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I Am Superwoman, Hear Me Roar!
In the mid seventies women's lib was in vogue and, like all popular
culture media, comics had jumped on the bandwagon. In keeping with the best
comics tradition the writers immediately took the whole concept over the top.
Hence the horrors inflicted on Wonder Woman in her costumeless phase in the
name of promoting social equality.
At any rate feminism, or at least the illusion of it, was still popular
in comics in 1976 when Paul Levitz and Wally Wood restarted DC's long defunct
All Star Comics with issue 58 and brought back the Justice Society of America.
Since the original cast was getting a bit long in the tooth (after all they
had begun their careers in the late thirties and early forties) despite their
slowed aging (thanks to a bit of psuedo-science I no longer remember) an
additional younger cast was introduced. The temporally displaced Star
Spangled Kid, the now adult Robin and the aged Earth-2 Superman's freshly
arrived cousin, Kara-L. Soon to become known to the world as Power Girl.
Kara was certainly one of DC's most abrasive heroines. Aroggant, thin
skinned (metaphorically, like her cousin her hide could survive tank shells)
headstrong and likely to fly off the handle when compared to her cousin. A
far cry from Supergirl on Earth-1 who had always been comfortable in her role
as Superman's "little sister".
To be fair it can't have been easy for her to suddenly step into the
shadow of a man who had been famed around the world for over three and a half
decades. But in trying to establish herself as a heroine in her own right
she sometimes went too far. Case in point in All Star Comics 67 (July-Aug
1977) she decided that the best way to investigate the subterranean race that
had carried off Wildcat was to surrender to these unknown adversaries. The
Star Spangled Kid thought that was a dumb idea so she knocked him out then
gave up. While awake when last seen from the dialogue below the subterraneans
must have KOed Kara too once she was off panel. All things consider she was
lucky they all got to wake up instead of getting dissected or otherwise
inconvenienced.
Art by Joe Staton and Bob Layton.
Who knew you could stun a bulletproof woman by whacking her head with the
skulls of physically normal humans? Or at least do it without using enough
force to crush Wildcat and the Star Spangled Kid's heads like melons. Lucky
for them the Comics Code was stronger than the laws of physics and biology or
it could have got messy.
At any rate while the subterraneans seemed to show wisdom in prisoner
restraint when the Justice Society answers Power Girl's signal (and walk into
an ambush as the under dwellers are on alert after their prisoner's escape
attempt) evidentally the bonds came off as soon as they stuck the trio in a
cell. They already knew Power Girl could bust steel! What the heck were they
thinking?
Of course she broke free and challenged Middle Earth's ruler to another
showdown. Unlike Hobbits these guys weren't pushovers and could go toe to toe
with Kryptonians..
The fight ended with Ayrn tossing her aside to apparently kill the Star
Spangled Kid and be on the verge of killing Wildcat. Kara freaked and punched
out the Underlord then finally showed she did indeed have a softer side and
shed a few tears. Probably consumed with guilt over having brought the Kid
into this mess against his will which had got him killed. Fortunately before
she could do too much wallowing in guilt he shows up alive and only a bit
bruised. Did Kara learn a valuable lesson? Maybe, but from the following
issues she was clearly a slow learner.
Of course she did have issues to work out which is why she wasn't
available when Wildcat and the Huntress were looking for reinforcements in All
Star Comics 71 (March-April '78)
You just saw Kara struggling against the Symbio Ship, the Kryptonian
artifact in which she had spent most of her life. Her father wasn't quite
the rocket scientist his brother was so while Kal-L's ship had landed over
sixty years earlier hers didn't arrive until the mid seventies. The ship had
slowed her aging so she arrived a little over twenty years old instead of the
same physical age as her cousin. She hadn't emerged as an infant with an
adult's body because the Symbio Ship had been feeding her a virtual reality
simulation of the life she would have had on Krypton. So after she landed on
Earth she woke upon to find that everything she knew was an illusion and the
world she thought she belonged was reduced to radioactive debris decades ago.
No wonder she was so edgy.
At any rate the ship was feeling abandoned and wanted her back to resume
the simulation. She fought it off and thought she had wrecked it but after
the Crisis on Infinite Earths it was the only link she had to any sort of past.
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