Who is Psi on 'Supergirl?'

'The New Adventures of Supergirl'

In the first three issues of The New Adventures of Supergirl, Psi served as the muscle for a mysterious man pulling her strings.

She managed to overwhelm and defeat Supergirl, but convinced her employer not to kill the Girl of Steel until she (Psi) found a way to siphon off Supergirl's power for herself.

(This boss was apparently quite secure in himself, since presumably adding Supergirl's own powers to Psi's would make her much more powerful than he could hope to be...)

When she failed, her mysterious boss proved himself to be something else entirely...!

This three-issue arc, Psi's first appearance, was written by Paul Kupperberg and drawn by Carmine Infantino. It was recently reissued in The Daring New Adventures of Supergirl Vol. 1, which you can get at your local comic shop, on Amazon, or digitally.

Suicide Squad

Kupperberg and John Ostrander (with artist Erik Larsen) would bring back Psi for a single issue teaming the Doom Patrol with the Suicide Squad.

In Doom Patrol and Suicide Squad Special #1, part of a crossover story between the two titles, Psi joined the Suicide Squad -- only to learn (along the The Thinker, Weasel, and Mister 104) that the team sometimes lives up to its name.

Two fo the four returned to life later, but the next time fans saw Psi, she was much worse for wear...!

You can get the Doom Patrol and Suicide Squad Special on ComiXology.

The zombie years

It should not be a surprise that a minor, dead, villainous character showed up again in the pages of Blackest Night: Suicide Squad.

What is perhaps more interesting is that the Blackest Night event would be the second time Psi would return as a zombie, the first being Suicide Squad #50, in which the team is haunted by zombified specters of those they had lost.

You can get that issue here.

John Ostrander, who co-wrote Suicide Squad #50 with Kim Yale, would also write Suicide Squad #67, the Blackest Night tie-in released as part of a promotion where DC brought cancelled comics "back from the dead" to tell their zombie stories (this time with Gail Simone).

You can get that one here. It was the first part of a three-part arc that would play out in Simone's Secret Six #17 and #18.

Forever Evil

In Forever Evil, Psi played a bit of a Hannibal Lecter role; she was key to helping Steve Trevor figure out how to get the Justice League back -- and seemed to go along with it fairly willingly, with the caveat that she got to have her fun messing around with his mind from the relative security if her ARGUS holding cell along the way.

Here, Psi was reintroduced for The New 52 as a telepath who had breached from another dimension, with not much else in the way of backstory offered.

She was also a bit more monstrous in the reinvention, with no mouth to actually communicate with Trevor.

You can get Forever Evil: ARGUS in trade paperback at your local comic shop, on Amazon, or digitally.

Rebirth

In a recent Batgirl Annual, Supergirl and Batgirl discovered Psi -- kind of a pitiful creature here, almost the natural extension of what we saw in Forever Evil -- trapped in a Cadmus lab.

Apparently after promising that they would free her from her psionic powers, they instead tapped her brain into the Phantom Zone, giving her more power but near-constant agony.

Psi recruits Supergirl to send her to the Zone, which Supergirl does -- not willingly, as she is worried what might happen to Psi there.

What did, in fact, happen is that she went a little crazy and reappeared for a two-issue arc in Supergirl #10 and #11. Eventually, Psi's sanity is restored when Supergirl and Batgirl help her to break her psychic connections to numerous Phantom Zone inmates.