The first teaser for DC Studios’ Supergirl was brief, but it did give us a quick look at the homeworld of the titular heroine, played by Milly Alcock. We witness as an energy dome encases an alien city, while the rest of the planet crumbles around it. This is Argo City, birthplace of Kara Zor-El, a.k.a. Supergirl, which escaped the destruction of Krypton and became its own world. We see it in the Supergirl trailer, and we assume there will be many flashbacks to Kara’s tortured childhood there. However, in comics and other media, Argo City has undergone numerous iterations. These are the most important and long-lasting versions, from both DC and outside comics media, all leading up to 2026’s Supergirl.
Action Comics #252/Silver Age (1959)
The Silver Age origins of Supergirl’s home of Argo City are admittedly pretty goofy. Even by comic book physics standards, how they explained Supergirl’s birthplace is, to put it mildly, eye-roll inducing. In its original incarnation, Argo was a domed city on Krypton. The clear dome was created by Zor-El, the scientist brother of Jor-El, Superman’s dad. It was intended to keep Argonians healthier by breathing the purified air of the city. But that’s not the goofy part. As revealed in Action Comics#252, when Krypton exploded, the chunk of the planet with Argo City on it just floated away, containing thousands of Kryptonian survivors. Yes, Argo and its inhabitants just yeeted off out into space, on a giant chunk of rock inside a bubble, instead of disintegrating. We’re sure the 8-year-olds reading it probably didn’t even blink.
Eventually, Zor-El and his wife, Alura, discovered that the bedrock underneath Argo City was becoming Kryptonite. It slowly started to poison the population. Zor-El and Alura were among the last survivors, and they decided to send their daughter Kara to Earth to survive this new apocalypse. The fifteen-year-old Kara rocketed to Earth, where her superpowered cousin Kal-El welcomed her, and she became Supergirl. Years later, Supergirl discovered that her father had discovered “the Survival Zone,” which is adjacent to the Phantom Zone discovered by his brother, Jor-El. He and Alura, and several other Argo survivors, projected themselves into it, after a meteor shower destroyed the Argo dome. Eventually, the surviving Argonians left the Survival Zone and integrated into the Kryptonian bottle city of Kandor, now in Superman’s Fortress of Solitude.
Supergirl Feature Film (1984)
The first live-action depiction of Argo City came in the 1984 film Supergirl. In the film, Argo City exists as an isolated community that survived the planet Krypton’s destruction, but not by some gigantic clear dome. Instead, the citizens transported Argo into a pocket of trans-dimensional space, given the name “Innerspace”. A device called the Omegahedron, which was the power source for Argo, is accidentally transported to Earth. Kara (Helen Slater) must go to Earth and recover it to save Argo City. The Innerspace dimension introduced in this movie clearly drew inspiration from Zor-El’s Survival Zone in the comics. However, the crystalline structure it’s encased in owes more to Richard Donner’s Superman aesthetic than anything in the comics.
Superman: The Animated Series (1996-2000)
In the post-Crisis on Infinite Earths DC Universe, Kara Zor-El was erased from continuity. A different Supergirl, a protoplasmic shapeshifting artificial intelligence named Matrix, replaced her. But the creators of Superman: The Animated Series wanted a classic version of Supergirl for their version, which debuted in 1998. But DC’s rules at the time were very strict about other survivors of Krypton running around. So series producers Bruce Timm and Paul Dini created a version of Kara that was not Superman’s Kryptonian cousin, but instead the sole survivor of another doomed planet, named (of course) Argo.
In the DCAU, Argo was a neighboring planet inhabited by Kryptonian colonizers. When Krypton exploded, it shifted the orbit of Argo, and the planet entered into a deep freeze. One of the only survivors was a scientist named Alura In-Ze. She placed herself and her teenage daughter, Kara, in cryo-sleep, waiting for the day someone would rescue them. Eventually, Superman found the remnants of Argo, rescued Kara, and took her back with him to Earth, where she gained the same superpowers he had. Raised by Ma and Pa Kent as his “cousin” Kara, she eventually became Supergirl. Only in this version, Argo was an entire planet, not just a domed city.
Action Comics’ “Brainiac” (2008)
Eventually, the original concept of Supergirl returned to DC continuity in 2008, although with some revisions. In this version, told by Geoff Johns and Gary Frank, Kara was a teenager living in Argo City when Brainiac attacked Krypton. She witnessed as the alien android miniaturized and stole the city of Kandor. Using technology left behind by Brainiac and reverse-engineered, Kara’s father Zor-El used a similar “dome” of energy to protect Argo.
When Krypton was crumbling around them, Zor-El used the tech to encase Argo City and flee into space. Eventually, Brainiac tracked Argo City down in space, and killed most of the inhabitants. Zor-El used an experimental rocket to send his daughter Kara to Earth, where she became Supergirl. Brainiac later kidnapped the surviving Argo citizens and integrated them into the bottle city of Kandor. This became the first time DC presented a connection between Brainiac’s “shrinking” tech and Argo’s protective dome.
Supergirl Arrowverse TV Series (2015-2021)
The 2015 Arrowverse series Supergirl starring Melissa Benoist also had its own version of Argo City. In the series, when Krypton exploded, Zor-El built a fail-safe dome for the city he lived in, Argo. Not sure if it would work, and not wanting to risk the life of his daughter Kara, he and Alura sent Kara away in a pod to Earth, where they knew her cousin Kal-El lived as Superman. However, the fail-safe did work, and Argo evaded Krypton’s destruction, existing as the last remaining city of Krypton. Sadly, Zor-El died thanks to the tainted air within the fail-safe. Because of the dome, there could be no communication in or out of Argo. So Kara’s mother thought she died, and Kara didn’t know Argo survived until adulthood. Supergirl eventually returned to the city of her birth, which finally met its end in the CW event Crisis on Infinite Earths.
Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow (2021)
All of this brings us to the most recent version of Argo City, shown in flashbacks in Tom King’s Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow. Interestingly enough, that version goes all the way back to the original Silver Age concept of Argo. Only far less silly. In the flashbacks, we see Argo erect an energy dome around itself as Krypton falls apart, a scene shown in the Supergirl trailer. Slowly, over the next several years, the Argo citizens all die of Kryptonite poisoning, including Kara’s mother Alura, who makes her daughter promise on her deathbed to “be good.” Just as in the Silver Age, Zor-El sends Kara to Earth in an experimental ship, where she becomes Supergirl. This proves that the first origin is still the best; it just needed some modern tweaking to appear less silly.
Will Supergirl only pull from Woman of Tomorrow for its Argo inspiration, or will they look to all of DC Comics lore? We’ll have to wait until June 26, 2026, when Craig Gillespie’s Supergirl lands in theaters.