about supergirl

reposting from the engine supergirl remake/remodel thread by request…

Dang, That alien girl with the shapeshifting costume is a cool idea.

I haven’t followed her much, but the idea expressed several places of Supergirl as a young woman growing up in an alien place, in contrast to whitebread Clark, has terrific potential. her ideas of an appropriate costume might be very different.
~marv

yeah, half the appeal of writing supergirl is not that she’s superman as a girl, it’s that she’s superman without any of the baggage he’s accrued over the years. i felt like a jackass, but sitting in superman returns, i kept wondering, why the hell is superman wasting his time pretending to be clark kent and working as a reporter?

it was a fine idea sixty years ago, being a reporter to keep in touch. but these days, it’s extraneous. think about if kal-el had actually landed in, say, the 70s, and had gotten the daily planet gig in the 90s. why does he need to work at a newspaper and spend hours NOT flying around helping people? didn’t bryan singer read the first issue of astro city?

but that’s not even the real meat here. movie or dcu, these days, superman doesn’t NEED a secret identity. clark kent’s friends are publically superman’s pals already, all he’d need to do is move his parents to the fortress to keep them safe.

as far as keeping informed, give him a satellite phone built by batman that’s indestructible, or tucks into his ‘invincible field’, depending on your version of how his powers work.

he has a fortress in the arctic, so he doesn’t need a manhatten apartment. and if he did need money or help, ANYONE IN THE WORLD would let him sleep on their couch, hook him up with a sandwich or a movie ticket or anything. he’s SUPERMAN.

so kara would show up and notice the absurdity of this, and while she’s not going to out clark to the public or screw up his gig, however silly she may think it is, well, she’s not going to bother pretending to be someone other than herself; a kryptonian girl with superpowers who’s living on earth with her cousin, the greatest hero of all time.

the trouble with a goth/punk/angsty outlook for kara is that that kind of worldview is generally coming out of a high school kid who gets exposed to the real world and gets disillusioned. but supergirl is never going to have any fear or doubt. she won’t sulk about wondering what one person can do against the entire system.

she’s supergirl, she knows EXACTLY what she can do to help. throw tanks about and punch holes in mountains and inspire the youth of the world to take power and responsibility for themselves and change the broken system. meanwhile, she’s a celebrity and a hero and everyone, everywhere, loves her except lex luthor.

power girl would have a very similar outlook, but with more aggresive methods, not being afraid to show up at un sessions and speak out against human rights abuses she’s witnessed on patrol.