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This article contains light spoilers for My Adventures With Superman season three, episode one.
As its name suggests, My Adventures With Superman isn’t just about the titular hero. Each episode gives just as much time to his pal Jimmy Olsen and to his girlfriend Lois Lane, a place of honor illustrated by the end of the opening credits. Right before the episode proper begins, we see Jimmy and Lois steel themselves against some upcoming threat, standing on either side of Clark as he removes his glasses to become Superman.
Season three adds a fourth person to the circle of friends, Clark’s Kryptonian cousin Supergirl. The cynical viewer would dismiss Kara’s inclusion as a cheap tie-in to Supergirl, which hits theaters less than two weeks after the new season drops. But anyone who comes to My Adventures With Superman looking for the superpowered party girl played by Milly Alcock will be surprised. The Kara here, voiced by Kiana Madeira, is just as kindhearted but more alien than her cousin, less self-assured than the version played by Alcock.
So which is right? Who has the canonical Supergirl? The answer is: both! Supergirl has been reinvented time and again since her first appearance in 1959’s Action Comics #252, with each new version revealing the richness of the character.
In her first adventures, Supergirl was little more than Superboy in a miniskirt. Writers rarely gave her the self-confidence afforded Superman, and her adventures were more adolescent: she worried about dates with boys, spats with friends, and spent time with the futuristic teens in the Legion of Super-Heroes. Like most of DC’s characters in the Silver Age, she had few discernible character traits beyond “teen girl.”
That began to change with her first solo series in 1972, which gave her a more modern costume—a blue blouse and red shorts instead of the more obvious spin on Superman’s costume—and a grown-up identity. She was a modern woman, who tried to balance her job and love life with her responsibilities of being Supergirl, kind of like a Kryptonian Mary Tyler Moore.
Since then, Supergirl has been a shapeshifting blob of goo, a human teen with magical abilities, the daughter of Darkseid, and—most recently—a young woman dealing with mixed emotions as she returns to her hometown. All that doesn’t count out-of-continuity stories like Tom King and Bilquis Evely’s Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, the inspiration for the movie, nor Power Girl, an alternate reality Kara who has long been integrated into the mainline DC Universe, with her own personality and complicated background.
Even on My Adventures With Superman, Kara has been on a journey. She played an antagonistic role in season two, where she had been tricked by the evil AI Brainiac into fighting against humanity. She found her way back to heroism thanks to her connection with Superman, Jimmy, and Lois. By the end of the season, she had exchanged the imposing black and red costume she was wearing for more a brighter blue and red outfit.
In the opening of the season three premiere “Into the New World,” Supergirl does away with Brainiac, saying goodbye one last time to the creature she called “Father” and establishing her own identity. What is that identity? Judging by this first episode, Kara has chosen to become a sweet, silly teen. She flirts with Jimmy, had fun participating in the Smallville fall festival, and jumps right into a mystery that even gives Clark pause.
This Supergirl has none of the wry cynicism of the character we see in the movie. But she isn’t as naive as the original Silver Age version, nor as grown up as the character that Melissa Benoist played for six seasons on TV. She’s her own version of Supergirl, and that’s Supergirl too.
At her core, Supergirl is a woman with incredible powers, who lost her family and arrives in a world where Superman already exists. Every version of Supergirl, no matter the medium, has had to find her own identity separate from her cousin. And, as just My Adventures With Superman and Supergirl shows, she sometimes comes up with differing answers.
That’s not a limitation on the character. Instead, it’s a strength. It shows a character who isn’t defined by her cousin or her past, nor other versions of herself. She gets to make her own way, experimenting with different ways of being a hero. My Adventures With Superman is just one of those ways, and it might be the most fun way—precisely because she gets to figure out her identity with the help of her friends.
My Adventures With Superman airs new episodes every Saturday at midnight on Adult Swim.
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