At the end of last week’s Supergirl (Vol. 8 #18) we are left with a Supergirl that has seemingly lost her powers forever after being exposed to Gold Kryptonite. To coincide with this, I thought I would take a look at a few previous stories where Supergirl loses her powers and how she got them back. This is not an exhaustive list by any means but I did want to give a good variety by covering a silver age story, a modern story, and a story from the tv show.
We’ll start with one of the earlier appearances of Gold Kryptonite and a story I touched upon before in my Introduction to Black Flame post. “The Maid of Menace” is not only a clever play on Supergirl’s moniker “The Maid of Might”, it’s also the name of the backup story to Action Comics #304 by Leo Dorfman and Jim Mooney. This is the introductory story of Black Flame and prominently features Gold Kryptonite. I won’t cover this story too thoroughly, but as part of Black Flame’s plot, she convinces Supergirl that she’s a descendant of the heroic lass. Supergirl concocts the plan to expose herself to gold Kryptonite so that she and her descendants wouldn’t have super powers. A good chunk of act 3 has Supergirl powerless, we find out Black Flame isn’t actually a space pirate queen from the future and is instead just a normal villain from Kandor. Supergirl get’s overcome by quicksand, Black Flame starts shrinking (due to some red-k shenanigans), and Supergirl reveals that she knew everything all along.
The solution here for how Supergirl got over her permanent power loss is that she didn’t actually expose herself to gold-k and it was all a ruse. The silver age was full of one-and-done stories like this where the book would end right where our heroes started and it works quite well in this context and there’s a lot of good story crammed into 13 pages here. Black Flame also maintains her powers being removed for the rest of her pre-crisis appearances in a nice bit of continuity.
While, as a viewer, it never felt that Kara’s powers would be gone forever in “Human for a Day” – written by Yahlin Chang and Ted Sullivan and directed by Larry Teng – it is discussed by the characters in the story that it may be a permanent change. After solar-flaring in the previous episode of the series, Kara finds herself without powers for most of the 7th episode of the series. Kara struggles with her power-loss succumbing to both a cold and a broken arm throughout the events of the episode. We see the DEO uncertain of why Supergirl has yet to regain her powers, since Superman usually only needs 48 hours to re-charge and Max Lord even chimes in on the subject making the city believe that Supergirl may never return.
This is a rather brilliant episode and features a lot of characters stepping up into heroic roles with National City now without their star super-hero, notably Cat Grant who gives an empowering speech to the city and James Olsen who is on the streets helping out wherever he could almost as a pre-cursor to his Guardian role. My favorite scene however is when Kara sees a bodega getting robbed and even without powers she steps up, stands in front of a gun, and successfully de-escalates the situation. James snaps a photo of Supergirl during this scene and it’s baffling to me that he still thought the photo of Kara that he gave to her at the end of the season was better, the one that garnered the response of Kara saying “oh… I’m squinting”.
Supergirl’s powers are returned to her just in time to save the day – and specifically James who fell down an elevator shaft – by getting a burst of adrenaline. This is a really brilliant episode in a season full of fantastic episodes, although I would like to see how it would’ve played out if the episode ended with her still powerless and how that sort of intrigue could’ve added to the mindset that Supergirl may actually not get her powers back.
The last instance I want to discuss is the most interesting to me and really feels like the most permanent loss of Supergirl’s powers and it actually stuck for a little while. Crucible was the last arc of Supergirl’s New 52 run and issue 40 closed out this story and the title as a whole. Written by K Perkins and Mike Johnson, pencilled by Emanuela Lupacchino, inked by Ray McCarthy, colored by Hi-Fi, and lettered by Rob Leigh, saw release in early 2015 and the final few pages of the story is where we really get to the topic of this blog post. Supergirl has taken her leave of Crucible telling the rest of her team that she “just started a life [on Earth].” and she’s “not ready to abandon it” so we follow her back to Earth where we find her working at Elixir Cafe. Narration boxes mention that she is feeling back to sorts after getting depleted during the Crucible adventure, but she also feels different. The book ends with her slicing her finger and her suddenly feeling tired, hungry, and human like she hadn’t felt since coming to earth.
Even with that pretty crazy cliffhanger, Supergirl doesn’t really show up for a while after this. Most of the rest of 2015 she gets cameos at best and for the most part, if you wanted to get your Supergirl fix, you’d have to turn to Convergence but this wasn’t following up on the current continuity Supergirl. We would have to wait until the Final Days of Superman crossover about a year later where we find out what had been going on and where Supergirl had been. We find out that Vandal Savage and his evil plan was the cause of Supergirl’s power loss and that she had been working with Cameron Chase and the DEO to help get her powers back to fully functioning but had thus far only been able to produce brief stints of super-powers. This story arc would also introduce the most recent version of the Danvers being DEO agents Jeremiah and Eliza. Supergirl would continue appearing alongside New 52 Superman in his final story where she gladly takes on the role of the final survivor of the House of El, even with her powers still being underperforming at this point.
It wouldn’t be until August of the following year in Supergirl: Rebirth #1 issue – written by Steve Orlando with art by Emanuela Lupacchino, and Ray McCarthy, colors by Michael Atiyeh, and letters by Steve Wands – where we would see Supergirl’s powers return for real. At the DEO Ghost Site #252, Kara is working with her (now) foster parents of Jeremiah and Eliza Danvers and Director Cameron Chase in a new attempt to get Supergirl’s powers back. Using a Phantom Drive, a rocket, and a trip to the sun, this is “Supergirl’s last hope” at getting her powers back. The yellow sun, along with the Kryptonian regeneration matrix in the rocket, thankfully do work this time and Supergirl is back for real, just in time too to help her new parents deal with the Kryptonian werewolf known as Lar-On.
As I mentioned above, this isn’t a full list of all the times Supergirl loses her powers. After issue 50 of the Peter David story, Linda no longer has her earth-borne angel powers, the Reactron in the 2000s would also be powered by Gold-K but that Gold-K only temporarily removed powers, and in a recent entry of Supergirl in the Multiverse (Earth-523) we saw all the super-powers in the world removed. One thing I can say for certain, while it’s uncertain how she’ll get her powers back, Supergirl will return.
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