This one is a little different from the other faux covers I’ve done, because this one leads to something bigger. You’ll notice that there’s a lack of a “fake story blurb” with this one. Well, it’s a long story. Let me start at the beginning.
I’ve always been a fan of Power Girl. And I don’t mean I’m one of those people who grew to like her from her recent popularity thanks to her appearances in JSA and her defining run by Amanda Conner. No, I mean, I liked her back in the 80s. She makes up what I call my “holy four” of DC Superheroes. Back around that time, when I was JUST getting into comics seriously, there was four particular comics that jumped out at me. Those four were Blue Devil, Firestorm, Captain Atom, and a miniseries about some blonde bombshell named Karen Starr, aka Power Girl. Now some of you may not be familiar with her, so let me give you a quick rundown of her. She was introduced in the 70’s as a grown up version of Supergirl for Earth-Two. (If you’re unfamiliar with what THAT is, then I wouldn’t worry, because it really doesn’t matter.) Eventually there was an event called Crisis where the powers-that-be had decided they wanted Superman to be the only survivor of Krypton, so they killed Supergirl. Power Girl had survived because of her original name. (Seriously, how depressing is it that if she had been called Superwoman or something, she’d have been killed.) So, they decided to totally reinvent the character into this.
Power Girl was now an Atlantean Princess, placed in hibernation for aeons as opposed to being sent from Krypton. (Honestly the origin isn’t that different, except now instead of her powers being alien in nature, they were now mystical.) Now I really liked this. I thought it made her stand out as her own person, and not just an extension of Superman’s supporting cast. She was still powerful and strong, but not invincible. She was an actual interesting character. She wasn’t this Mary-Sue type, she had flaws and serious ones. She was hot-headed and arrogant cynic, who’s temper often got her into trouble with others. She had genuine friendship with many male characters, as opposed to just being ’the girl’ to have romantic stories with. (Her friendship with Captain Atom never had any romantic entanglements. They were often chucking verbal potshots at one another, like friends do.) She adopted this horrible, mangy evil cat that liked NO ONE but her. In short… She was a good character.
In the 1990s, she had some rather stupid crap happen to her, but it was the 1990s and if you were a comic character who managed to get through that decade unscathed, then you needed to thank the Kirby Almighty that you were probably overlooked and obscure. But as this was the 1990s, this was the time I started to take being a comic artist seriously. And honestly, I always wanted to put my spin on Power Girl. But I realized back then I had a ways to go before I was ready to draw for “the big boys”. (I still do. :P ) But during the 2000s, I became aware of the notion that people found Power Girl’s origin to be confusing. This honestly… Really baffled me.For some reason, people were still obsessing over her Kryptonian origins, which weren’t really relevant anymore. At least they weren’t, until Infinite Crisis re-established them again. So basically, ‘She’s an Atlantean daughter put into hibernation’ is more confusing than ‘She’s another survivor of Krypton from a parallel universe, who also survived her universe being destroyed, and is running around in the current universe as the not-cousin of Superman.’ Of course. How could I have been so blind.
I never have liked that. She’s her OWN character. Sure, maybe her origin needed some fine tuning, but it was HER origin. Not Superman’s origin. To me, it turned her into another Superman supporting cast member. Power Girl was no different now than Supergirl or Steel. And that has always bugged me.
Now of course her ongoing comic and supporting characters are quite frankly all wonderful. (And the art, of course, as been spectacular.)
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| by Adam Hughes |
I just don’t like that she has to share Superman’s origin.
Fast forward to this time last year.
A phone conversation with my friend James, who’s an animator out there in Tinseltown, led to the topic of re-envisioning various super-heroes with “Disney formula” origin stories. Some of them actually led quite nicely to the formula. Especially Aquaman. So did Wonder Woman. Especially if you added in period piece feel them to all. Then later that night, I thought about Power Girl. (No, not THAT was you pervs! Get yer mind outta the sewer and back in the gutter!) Basically the thought about how the Atlantean Princess angle, her cat, the fun adventures, ect. It really played up the Disney Formula nicely. So like I do when an idea hits me, I keep thinking about it. Tweaked the origin a bit, keeping the Atlantean thing, removing all elements of Superman or Krypton, fleshed out the supporting cast a bit… And the next thing you know, I had a story idea, I REALLY liked. So I stopped, because if I went any further, I was going to end up drawing this thing, and it would have only been just a fan comic. After all… I don’t own the character. But that didn’t stop me from still going back and tweaking the concept more and more. Changing some stuff here and there, to make it more of an original concept. Instead of Atlantis, we’d make it Lemuria. Instead of a snarky cat, we’d make it a lemur. (Lemuria… Lemur. I’m nothing if not full of groaning puns!) Instead of a buxom blue-eyed blonde, we’d make it a smaller framed redhead with heterochromatic eyes. I was slowly turning the story from a Power Girl fanfic into something original.
Now I know that may sound a bit derivative, but hey, lots of things started off as something else entirely. Donkey Kong (and by extension Mario) was originally going to be a Popeye game, Watchmen was going to be the Charleton Comics characters and Star Wars was going to be Flash Gordon. And the last time this happened with me, I ended up with Shadowgirls and that turned out pretty decently I think. So I’ve learned just to go with the flow, when it comes to these things. You never know how these things turn out.
So around the time that we knew Shadowgirls was coming to a premature end, I did that Batgirls fake cover. I thought I’d do up a few more fake covers. I had one for Superman and one for Wonder Woman… And I thought about that Power Girl concept a bit. And I decided to just go for it. Below this post, you’ll probably see a entry called “Intrepid Verisimilitude”, which shows a quick promo picture of the Intrepid Firecracker and her lemur…
Care to take a guess where that idea originated from? :P
Now, here’s the deal. I AM going to do this story, and I’ve gotten it roughly plotted out, and it’ll be roughly four issues in length. But I want to get the entire thing drawn first before I even release it. It’ll be full color, and it’ll be released on the web, with a collection afterwards. But it’s going to take me time to draw it all, and right now I’m still scripting it. And I do want to do a short unrelated B&W story before it. So it’ll probably be well into next year before it ready. But I think it’ll be a lot of fun, and hopefully… You’ll be interested.
If not, well, it’s not like I won’t be drawing other stuff too. And since you got through all that self-indulgence nonsense I just threw at you, here’s the Power Girl cover, minus the logo and stuff.
Next time, we’ll talk about something really stupid.
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