Supergirl in the Multiverse: Earth-18

Earth-18 is home to the Justice Riders, a Wild West style Justice League based mainly on the 80s and 90s Justice League International family of comics. In their debut appearance, Sheriff Diana Prince gathers up a handful of other lawmen and former accomplices including Kid Flash, Hawkman, Blue Beetle, Booster Gold, and J’onn J’onzz and leads them in a quest to Helldorado in a battle against Maxwell Lord. The story ends with the team disbanding with no promise of further stories which seems to be the case. Most appearances of Earth-18 past Justice Riders are brief cameos or the team dying in the pages of convergence. Earth-18 is also the name of a similar universe first appearing in Multiversity that has a similar but slightly different team of Justice Riders but again this universe has been mostly restricted to cameos.

When finding a Supergirl for this universe, and often for all the universes, I first look to finding the Superman of the given universe. Kryptonians don’t have a lot of presence in Earth-18, Clark Kent is mentioned briefly and shows up at the end of Justice Riders as a dime novelist but doesn’t show any sort of super powers. In the Superboy storyline titled “Hyper-Tension” that ran from issues 60-65 of his title from the 90s featured a hypertime version of Earth-18 and shows Kid Kon-El. Kid Kon-El seems to have similar powers to the New Earth Superboy implying the possibility of Kryptonians on this earth and also Kon’s steed is named Comet, a common companion to Supergirl in many iterations. For Earth-18 I mostly focused on the pre-flashpoint version of the universe and leaned into the idea of JLI in the Wild West. Power Girl was a member of the Justice League during it’s JLI era and showed up in Justice League America, Justice League Europe, and Justice League International and I feel like she would at the very least have been mentioned if Justice Riders ever got a proper sequel. Making her Sheriff of Argo feels like a nice casual reference to classic lore and also her being a sheriff would also help to connect her with Diana who is also a sheriff. And while Sheriff Karen Starr of Argo doesn’t actually exist in Earth-18, her steed Comet does.

As with all of my Supergirl in the Multiverse posts, this is my own artwork. This drawing depicts Karen Starr, Sheriff of Argo in the foreground standing against her steed Comet, a brown horse. They are standing in a desert environment with the town of Argo shown in the background. Orange and red skies imply the sun is setting on the horizon. The top right features a motif of Power Girl’s symbol with an 18 on top of it.