Kara Zor-El has lived many lives across her long, occasionally strange comic book history, but arguably no book has been more important to her modern imagining than Woman of Tomorrow. When the smash-hit miniseries released in 2021 to critical acclaim, it quickly became the jumping-on-point recommendation for people who wanted to get the Supergirl experience, even with its uniquely sci-fi bent. And then everything changed again a few years later, when James Gunn nonchalantly dropped the book as one of the comics his new era of the DC movie universe was going to draw inspiration from.
Now, Woman of Tomorrow is consistently one of DC’s premiere trades—spurred in part by the anticipation for next year’s Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow movie, directed by Craig Gillespie and starring House of the Dragon breakout Milly Alcock as Kara. It’s an anticipation that has only grown further when it became clearer that the film isn’t just taking the book’s catchy title, but specifically drawing on its world and characters. Our first look at the film came ripped right out of one of its most famous panels, and key characters from the book—even characters that didn’t make the final cut—joined the cast. Woman of Tomorrow will be just the second movie in DC’s attempted re-do at this whole thing, and its vision is one explicitly guided by roots in the comics unlike anything we’ve seen announced so far.
Which is why when io9 visited the team behind the book—writer Tom King, penciller Bilquis Evely, and colorist Matheus Lopes—in London, England recently, fresh off a visit to the set of the now-filming adaptation, it was important to recognize not just the moment of Woman of Tomorrow‘s impending shoot even further into the stars, but just how far the dreams of its creative team have come in the last few years. A dream realized in one way: this transatlantic visit marked the first time the trio had actually met in person.
“For me it was nerve-wracking. Because we’ve been working together for five, almost six years—since 2020 I think,” King told io9 in a small corner of a quiet London restaurant. “If Mat and Bil, they met me and they’re like ‘oh my god that guy’s horrible’ in person… I’m just so desperate to keep seeing them in my inbox, and seeing just the transcendent heights they reach and how I can somehow contribute to that. It was mostly just nervousness at that.”
“So that’s why I completely disguised my personality! A little joke but it’s based on truth,” King continued. “I just admire what they do so much, and being in person with them was an absolute joy just to see this one.” It was a feeling, like one of the many about this book and this character, shared by Evely and Lopes.
“I was very nervous to meet [Tom],” Evely added. “But at the same time we worked for so long and I read your writing for so long and I feel like I met you. I feel like I’m your friend. To finally see you here, in this moment, to visit to the set. It’s a special moment.”
Lopes, meanwhile, came somewhat prepared. “I wasn’t as nervous because I’d watched a lot of podcasts to see what Tom was like,” the colorist said. “I felt like I knew him, besides from the scripts… it felt good.”
Woman of Tomorrow was an unlikely creative process for the trio. Work on the book began during the heights of the covid-19 pandemic, and not only were King, Evely, and Lopes separated by oceans and continents, not even communicating over video, but King had already mostly written what would become the scripts for the final series by the time Evely and Lopes were submitting pages for the first.
“I feel this is so beautiful and distinctive, and I have one superpower. I do so many things poorly, but I can do one thing well,” King jokingly reflected. “Which is I can I can picture in my head what a comic book is going to look like. It comes from wasting your youth reading too many comic books, and I definitely wasted my youth away. I could see in my head what [Bilquis] would do with it, so I just wrote the comic that I thought she’d create. And I was right. I mean it went above and beyond what I thought. That was the creative process: it was just writing the best story I could, and watching her draw it in my head, and watching her draw it in real life.”
“And that’s why we are so good together,” Evely added. “We’re together because he wrote what needs to be wrote, and I do my part. It’s a good match.” A match that has already proven to bear fruit beyond DC in their swords-and-sorcery series Helen of Wyndhorn at Dark Horse—and may yet bear further fruit, with King already working on ideas for his potential next collaboration with the artist.
It’s the energy of that collaborative potential that drew King, Evely, and Lopes to Supergirl in the first place. “I’ve always said from the beginning of my career that I’m not so interested in the characters I work on, more than the team I work with, and the collaborators,” King said of the early stages of what would become Woman of Tomorrow. “So it began with an editor I had worked on Mr. Miracle and Strange Adventures with, and I’m saying, ‘Is there something there that we can do another Mr. Miracle for,’ basically. I would start trying to do another Mr. Miracle. And they said Supergirl was available, so I said yeah, obviously incredible potential with her. And I think the next thing they said is the artists available to draw it. They had a list and the first one was Bilquis. I didn’t read another name after her. I thought they were joking. She’s willing to do Supergirl? And so I think it started with the artist, before the idea.”
“I talked to Steve Orlando, who was writing Supergirl, and I was said ‘She’s kind of generic. I don’t really know. She has the same values as Superman,’” King continued. “And he’s like ‘No no, she doesn’t have the same values as Superman because she’s been through something Superman hasn’t. She was alive on Krypton, she was 14. She saw her planet destroyed. She lived through a horrible event. She lived through three other horrible events, to watch her asteroid destroyed, and her parents die. And Superman was just a baby. He arrived into optimism and she arrived… she had been through something. She arrived having seen something destroyed. And it’s a completely different perspective on how to be up, up in the sky, with that burden on your back.”
But Kara wasn’t the only star of Woman of Tomorrow. Arguably, in some ways, she isn’t even the star. That comes in the form of Ruthye Marye Knoll, a young woman from an alien world Supergirl comes across while celebrating her 21st birthday (away from a yellow sun, so she can get appropriately soused, of course). Seeking the death of a mercenary who killed her father in cold blood, Ruthye becomes the heart of Kara’s journey in the book, and the core of its themes. “I wanted to sort of [do] an Odyssey-like plot. I’d written a book called Up in the Sky which is a very Odyssey plot—just going from planet to planet looking for a kidnapped girl. I wanted this to complement that book,” King added. “I was looking for an Odyssey plot and I sort of came with this idea of two people, one giving each other one giving the other the chance for revenge. In the beginning I thought Supergirl would be the younger of the two and I was actually going to put Lobo [ed. note: who will now appear in the cinematic version in some capacity, played by former Aquaman star Jason Momoa]. But it was my editor who switched it out, my editor Brittany [Holzherr], was like ‘Make Supergirl the veteran.’ So then I invented Ruthye, and we were off to the races.”
“When I first saw this pitch for the mini series, I somehow knew what to do,” Evely said of developing Ruthye’s design, and the world she came from. “It’s like I imagine my head, and I show you some image boards with some ideas with pretty much cosmic images, with a little piece of vibe. I try to create lines that evoke some good sensibility for the comics. So every detail in the panels, is like telling some how I see the history behind [Ruthye] as well. Pretty much my passion is the backgrounds, and her eyes, and the way she feels all in all these scenes.”
It’s an interesting contrast to Evely’s approach to designing Kara for the series. Unlike the new, fantastical sci-fi aesthetic of the rest of Woman of Tomorrow, Kara cuts a distinctly classical figure. “The way I draw her, it’s because she passed through a lot of things like in her life like Tom said,” Evely continued. “She is young, but at the same time I feel like she was very mature. I try to show it in the way she looks, in the way she stands, or even move in her hands—it’s very subtle but it’s making all the difference, because it’s very human. You can identify yourself in her.”
That passion Evely and Lopes alike felt in pushing something new in the DC cosmos—which has spent generations going under re-interpretation after re-interpretation—to give Woman of Tomorrow an aesthetic unlike anything DC was releasing at the time. “I was just finishing The Dreaming which was a very cosmic book, and I kind of brought with me the same kind of the same aesthetic for Supergirl,” Evely added. “Dreaming was a book where we could explore everything. I feel like in Supergirl we could do it even more, because we went through a lot of planets, and in every single case, you could create another world. It was kind of a fun way to explore the creativity and the imagination of what we could create.”
“The universe is a big place, and like Earth, I imagine there’s a lot of diversity—I wanted to every place in the book to feel especially different,” Lopes said of the psychedelic yet warm colorscape he envisioned for Woman of Tomorrow. “I made sure that little things would always stand out from what we have here in Earth. For a small example… there are no blue skies until the last issue. I made sure of that. There’s always some shade of green, or something like that, or a yellow. I don’t know if people noticed that very intentionally, but somehow I think that they get this—there are no blue skies, so when there’s aliens that are more humanlike, like Ruthye and Krem [the man who killed her father], I always tried to leave a little something different, like the color of the eyes. It’s pink eyes for Ruthye, purple eyes for Krem. I was looking for a diversity beyond Earth as well—different lighting, lights, different lights, different hues for nature.”
Evely and Lopes being on the same page, literally and aesthetically, for Woman of Tomorrow, was born out of their prior collaboration on The Dreaming. “Whatever project Bilquis was choosing [after Dreaming], I would go with her. It was just really exciting, when she picked Supergirl,” Lopes continued. “For Woman of Tomorrow, I did something that I don’t usually do and I would say it’s kind of breaking the world of comics: I chose the feel of the style for the comic before I read a lot of it, and saw a lot of it, because it was the pandemic. It was a rough time, for me and for the whole world. I was trying to do some more colorful work. I don’t know why, but it was me trying to bring some color into a dark time. So even before Supergirl, I was like ‘No, I’m gonna make this a very bright vibrant world and universe.’ And it fits perfectly.”
“I think that’s a little of the magic of the art. Tom was in a headspace. Bilquis and I were in a headspace. And that combined, in that moment of time, was what created Supergirl.” Lopes continued. “It was really something out of chance. I just wanted to compliment the page.”
But that headspace also informed Woman of Tomorrow‘s darker bent, too. The undercurrent of the book, driven through Ruthye’s desire to seek vengeance for her father’s murder, is a reckoning with the act of violence itself, as Krem cuts a bloody path across the stars to avoid Supergirl and Ruthye alike. The balance between the cosmic awe of the series’ aesthetic, and that dark heart, was something Evely reflected through her own feelings while she was working on the series. “Something I always try to add in my work is that a sense of comfort, somehow, even when it’s a darker place or a sad environment—you can see still beauty in that, and for me, it’s a kind of comfort while I was working on this book,” Evely said. “I was like everyone at the time, very stressed. I had come from another project, had worked a lot, and through three years straight I was very tired and stressed, almost burnout. With Supergirl I was in the middle of understanding what it is I wanted to do. I always loved to work on comics. I always liked to draw, but at some point, in this case when I was starting Supergirl I was like, ‘Do I even like drawing?’ Because I was so stressed.
“But the book, and the image we were creating, was so special. I saw the first pages colored by [Matheus], and through that whole process, I got to enjoy my own work and discover my own style again, somehow. I think it shows on the page, and it shows a kind of discomfort through the story we were telling.”
That was something that reflected in what had drawn King to Supergirl in the first place: the tragedies that she had worked through and overcome, to become the person Kara is as we know her today. “One of the interesting things about Kara was that one of her original creators, Otto Binder, created her as a dedication to his daughter. He created two characters as a dedication to her—Kara and Ms. Marvel from the Captain Marvel family. But soon after he created Supergirl, his daughter tragically died,” King said. “He spent the rest of his life haunted, it ruined him, destroyed him as a man and a creator, and I always felt… I don’t know, some transference, like that character has a little bit of that ghost in it. That little bit of haunting, a little bit of her that’s not like Superman.”
“There’s something there because she’s been through tragedy. She’s been through Krypton, her actual origins come from tragedy and how that changes a person. How it makes them a little tougher, a little more more cynical, a little more open-eyed towards the world,” King continued. “But also a little stronger. A little more powerful and compassionate, because they’ve actually seen the other side of it. They’ve seen the pain that they’re saving people from. That was the idea that I wanted to push. That sounds like a very complicated way of what I’m trying to say, which is to make her a badass and put a little bit of Wolverine in her. That cool, rebel character that I always loved growing up.”
It’s clear that the team’s vision for Supergirl resonated beyond just comic critics. In January 2023, James Gunn and Peter Safran revealed that one of the first films in their ambitious slate for a revived DC movie universe would be Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, specifically drawing on the book’s interpretation of Kara’s struggles. For the team behind the book—especially as trade collections began selling out just from Gunn’s mention—the news came out of nowhere.
“When the news about the film came out, it was so great, because I knew people would turn to the comic,” Evely said.
“That the announcement happened was very shocking. We were in Brazil, figuring out the next steps,” Lopes added. “After a while, it becomes so distant. Now it’s finally becoming real to us, visiting the set. Things are as real as they can get. It was something so far away, and now it’s really close, I love it.”
“It’s real but it’s still surreal. Because it’s so crazy,” Evely continued. “I felt a great sense of comfort [visiting the set], because we saw how hard such talented people were working on this movie. We gave all of our hearts to it in the book, so it’s really nice to see that they are giving their hearts to the movie.”
King already had some experience working in the realm of DC film—he had previously worked with Ava DuVernay on the since-cancelled New Gods film, and in the new era of DC beyond Supergirl, he had worked in early phases of the Lanterns TV show. But that didn’t change how seeing Woman of Tomorrow be part of that vision felt. “I mean, I try to be as cynical as I can about everything—mostly to keep up with my children so we can be on the same vibe,” King joked. “When they first showed us the scope of it, I literally… tears in my eyes. I was trying to play cool, because there are a lot of producers and people I wanted to look tough with. Bilquis and Matheus are there. So I’d subtly wipe away my tears. If anyone asks: I was cool and chill.”
“Not to name drop, but to defer to someone who understands this better than I do. I was hanging out with Brian Michael Bendis at a con–everywhere Bendis goes, people come up to him because of Miles Morales, the impact that he had on culture on the world. They get pictures with him, and after we’re walking the hall, he gets stopped like seven times,” King continued. “And I felt like every time he turned to me he was just like ‘Miles is just a gift. It’s just a gift. It’s like walking around with a gift all day.’ That’s how Supergirl feels. It’s just like a gift, it’s wonderful.”
And with that gift, there’s a peculiar sense of ownership Woman of Tomorrow‘s team can have over this specific vision of the character. They don’t own Supergirl, of course, but Woman of Tomorrow is their Supergirl. “I feel like the way she presents herself is something we created,” Evely reflected. “The way she conducts, and, speaks, and looks, I feel this is from us. I like to think that maybe the other people remember her like that.”
“Putting aside the ownership and property, and all these bureaucratic things about it, yeah, I do feel like she’s partly ours,” Lopes added. “We created that comic book and that is ours. I gave Kara a lighter tone of blue [in Woman of Tomorrow]. In my variant cover for the new Supergirl series, I made sure I drew her in a darker shade of blue—because Woman of Tomorrow has that lighter blue [on her suit]. There’s a lot of light in that book, and it shines more.”
“Kara has a ton of meaning to me. It’s a story I always tell: I always loved to draw since I was very young, I always liked to create characters and stories. But I didn’t know doing comics was [a viable career], because there just wasn’t a thing in Brazil like that. We didn’t have access to a lot of comics,” Evely concluded. “When I was a teenager, I was in a paper store, and I saw a thumbs up from Supergirl on a cover—I recognized her from cartoons, from television. But there was a little bit of text on the cover that said ‘Oh, drawn by a Brazilian artist.’ It was a real job, and done by a Brazilian? I can do that too?’”
“So when I started working on Woman of Tomorrow, I had already worked for 10 years with comics at that point. I had never tried pitching for her, but then I saw the pitch from Tom, it just felt perfect. I could draw more fantasy, and starscapes that I love. Like I said, I was in a very stressful moment working on it at first. In the process of creating the pages, I felt like I was starting to fall in love with comics again,” Evely continued. “Supergirl… I discovered my future job through her. And then she saved me again, and brought me back to what I really love. Woman of Tomorrow is the book that is represents all that to me now.”
“I didn’t start reading comics until I was a little older,” Lopes added. “I hadn’t ready any Supergirl comics before working with Tom and Bilquis. My story begins with her there, but I fell in love with the characters Tom and Bilquis created for that book—and now she’s changed my life! That’s my favorite DC character ever.”
For King, too, there was a special resonance that he had not first felt when exploring who was on offer for his next DC venture. “Again, this book was written during the pandemic. My children were home with me 24 hours while it was being written. My daughter was 10, 11 at the time, and every page—every story, every ending, beginning, we would talk about it just so we had something to talk about,” King reflected. “And in making the book, I didn’t intend to do this, but I ended up wanting… I tried to make someone as complicated and as cool and as strong and as beautiful and as tough as my daughter. The book will always be the moment between the two of us as the world is sort of catching up.”
“As she grows older, I’ll still have this book. It’s beautiful.”
Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow is available in multiple complete formats, wherever good comics are sold. Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, the film, is currently slated for a June 2026 release.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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