Kara in Warlord-land, part 1 – Warlord 116-120

Cover Date: April 1987 to October 1987

Release Date: 15th January to 19th May 1987

When following a single character, especially at best a B-lister, through their publishing history you occasionally end up in some weird little cul-de-sacs of their Universe. Such is the case with Kara and her appearances in Warlord.

Now I’m not going to dive through 115 issues to get the feel for the comic so we’re going to have to rely on what the internet tells me about this comic.

Basically, Skartaris is the hollow world, a world inside the Earth itself (later retconned to be in another dimension), settled at some point by Atleanians. Our titular Warlord, Travis Morgan was a US pilot who crashed in the Yukon and stumbled into the place. His machinations aren’t why we’re here though we’re here for Kara!

Warlord #116 (April 1987) 

Kara appears on the very last page riding into Bandakhar, City of Thieves, looking for directions to wherever she’s going. When a large thug tries to intimidate her she just picks him up one-handed and throws him a good distance away. We’re given no indication as to who she is, it’s only if you look with some hindsight you can see she’s wearing her swimsuit costume with a blue t-shirt over the top. With no pants or even a skirt over the top, it looks really silly. Though to be fair, it’s pretty fitting to the other fashions of the world, in some way she’s overdressed compared to some of the other characters.

Warlord #117 (May 1987)

Kara is up to a page and 3/4 this time around! She’s trying to chart a boat to New Atlantis, somewhere the Captains doesn’t want to go as he’s travelling south to Bakwele. When a rope snapped spilling heavily boxes, endangering the Captain’s daughter, Kara zips along at superspeed to snatch the girl to safety. This helpfully convinces the Captain to go north to take her to her destination.

Her hair seems to have grown some between issues, which I assume is to suggest that some time has passed, though there’s no implication either way. I actually like her hair like this, and I assume the headband is a callout to the once worn by Supergirl towards her end (though like everyone else this Kara wouldn’t have remembered Supergirl).

This time we open with Kara at sea, again her hair having grown more to show more time has passed. And the Captain helpfully tells us that New Atlantis is nothing but a boneyard, Mr Exposistion further explaining that a power wizard drained her minions to try a powerful spell that ended up destroying himself rather than Warlord.

Kara doesn’t answer instead warning him that trouble is on its way, having seen it well in advance with her supervision (a power that she’s rarely if at all shown before). This attacker is in a laser-firing Scorpion ship, which Kara flies off to attack fairly easily defeating it but not before it gets a shot off at the ships she has been travelling on. To save the crew she lifts up the ship and flies it towards the nearest island. It’s implied here that she’s still getting used to her powers, even though she all seem like fairly solid Kryptonian abilities like she had before. But obviously, now she’s, sigh, Atlantean so that might be having an effect.

After many pages of pulp action and subplots, we cut back to Kara in the deserted city, where we learn that she’s here to try and learn about her Atleantian heritage. She’s determined not to rest until she finds anything about her background.

Warlord #119 (July 1987)

After exploring the city for some time Power Girl finds a hidden shrine underneath a massive plinth of a statue of her grandfather Arion defeating a monster. Opening the massive stone block of a door and entering the shrine she’s however inadvertently released something from its imprisonment…

This whispy red mist has been influencing her as she’s been using the data retrieval system in the shrine, remembering she’s actually a skilled programmer. She then uses her laser eyes, coloured yellow rather than it’s regular red (though again she very rarely used this power) on a crystal cube releasing a red demon to who she pledges her service to straight away.

Finally, one of the main characters gets involved in Kara’s little subplot, which has been building up over the last few issues. In this case, it’s Jennifer Morgan, daughter of our Warlord who’s also a powerful magic-user. She senses the released evil and follows it back to New Atlantis. The demon commands the mind control Kara to attack Jennifer who stays in a force bubble trying, and eventually succeeding in freeing her from the demon’s influence. The demon has however fled the scene. It’s only here that we’re actually told who Jennifer is, this is not comic books that treat everyone comics as someone’s first! Likewise, we’ve still not been told directly that this is Kara in the story, only a hint in #118 and a caption box in #119 mentioning that it’s Power Girl.