Posted By Dan Greenfield on Jun 21, 2026 | 10 comments

PAUL KUPPERBERG brings you a SUPERGIRL WEEK SPECIAL…

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Supergirl, starring Milly Alcock, is out this week, so we’ve gathered up the 13th Dimension crew to bring you our first-ever SUPERGIRL WEEK! Click here for more high-flying features!

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By PAUL KUPPERBERG

I’ve seen the Supergirl movie trailers, and, while she’s not exactly “my” Supergirl (i.e. the Kara Zor-El I grew up with in the 1960s and the one I would later write), the new movie prompted me to post this on Facebook back in December:

Maybe because I’ve worked across so many comic-book business disciplines—creative, public relations, editorial, licensing, licensed publishing—and was exposed to the many different uses of the characters, I’m not bothered that the canonical Batman in the comics differs from the ones that advertisers wanted to represent their products or services or the producers of other media needed for their animation or TV or movie projects. The “real thing”—whatever that particular version or era of a character that is to you—is still there for you to read whenever you want, regardless of changes made by licensors.

Also, this ain’t my first time at the Supergirl cinematic rodeo; I was around for and writing the comic book during the fiasco that was the 1984 Supergirl movie starring Helen Slater and Faye Dunaway.

And, after all, the new Supergirl is based on a comic book, and a particularly well-regarded one at that (2022’s Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow by Tom King and Bilquis Evely), starring a Supergirl that’s many steps removed from the character I wrote in the 1980s. Between my time on Supergirl (in Superman Family and in her own title) and the Kara Zor-El of Woman of Tomrrow there had been (1) an erasure from existence, (2) the Matrix Supergirl, (3) the Linda Danvers/Matrix-merged Supergirl, (4) Cir-El, the time-displaced Supergirl, (5) the reborn Kara Zor-El, (6) the “New 52” Supergirl, and (7) the “Rebirth” Supergirl.

My “real thing” Supergirl was the original, the Kara Zor-El introduced in Action Comics #252 (May 1959). The Supergirl feature was the reason I collected Action Comics, and I followed Kara from there, through her sporadic career in Adventure Comics and her own short-lived series through the 1960s and into the 1970s, until she landed in Superman Family, which is where we finally became formally acquainted when I took over the writing duties from Marty Pasko in #217 (April 1982), which was followed by a 23-issue run of her own title, launched with artists Carmine Infantino and Bob Oksner.

But both Supergirl and Superboy were cancelled in 1984. I was put to work coming up with new directions for both features to be relaunched later in ’85 as DC Double Comics, a 48-page book with a 24-page lead story and 16-page back-up rotating each month between Supergirl and Superboy.

Of course, the best laid plans of mice and comic book writers often go awry, and DCDC did too, along with a large chunk of the DC Universe, in Crisis on Infinite Earths (April 1985).

Crisis changed everything.

Including, especially, the world of Superman.

The Man of Steel and friends I’d spent the previous several years writing in Superman Family, World of Krypton, Superman, Action Comics, DC Comics Presents, The New Adventures of Superboy, The Daring New Adventures of Supergirl, the Superman newspaper strip for the Tribune Syndicate, and a series of 46-page graphic novels for DC’s European publisher Ehapa, no longer existed.

And that included DC Double Comics. Because in this brave new world, Superman doesn’t become Superboy and Kara never was.

Before this radical overhaul of the Superman mythos was settled on (see John Byrne’s Man of Steel miniseries and subsequent Superman relaunch) and the brakes put on the project, work had already begun on DCDC. I wrote the scripts for the first issue’s 24-page Supergirl lead story and 13 pages of the second issue’s 16-page second feature, as well as the 16-pager Superboy for #1 and the 24-pager for #2.

New Supergirl penciler Eduardo Barreto (Bob Oksner was scheduled to ink) completed the entire first issue, which was also lettered; Carmine Infantino was being shifted over to pencil the Superboy feature and also finished that first issue, which was lettered by Ben Oda. I’m not sure who was assigned as inker, but I did find a scan online of the splash page inked by Klaus Janson.

(A side note: The New Adventures of Superboy was cancelled before I could wrap up an ongoing storyline, the script for which was already written. I’ve published it and the scripts for the first two issues of DCDC in the appropriately titled Unpublished Comic Book Scripts of Paul Kupperberg, available from Amazon.)

I was happy for the chance to do something different with Supergirl. After almost two years, the whole soap opera vibe of supporting cast members with problems was wearing thin as was my desire to find new ways to twist things around. I was still carrying around characters from 1961, having brought back her teenage/orphanage years crush, Dick Malverne, who was now taking on stalkerish qualities. It creeped me out enough that I had Linda send him packing, refusing to feel guilty for not returning his feelings. Darn him!

Like the Kara in Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, my Kara in DCDC takes off for deep space, only instead of heading for a planet with a red sun where she could party until she puked, she made her first stop on New Krypton, the phase-world that only reappears in our universe around a red sun during rare shifts in the cosmic axis where the survivors of the one-time bottle city of Kandor now live, including her parents, Zor-El and Allura.

Kara spills her heart out to Allura about the difficulties she faces living a triple life on Earth, always having to hide some part of herself as Linda Danvers, as Supergirl, or as Kara Zor-El. “But Linda is Kara… and Kara is Supergirl!” Some motherly advise calms her down, enabling Kara to settle in for “a few more days visiting,” away from the stresses awaiting her back home.

An encounter with a legendary master of Klurkor (an ancient Kryptonian martial art, honest, created by E. Nelson Bridwell), who gets in her face to tell her she’s not such hot stuff (“You are a Supergirl elsewhere. Here, you are nothing.”), makes her realize that having superpowers has made her lazy and perhaps some discipline and training would do her good.

Meanwhile, “several miles to the north,” her father Zor-El and his cousin, one-time Kandorian superhero Nightwing Van-Zee are messing with the elemental forces of nature in their attempt to tap into the planet’s vast potential of hydro-thermal energy… but what choice do they have if New Krypton is ever to achieve the former glory of their original homeworld?

There ends the first issue, the 14 existing script pages for #2 picking up two weeks later, with Kara still on New Krypton, still being picked on by the old Klurkor master, while Zor-El and Van-Zee’s drilling awakens and unleashes something wicked from the planet’s core. And, meanwhile on Earth, Linda’s friends worry about her.

I have no written record of the plans for the strip, but as I recall, the first six issues were supposed to deal with Kara’s stay on New Krypton, proving to herself that even without superpowers, she was still a hero. But the planet is still menaced by the subterranean threat as the time for it to phase out of this dimension gets closer, forcing her to make a choice: stay and save her people from destruction even though it means she’ll be trapped in this dimension, or abandon New Krypton to stay in her home universe.

Kara stays, the enemy is defeated, but she has no way to return to Earth until the next shift in the cosmic axis, many years in the future. So, with New Krypton secured and on its way to a bright future, Kara takes to wandering, still powerless, looking for both a way home… and herself.

But without the drunken bacchanalia… not that 1985 DC would have let me get away with that. Even if I had thought of it.

I mean, “Darn you, Dick Malverne” was about as edgy as it got.

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MORE

— The Complete SUPERGIRL WEEK Index of Columns and Features. Click here.

— SUNDAY FUNNIES WITH KERRY CALLEN: Why SUPERGIRL Never Dates. Click here.

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PAUL KUPPERBERG was a Silver Age fan who grew up to become a Bronze Age comic book creator, writer of Superman, the Doom Patrol, and Green Lantern, creator of Arion Lord of Atlantis, Checkmate, and Takion, and slayer of Aquababy, Archie, and Vigilante. He is the Harvey and Eisner Award nominated writer of Archie Comics’ Life with Archie, and his YA novel Kevin was nominated for a GLAAD media award and won a Scribe Award from the IAMTW. Check out his memoir, Panel by Panel: My Comic Book Life. 

Website: https://www.paulkupperberg.net/

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