Supergirl’s Weirdest Stories Are Stranger Than the New Film

With the new Supergirl movie days away, one thing is clear: this is not your standard Supergirl story. Based on Tom King and Bilquis Evely’s acclaimed graphic novel Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, Kara is taken far outside her usual comfort zone and placed in a cosmic western unlike anything we’ve seen before on the big screen.

Then again, longtime comic readers know that Supergirl has never exactly had a normal publication history.

Take “The Secret Origin of Supergirl’s Super-Horse” from Action Comics #293 (1962) and #311 (1964). On the surface, it sounds harmless enough. Supergirl has a pet horse named Comet who possesses Superman-level powers and can communicate telepathically. Strange, but this was Silver Age DC, where strange was practically a requirement.

The story gets much weirder when readers learn that Comet is actually Biron, a centaur from ancient Greece. After a magical mishap involving Circe, he is transformed into a full horse. If that wasn’t enough, a passing magical comet later turns Comet into a human man named “Bronco” Bill Starr. Bill joins a rodeo, meets Supergirl in her civilian identity, and the two begin dating. They even share a kiss. Supergirl has absolutely no idea she is romantically involved with her own horse. Silver Age comics were operating on a completely different wavelength.

Things did not get any less bizarre in later decades.

After the legendary Crisis on Infinite Earths erased the original Kara Zor-El from continuity, DC introduced a completely new Supergirl known as Matrix. Matrix wasn’t Kryptonian at all. She was a purple, shape-shifting protoplasmic lifeform created in a laboratory by an alternate-universe version of Lex Luthor.

Seeking a more human existence, Matrix arrives on Earth and encounters Linda Danvers, a troubled teenager who is in the process of being sacrificed by her boyfriend’s demonic cult. To save Linda’s life, Matrix merges with her on both a physical and spiritual level. Because a pure being sacrificed itself for a sinner, Heaven literally steps in. The result is one of the strangest reinventions in DC history: Supergirl becomes an Earth-Born Angel of Fire, complete with flaming wings, divine powers, and flame vision. If someone pitched that concept today without context, most readers would assume it was fan fiction.

My personal runner-up for weirdest Supergirl story has to be “The Heroine Haters” from Adventure Comics #384 (1969).

Fed up with being single, Supergirl decides to try computer dating. Naturally, she doesn’t use an ordinary dating service. Instead, she relies on Superman’s advanced Kryptonian supercomputer at the Fortress of Solitude to find her perfect genetic match. The machine identifies a handsome alien hero named Volar from the planet Torma.

When Supergirl travels across the galaxy to meet him, she discovers that Torma is an incredibly sexist world where women are treated as second-class citizens. Volar seems ideal on paper, but every time Supergirl tries to get closer, he pulls away. Eventually, the truth comes out. Volar is actually a woman who wears a genetically engineered male disguise created by her scientist father so she could fight crime without facing the discrimination of her society.

Compared to a super-powered horse boyfriend, an angelic fusion with a troubled teenager, and intergalactic computer dating gone wrong, Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow suddenly doesn’t seem quite so unconventional. If anything, the new movie is carrying on a long and proud tradition. Supergirl has spent decades starring in some of the strangest stories DC Comics has ever published, and that’s part of what makes her such a fascinating character.