I think showing her travails makes her more human, and shows that what she's overcome requires great strength. And I think that doesn't serve the character or the audience as well as it could. Tom King: I think Supergirl is one of those series that's very easy to write in a precious manner, where you worship her more than you write her. Did you intentionally make that introduction fun to lighten the heaviness of the story? We find Supergirl in an interesting state when she's introduced in the story. So, this is a stripping down of Supergirl - but I think it's just a pure version of her. I wanted to get back to her original self. She was 14 when she saw her planet, all of her friends die, and her parents die. How do we get back to what makes her cool? The idea of a woman who, unlike Superman, didn't just survive a Holocaust she witnessed the Holocaust. Going back to Otto Binder, and him basing this character on his daughter. Instead, let's see the purity of that character. It seems like all our stories are about her dad or her relationship to Superman. There's so much there, and I just wanted to take all that stuff off and get to the core of the character get her out of her normal environments and her normal conflicts.

Not to mention in the '90s, when I was coming up, she was like an ectoplasmic space angel. She's gone through so much that it's hard to get a hold of her. She's changed dramatically in the last 10 years, between coming back to life to the New 52 to Rebirth. Her dad has 13 origin stories sometimes he's evil, sometimes he's a robot, sometimes alive, sometimes he's dead. At least 13 writers have rewritten her origin over the years. So, the idea of this thing was to strip her story down, because Supergirl has a majorly weird history in terms of continuity. It's like they've got varnishes all over them, and you've got to get them off.

It's about taking them apart and putting them back together. I think with characters like Supergirl and Superman, you're not looking to deconstruct these characters you're looking to take off all the armor that everyone else has put on until you get to the core of them.

And it's always been a great formula for making good, deep Batman stories.

You want to tear them apart and see what makes them work, and show how those things have ironies and depth and grayness, and then you put them back together. With Batman characters, there's a deconstruction element to them. Tom King: I think there's a difference when you work with Batman characters and when you work with Super characters.

Supergirl woman of tomorrow tpb