danvers after all. Which came as no great surprise, really, given that Peter David claimed to own Fallen Angel, but definitely did not own any of the characters he had used in his run on the "Supergirl" title. Ever since I first heard about this, it seemed to me that legally, David could never "reveal" that Lee was in fact Linda Danvers. The best he could do was drop vague hints and refuse to squarely disprove it so that readers could believe whatever they wanted to believe. But it appears that eventually he did choose to squarely disprove it, for whatever reasons.
2004. Superman #200 (second series.) The Cir-El Supergirl dies, having previously, in other issues, a) passed a DNA test to prove she is Superman's daughter, and then b) been revealed to not be any relation to Superman at all. (Don't go trusting those slipshod DCU DNA tests anytime soon! Superboy has gone through similar nonsense over the years!)
2004. Superman/Batman #7. Written by Jeph Loeb. Superman and Batman meet Kara Zor-El. A blue-eyed blond teenage girl who allegedly has been in suspended animation for many years while a spaceship was carrying her to Earth from Krypton. She was (I believe she eventually says in a later issue, in fluent Kryptonian, and later in English after she masters it) originally intended to arrive simultaneously with her younger cousin, baby Kal-El, and help raise him, but her ship got delayed for many years and now Superman is thirty-something while she's probably less than half his age. By the time the story arc is over, she is wearing a bare-midriff Supergirl costume. (Which is, at the very least, a huge improvement over what she was wearing in the early scenes of the story arc: Nothing!)
At any rate, upon first meeting her, Superman does not immediately say, "Ah, then you must be this timeline's equivalent of the Kara Zor-El whom my good friend, the Linda Danvers Supergirl, recently encountered. She told me all about that." In fact, neither Superman nor Batman confuse the issue by mentioning any other "Kara" and/or "Supergirl" person they have ever seen or heard of. They react as if the idea of a girl named Kara, and/or a girl with powers very similar to Superman's, is a Strange New Experience for everyone.
This particular Kara is supposed to be the star of a new monthly title, starting in the very near future, written by Jeph Loeb. How long will it last? Is she really Superman's cousin? What will become her distinctive personality traits? I have no idea, but for the moment, she is supposedly The Current Supergirl (until further notice!).
3. Short Lists of The Different Users of Each Relevant Name
Here's the funny thing - no matter how hard you try to explain it to them, there are still some people who get just a trifle confused about exactly which character you mean when you casually refer to "Supergirl" or "Superwoman" or "Power Girl" or "Superman's cute blond cousin." Isn't that peculiar? Don't they realize how hard DC works to make these things user-friendly for new readers?
In an effort to sort it all out for you, I offer these lists of who has used which names, more or less in chronological order.
Super-Girl
1. An imaginary character in one story, created out of thin air, then disintegrated and forgotten. The story would have automatically been wiped out by Crisis anyway. As far as I know, the name "Super-Girl" (with a hyphen) has never been recycled.
Supergirl
1. Lucy Regent, Queen of Borgonia (presumably erased from continuity)
2. Kara Zor-El of Earth-1 (killed in Crisis, and then erased from history to boot.)
3. Louise-L of half a million years in the future (presumably erased from continuity)
4. Matrix, an artificial lifeform created by Alexander Luthor in a pocket universe.
5. The Matrix/Linda Danvers merged entity (who no longer exists as a separate entity, having been redivided.)
6. R'E'L of one million months in the future, who traveled back to the modern era in Young Justice #21 and hasn't been heard from since.
7. The Linda Danvers Supergirl who had "reduced" powers after being split away from Matrix. (Still alive, but no longer calling herself Supergirl these days, and with her powers restored to a higher level.)
8. Arguably the Matrix/Twilight merged entity known as an Angel of Fire could still lay claim to the name Supergirl, although I don't know if she ever bothered to do so.
9. Kara Zor-El of an alternate timeline that I tentatively think of as "Earth-Silver Age." (Sent back home and presumably died or will die in Crisis, or her local version of Crisis, or whatever.)
10. Cir-El, who started out allegedly being the time-traveling daughter of Lois and Clark, but was actually a genetically modified fake. (Dead)
11. Kara Zor-El, the New Kid on the Block who has not yet received a great deal of character development.
Superwoman
1. Lois Lane on various occasions (those occasions were all erased by Crisis, although the rebooted Lois is still with us).
2. Luma Lynai of the planet Staryl (although I'm not absolutely clear on whether she normally called herself Superwoman in her daily activities, or if that was just the way Supergirl described her - at any rate, Crisis presumably erased her too).
3. The evil analog of Wonder Woman from Earth-3 (killed in Crisis)
4. Kristin Wells (presumably erased from history by Crisis - her appearances as Superwoman were definitely erased, but Kristin Wells the historian might "still" live in the 29th Century of the modern DCU for all I know!)
5. The evil artificially empowered near-duplicate of Wonder Woman from the Antimatter Universe of Qward, this new origin story being meant as a retcon to salvage the gist of some of the Pre-Crisis stories about the various members of the Crime Syndicate of America from Earth-3. This version of Superwoman had still died during the Crisis, evidently. (Presumably this one was retconned away by #7, below.)
6. Dana Dearden, also known as Obsession, a Superman stalker who was convinced they were meant to be happy couple. (Died.)
7. The evil analog of Wonder Woman and of Lois Lane, from the modern Antimatter Universe Earth-2.
Power Girl
1. Kara Zor-L, the cousin of the Golden Age Superman (Kal-L), from the Earth-2 universe in Pre-Crisis continuity
2. Kara, aka Karen Starr, the Post-Crisis version of the character, the granddaughter of Arion of Atlantis, who is allegedly more-or-less the "same" character who worked with the JSA from time to time in some Pre-Crisis stories.
And if we look for anybody Superman has ever met who used the first name Kara, we have:
Kara
1. Kara Zor-El of Earth-1, the Silver Age Supergirl (erased by Crisis).
2. Kara Zor-L of Earth-2, aka Karen Starr, the first Power Girl.
3. Kara, aka Karen Starr, the post-Crisis Power Girl (using that name whether or not, at any given time, she thinks she is a) Superman's cousin, b) Arion's granddaughter, or c) None of the above).
4. Kara, the mysterious ghost who appeared in a single Deadman story and might be some lingering echo of the officially-erased-from-continuity Kara Zor-El, lthough she never actually said so. (For all we know, she could also be the ghost of that nice German girl, Kara Hausenpfeffer of Earth-46038, whose name and homeworld I just invented to illustrate a point - one of the zillions of unnamed casualties of Crisis from when all those other parallel earths were getting the ax.)
5. Kara of Argo City, of the planet Odiline, the blond teenage girl who fought bravely alongside Superman in Superman Versus Aliens, whom Dan Jurgens insisted he was going to use again, but never did.
6. Kara Zor-El of the "Earth-Silver Age" alternate timeline, the girl in the Peter David "Many Happy Returns" story arc. (Bounced back to her native timeline and presumably will die/did die in Crisis.)
7. Kara Zor-El, the one who has just recently been inserted into modern DCU continuity, and what will become of her is anybody's guess.
So by my reckoning, we have:
1 Super-Girl
11 Supergirls
7 Superwomen
2 Power Girls (though you may feel that completely redoing the origin doesn't constitute a "new" character?)
7 Karas
With considerable overlap among those categories, of course.
(Here's my advice: The next time anyone tries to tell you that the purpose of killing off Supergirl in Crisis and retconning her out of existence to boot was to greatly simplify Superman's family tree and his general continuity in years to come, just laugh!)