Warning: contains spoilers for Knight Terrors: Action Comics #1!
Summary
- Power Girl is trapped in a nightmarish version of Krypton, but reality glitches, and she comes face-to-face with Kal-L, who tells her she is a defective robot.
- These nightmares reflect Power Girl’s quest for acceptance and her struggle to fit in with Earth’s superheroic community and the Superman Family.
- Power Girl’s self-doubt is manipulated by the villain Insomnia, who turns her into a defective robotic duplicate of Supergirl, using a classic Superman trope in a chilling and stunning way.
Power Girl is being forced to live a nightmarish version of a classic Superman trope. The last survivor of a now-dead universe, Power Girl has struggled to find her place among Earth’s superheroic community, but she has finally found a degree of peace. This peace is shattered in Knight Terrors: Action Comics #1 as Power Girl finds herself trapped in a hellish world — one that flips the script on a classic Superman trope.
In “She’s Got No Strings” by Leah Williams, Vasco Georgiev, Alex Guimarães and Becca Carey from Knight Terrors: Action Comics #1, Power Girl finds herself back on her version of Krypton. Rather than the planet being destroyed, her parents have decided to abandon her; she also must fight off an over-zealous suitor. As she goes to strike him, reality glitches, and she finds herself face-to-face with her cousin, Kal-L, the Golden Age Superman from her home universe.
Kal-L seemingly reveals to her that she is a robot and powers her down; he then takes her to a junkyard, telling the attendant she has a “major defect.” Afterward, Power Girl continues to trip through different nightmares, including one where her current partner Omen turns on her.
Power Girl’s Nightmares Are Unique to Her
Though these sequences are clearly “nightmares” caused by the new DC villain Insomnia, they still reflect Power Girl’s restlessness and quest for acceptance. Initially introduced as the Earth-2 Supergirl, Power Girl’s origin was significantly overhauled after the Crisis On Infinite Earths, which turned her into a descendent of Atlantean sorcerers. This origin was then retconned again nearly twenty years later in Infinite Crisis, which restored her classic Earth-2 story. Since then, Power Girl has struggled to fit in with both Earth’s heroic community and the Superman Family.
Knight Terrors: Action Comics #1 brings these insecurities back to the forefront of Paige’s story — by using a classic Superman trope. In many of the Man of Steel’s pre-Crisis adventures, he utilized robotic duplicates of himself; in some instances, he would use them while traveling in deep space, or when he needed to protect his secret identity as Clark Kent. Likewise, Supergirl used a similar strategy in her classic Silver Age appearances as well. Superman’s robotic duplicates are a quaint reminder of a simpler time in comics, but here the trope is employed with chilling effect. These different nightmare scenarios are the result of Power Girl’s “systems rebooting.
Power Girl’s Self Doubt Will Be Her Undoing
The issue’s final page, in which Omen puppeteers Power Girl using binary computer code, is truly terrifying and thematically on point. Since Crisis on Infinite Earths, Power Girl has seemingly drifted from team to team, never fitting in; the (incorrect) belief that she is an inferior version of Supergirl fueled this restlessness. Insomnia, the dark force behind Knight Terrors, has weaponized this anxiety, playing on Power Girl’s self-doubt by turning her into a defective robotic duplicate — in short, by making her a truly artificial version of Supergirl. This classic robotic Superman trope, long considered a life-saver, has been corrupted to stunning effect.
Knight Terrors: Action Comics #1 is on sale now from DC Comics!
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