So where is Supergirl?


And I’m not going to title this post the goddamned Supergirl Problem.

Maybe my level of expectation is too high, and it’s silly for me to be asking this question. I mean, over in Marvel, Wolverine spends 10 months either dead, zombified and killing for Hydra, or on a mission to take out Hydra in his own series, yet gallavants in various X-Men books like nothing’s out of the ordinary.

But where is Supergirl?

Maybe the question should be “Where isn’t Supergirl?” In “Up, Up and Away,” she’s in Metropolis, ready to respond to the de-powered Clark Kent’s distress calls. In “Supergirl,” she’s in Kandor, apparently wanting to kill Kal El yet is in love with him? (I don’t really know what’s going on there) And in “Supergirl and the Legion of Superheroes,” she’s 1000 years in the future.

Now a recent issue of “52” explained, or at least alluded to, how she ended up in the future. So I can understand that out in space, during Infinite Crisis, she was sent off into the future by some wayward beam of time warping mischief. And if one is returning from the future, one could feasibly return to any moment. So it’s entirely possible that she can come back from the 31st century in time to be Clark Kent’s personal Jesus.

But I don’t get how she’s in Kandor at the same time. For that matter, I don’t really get anything about what’s going on in “Supergirl,” because Power Girl’s in there with her, and she’s in “JSA.” And Kal El’s mom is alive. And my normal solution of just reading wikipedia for comicsland backstory is failing me on this one.

So I’m really hoping someone will stumble upon this and be able to set me straight, because I need some straight-setting. I’m fully aware of the possibility that this is just one of those things that happens when a character appears in more than one book in any comic company – they’re going to be in several places at once. But I think over the past year or so, DC has kind of conditioned me to expect tighter editorial control.