Welcome to The Girls of Steel Week here at the Fortress. For five days I want to celebrate the various characters that have been given the name Supergirl. Instead of ranking them one to five I am going to go in chronological order, so sit back and enjoy the various Maids of Might that have been around DC Comics for over fifty years!
(Quick note here on Day One before we really get into things; I feel kind of bad for using the image you see above. Normally I don’t like using Ed Benes cheesecake images. Sure he can draw a mean Superman and Batman and such but nine times out of ten if he draws a panel or cover and there is a woman on that panel or cover she is shoving either her breasts or behind towards “the camera” and to me that is a bit gratuitous. However my Photoshop skills are poor and this image proved too perfect not to use, so as semi-hypocritical as it may be this will be the image you see all week long.)
The Girls of Steel Week Day One: Kara Zor-El (Silver and Bronze Age)
The original Kara Zor-El is kind of an odd character for me because on one hand I really like the character but on the other hand I haven’t read a whole heck of a lot of her adventures. Sure there were some stories featuring her in Superman: From the ’30s to the ’70s, which contained the very first Superman comics I ever read, and I have gone back and read various issues of Superman and Action Comics and Superman Family and Adventure Comics plus Daring New Adventures of Supergirl (which became just Supergirl with issue 13) but I don’t feel that I really know her all that well. This makes liking the character problematic because I can’t point to specific stories and moments where I can say, “Yup, that’s it. That’s why I like me some Kara-Zor-El.”