Power Girl Faces Her Worst Anxieties in Dark Version of the Superman Trope

In Knight Terrors: Action Comics #1, Power Girl is forced to live a horrific Superman trope because of something truly nefarious by Insomnia. 

Power Girl is the last survivor of a now-dead universe and has been struggling to find her place among the Earth’s superheroes. However, in the new Action Comic, she suddenly finds herself trapped inside a nightmare that completely overturns a classic Superman trope.

In “She’s Got No Strings” by Leah Williams, Alex Guimarães, Vasco Georgiev, and Becca Carey, Power Girl finds herself in her own version of Krypton, and her parents have abandoned her. Here, she is being persuaded by an over-enthusiastic suitor. 

Reality glitches as she goes to strike the suitor, and Power Girl faces her cousin, Kal-L, from her home universe.

Kal-L reveals that she is a robot and deactivates her. He transports her to a scrapyard and informs the worker that she has a “major defect.” 

However, Power Girl continues experiencing a barrage of nightmares, including one where her current partner Omen betrays her.

We realize that the DC villain, Insomnia, clearly causes Power Girl’s nightmares. However, these are also a testament to the fact that she craves acceptance and has never achieved it.

Initially introduced as the Earth-2 Supergirl, Power Girl’s origins were severely modified after the Crisis of Infinite Earths, and she was converted into a descendant of Atlantean sorcerers.

The makers corrected themselves again twenty years later in Infinite Crisis and restored her Earth-2 heritage. This constant to and fro has left her hanging between the Earth’s heroic community and the Superman Family.

Knight Terrors: Action Comics #1 revisits the anxieties of Power Girl by employing a classic Superman storyline. 

In many of the pre-Crisis adventures of the Man of Steel, he used robotic replicas of himself for security and secrecy. He would sometimes deploy them while exploring deep space or when he needed to safeguard his identity as Clark Kent. 

Similarly, Supergirl also adopted a comparable strategy in her classic Silver Age appearances. Superman’s robotic replicas are a nostalgic nod to a more innocent era in comics, but here, the device is used with horrifying effects. 

These various nightmares result from Power Girl’s “systems rebooting.”

The final page of the issue, where Omen controls Power Girl with binary code, is a horrifying but appropriate end to the story.

Power Girl has been a wanderer since Crisis on Infinite Earths, joining various teams but never having a sense of belonging. Her (false) perception of being a lesser Supergirl has fueled this instability since time immemorial. 

Insomnia has exploited this insecurity, transforming Power Girl into a malfunctioning robotic replica — in essence, making her a truly synthetic version of Supergirl. 

This classic trope of a robotic Superman has been twisted, turned, and manipulated to a shocking degree to jeopardize the life of Power Girl!