Profile: Power Girl

Karen Starr, Power Girl
First appearance: All-Star Comics #58, Jan/Feb 1976. She was created by Gerry Conway as the cousin of the Earth-2 Superman, though it was Paul Levitz who did much of the writing for her at the time.

Current status: member of Justice Society in its current formation.

Was subjected to the following acts of discrimination: during the time she was with Justice League International, she was depowered so that she was considerably less tough than Superman, and Gerard Jones, when he took up the writing, would write sexist jokes at her expense. She was once impregnated by the magics of Arion in a storyline that tied in with Zero Hour, where her “son” Equinox fought a villain called Scarabus and then promptly disappeared. In Infinite Crisis, Superboy-Prime turns her into a “tuning fork” to be used by one of the Lex Luthor clones from the new Multiverses introduced before she’s rescued from it. There was also a pointless battle between her and the new incarnation of Kara Zor-El featured in the current Supergirl series.

What’s wrong with how this was done? The sexist jokes made about her in JLI under Jones' pen were questionable, and may need to be taken with a grain of salt. Infinite Crisis was overrated and little more than a pointless extension of the insults already seen in Identity Crisis. The battle between Karen Starr and Kara Zor-El was the work of Jeph Loeb; an overrated pastiche.

Seeing how bad Zero Hour was, I think that’s why the pregnancy was more pointless than need be too.

We could probably add how DC’s writers never gave a proper origin post-Crisis on Infinite Earths. Somehow, the angle that Geoff Johns went for doesn’t seem right, or it was done at the wrong time.