Examples:
Kara dreams herself out of Midvale Orphanage and into Smallville as the adopted daughter of Jonathan and Martha Kent. As Supergirl she is celebrated and praised but as Linda Kent she is ostracized as a nerd at Smallville High and thus unable to land the jerk she dotes on.

Linda Lee get adopted by a police officer and his wife, she then spends most of her time getting her father out of deadly peril before being sent back to the orphanage on the grounds that their home is too dangerous for a teenaged girl.

The list goes on but you get the picture…character driven stuff heavy on emotional content.

Those stories, in my view, had a unique fairy tale quality that super-hero comics abandoned long ago. The element of the fantastic is what made Supergirl (and the Man of Steel, Superboy, etc….) one of the more notable characters of the era.

Comics bloggers - including yours truly, I must admit - mock that fairy tale element. We point to the odder aspects of the Weisinger era and call them “twisted” or “perverted.” (Not that we don’t love those stories, natch!)

But, to be honest, the Brothers Grimm would be equally fine fodder for the internet if there were fairy tale blogs out there equivalent to, say, the Absorbascon or postmodernbarney.

(Hey, for all I know there are!)

The only genre of comics that still taps into the same sources as fairy tales - aside from Fables, of course - is manga. Super-hero fans might scream and shout at a shojo Kara, but if well done it probably would attract female fans and sell a boatload.

i don’t know about canceling her current book even with all of DC’s incoherence about the character, I don’t wanna give up on my favorite. Besides, canceling the current book will only strengthen the calls to bring back PAD’s SG - which could only be done by snuffing the current character - and that I am dead set against.

The sad part is, DC did do Supergirl right. They imported her from the cartoons in Superman Adventures and the JLU book and she fairly flourished…bratty, sarcastic but also sweet and all of a heroine. Why they felt the need to get away from that characterization is a mystery to me. I attribute Kara’s current revival to Paul Dini’s use of the character back in 1994 in Superman: The Animated Series. Kara In Zee proved the SA style Supergirl worked very very well indeed sans fire-wings and fatuous pseudo theology.

So yeah, lets have a Johnny DC Supergirl…as long as they refrain from “Kara by way of Manga” artwork.