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Right at the start...SPOILER ALERT...if you haven't seen Man of Steel, yet, you may not want to read this.
Okay, so, that done, I saw the movie last weekend and as anyone who knows me might suspect, I started thinking of ways to fit a Supergirl into this continuity. Fortunately, they gave me a hook I could use and that's where the spoilers come in.
So, in Man of Steel, the bad guys are General Zod and a few of his cronies, released from their disturbingly dildo-shaped cocoons, when Krypton explodes and destroys the orbital Phantom Zone portal-thingy (I'm pretty sure that's the technical name for it). And, seriously, did their stasis pod things have to be shaped like dildos? I know it's called Hollyweird for a reason, but try to keep that stuff in your own bedrooms, guys.
So, there they are, a bunch of soldier types, fresh outta jail and looking at the shattered remains for their homeworld.They manage to cobble together a "Phantom Drive" out of the portal thingy. They use it to travel to various Kryptonian outposts, one of which was planted on Earth some 20,000 years ago. Zod and his crew find no survivors at the outposts they visit. With the loss of the homeworld, the supply lines were cut and we're led to believe that they all died of starvation and loss of life support, etc. Too bad they didn't think to locate more of their outposts in yellow sun systems, or even worlds with environments similar enough to Krypton to support them.
But, then, Clark Kent stumbles into the outpost on Earth, accidentally tripping some kind of distress signal that Zod picks up. This is what brings the bad guys to Earth.
So, it's at about this point that inspiration hit me. An outpost that was situated on a world that let them survive. To give it a little of the old Supergirl connection, we'll call the planet Argo. The resources of Argo allowed this group to survive being cut off from Krypton. And, when they get the distress signal from Earth's outpost, they head for Earth, too.
A small group of scientists and soldier types, I think. They go into suspended animation for the journey and along the way, they have the misfortune to encounter an alien space ship. Aboard this ship, its sole occupant in fact, is the deposed former despot of his homeworld, until a religious leader overthrows him and exiles him into space. He was supposed to die, there, but some people are just too damned evil to die on schedule. He managed to survive long enough to detect the Kryptonians and decided to upgrade his transport.
So, he does that and kills all of the Kryptonians, but one. In Kara, he sees an opportunity and after giving the ship a little convincing "battle damage", Mongul revives her and tells her a story, involving thrilling heroics on his part, a marauding alien, a pitched battle and the destruction of his own, unarmed rescue ship. The others were, of course, collateral damage in the marauder's attack.
And so, to Kara. I'm thinking she's one of the Kryptonians who were engineered to be soldiers, or maybe peace officers. Whatever genetic advantages they are given would help account for some of the things we've seen in more recent versions of Supergirl. With the re-introduction of Kara Zor-El as Supergirl, a few years ago, she was shown to be somewhat stronger than her cousin. If she was bred as a soldier-type, and including the training she would have in that role, she'd naturally have a distinct advantage over a Kryptonian who grew up on a Kansas farm and never threw a punch before he was 33 years old.
Kara's strong, she's got that streak of aggression that makes a good soldier and she's had Mongul convincing her that he's her bestest friend in the Universe. When they get to Earth, she's protective of him. He hasn't revealed anything like his true strength to her. He let's her run interference for him, spinning some story about being a refugee and seeking asylum. His story is full of holes and such, but who'd know that, on Earth? Big as he is, he's demonstrated no extraordinary ability, and he's dressed in one of those nice suits the Kryptonians wear like long underwear, he must be alright. Right?
For Kara's suit, I drew from the movie style as much as I could. I was inspired by the trick the Kryptonians did with their armor face masks, how they can make them transparent when they need to, to make parts of Kara's suit transparent.
For Mongul's suit, I worked up a design that would keep a few hits of his comic costume, but have the bodysuit be one of the Kryptonian designs. I figure he used on that was in the ship, or that the ship has facilities to manufacture suits to order. In the movie, the suits are shown to be extraordinarily durable, with bullets sparking off them (yeah, I know, how do you strike a spark with copper-jacketed lead? It's Hollywood. What they don't know about guns and shooting would fill a freaking encyclopedia.), they're almost a layer of armor, themselves.
Of course, at some point, Mongul has to turn heel and the battle is on.
Joe L. Singleton
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