A Look at My Art: Supergirl Paper Drawings

I’ve been watching through the CBS/CW Supergirl television series over the past few months and after starting season 2 I recalled a drawing I made back when the series was airing. I started looking through my stuff and thankfully I have all my old sketchbooks in one place and was able to find the drawing I was after fairly easily. However, in doing so, I also stumbled across quite a few other Supergirl drawings from quite a large span of time. This post will mostly be an archival effort to help preserve my otherwise non-digitized art but I will try to group them as best I can. For those of you who keep up with my blog, you’ll know Supergirl in the Multiverse is my artwork and is made digitally. This is sort of a where did I get started with drawing Supergirl and maybe a way to reassess where I’ve been to see how I can go further. This is by no means every Supergirl drawing I have ever made, and I’ve excluded a lot of sketches that didn’t really go anywhere so you’re not looking at too many just messes of scribbles.

This is the aforementioned Supergirl Season 2 drawing made hastily when I was thoroughly invested in the Supergirl show and probably reading an absurd amount of Supercorp fanfiction as we all were back in 2017. For those of you who can’t immediately tell what’s going on I’ll describe it from left to right and top to bottom. Starting with James saying “I don’t do a lot this season”, then Mon-El flexing in a mirror “I’m only a good guy to get in Kara’s pants”, Supergirl onlooking the scene in front of her says “Don’t fight please”, while her good friend Lena pats her shoulder and says “It’s ok sweetie”. The scene in the front has Alex with her boot on Winn’s face with the pair saying “Winn, that’s a bad idea” “It’s not THAT bad of an idea”. Maggie Sawyer is standing on a box with a bubble saying “A small proud girlfirend” while J’onn is standing in the background sighing.

After finding what I was initially looking for, and realizing what a rich treasure trove it was of Supergirl content, the next thing I sought out to find was my oldest Supergirl drawings. While I have been drawing for probably most my life and I have sketchbooks from as far back as middle school, these two drawings seem to be the earliest I could find. They are both definitely from high school and they seem to be from junior or senior year (around 2013-2015). I was pretty thoroughly invested in comics at this time but a lot more focused on the Bat side of things as opposed to Superman and family so the S didn’t show up quite as often so these 2 drawings could very easily be the first Supergirls I ever drew.

The rest of my drawings I can’t really pinpoint a timeframe for so it won’t so much be in chronological order and more so grouped based on theme. I will preface this drawing by saying I found a lot of Power Girl drawings in my old sketchbooks (not as much as Supergirl of course) but I do generally like to keep Supergirl and Power Girl separate because they deserve to stand on their own as characters. All that being said, I did really like this Power Girl drawing and the way it commanded the space of the page.

This set of 3 drawings is all part of my attempt at differentiating and defining what I had considered to be the 6 clearly defined versions of Supergirl. In all actuality, after an absurd amount of Supergirl research, I feel like 4 is a better number but it’s also kind of like the 4-6 canon Robins depending on how you count. The 6 Supergirl’s I decided on for this almost-project were Power Girl, Cir-El, Modern Kara Zor-El, Pre-Crisis Kara Zor-El, Linda Danvers/Matrix, and Pre-Flashpoint Kara Zor-El. Like I said, having Kara Zor-El on there 3 times is probably overkill and at most all versions of Kara Zor-El can basically be broken down to be older than Kal or born after Kal on the floating chunk of Argo. Woman of Tomorrow tried to do both and the history doesn’t really make sense with that but that’s another conversation. You can also see here the start of me looking at the S Symbol and how it can have slight variations to define separate Supergirls, which would later become a staple of my Supergirl in the Multiverse series.

These next 5 pieces are all alternate costume designs I put together for Supergirl either leaning more into her Kryptonian heritage (like the first 3), going for a more street clothes look (like the 4th) or just borrowing her sort-of-cousin’s costume (like the 5th). I really like the idea of Supergirl having a more alien costume than Superman and it leans into her history of growing up on Krypton as opposed to growing up on earth. The street clothes variant doesn’t really have any reasoning I just thought it looked cool. Seeing the 90’s Superboy costume on a female figure might make you think back to the unused pitch by Magdalene Visaggio where she wanted to tell a story of Kon -El being a trans woman and going by the name Skyrocket. I’m not positive, but I do think this drawing was made before this pitch saw the light of day or at the very least it was an unrelated drawing. I would love to see the Skyrocket storyline explored somehow.

These next 8 drawings all kind of just fall into standard Supergirl drawings and I don’t have much to say about them. I do like the little splash of color in the the shirt rip drawing and I feel like it adds a nice dynamic flare. Otherwise this is just a standard collection of Supergirl drawings.

My last little set is a bit of a look at Marvel/DC crossovers. On the left is me drawing Supergirl on the cover of Marvel Ultimate Endgame #1 mostly as a joke, but the right is the never to be explored crossover of Mayday “Spider-Girl” Parker and Cir-El Supergirl. There isn’t too much explanation for the Endgame sketch, I got the Ultimate Endgame blind bag because I thought it would be fun. As you can tell, I got the blank variant in the blind bag and the 10 minute drive home from my comic shop I had the idea of drawing Supergirl on it as a joke. In an attempt to farm content, I took to Bluesky (@spupergirl.bsky.com) to ask my followers if they would like to see that and there was a great response. I had a lot of fun drawing this and I have yet to read the comic (and I probably won’t). Mayday and Cir-El are a great team up and I feel like they would get along and It would be a great story to see in an upcoming Marvel/DC crossover. I imagine there aren’t any DC execs here reading but if you are, I would do it for free.

I hope you enjoyed taking a trip down memory lane with me. I do have a handful of digitally drawn Supergirls that aren’t part of Supergirl in the Multiverse, so if you would like to see those here, let me know and stick around. I do like the idea of keeping an archive of my Supergirl artwork as both a portfolio and a historical record. Also when I was going through my sketchbooks I found this cool alternate Spider-Man drawing I did that I have no other reason to ever show anywhere so enjoy!