Power Girl’s Name Change Explained

Few characters have had quite as complicated a history as Power Girl. Originally created by Wally Wood, Gerry Conway, and Ric Estrada, the character was plunged almost immediately into a continuity nightmare after Crisis on Infinite Earths. Over the years, most writers have struggled to figure out what to do with her in her “downtime,” and how to distinguish her from Supergirl when she wasn’t in costume. A new miniseries is working to fix that — and the first step, apparently, is to literally give the character a new name.

While Power Girl has gone by Karen Starr for years, with “Karen” itself being something of a riff on Kara Zor-El (or Zor-L), because the character originated as Supergirl’s Earth-2 doppelganger. Following Crisis, with the multiverse no longer available and orders from on high to reduce the number of Kryptonians in the books, Power Girl was reinvented as having an Atlantean backstory — although it never really clicked with most readers, and even in-story there were occasional hints that there was more to her story.

Now, her name will be Paige Stetler — and there’s a story behind each half of that name.

“Paige is uniquely hers,” writer Lean Williams told DC’s official blog. “It started out as Omen having a series of nicknames for Power Girl. She abbreviated Power Girl as PG, and then it got shortened into Peej. Later, when they’re working with Jon Kent on something, he’s like, ‘Peej kind of sounds like Paige, which is a really pretty name.’ And the idea is, this is the beginning of our Power Girl story. This is page one. So that’s how I came up with Paige.”

As for Stetler, it’s a little less like a word game…although not much. 

“I wanted her to have a cowboy name,” she explains. “I used to work at a cattle ranch in Montana, so I’ve known lots of cowboys. Some of them were named Stetler. I wanted her to have a kind of cowboy-sounding name because, compared to the rest of the Super-Family, she’s a bit of a lone ranger. She’s a part of the family and she loves them, but she’s also working on her own a lot. That’s what she’s used to and that’s what she is comfortable with.”

The character has, in recent years, grappled with her backstory weirdness and how “out of place” she feels right on the page. Since the multiverse was restored in Infinite Crisis, her Kryptonian roots have been returned, as has her role as Supergirl on Earth-2 prior to landing in the “main” DC Universe. Of course, she also hasn’t spent a lot of time on the page where she wasn’t operating as Power Girl, with “PG” and “Peej” being nicknames for that identity, rather than a shortened form of Karen.