Every Animated Version of Supergirl, Ranked vs. Milly Alcock

Supergirl has landed a genuinely split reception, in terms of both critics and audiences. But there’s one thing nearly everyone agrees on, and that is: Milly Alcock is a pretty amazing Supergirl. Alcock’s Kara was first glimpsed drunk and dog-thieving (okay, we know Krypto is her dog) at the end of Superman (2025).

It’s actually a big compliment, since Kara has appeared in at least a dozen forms as a teen refugee, space soldier, comic relief best friend, and much more, played by multiple Supergirl actresses, and not one version of her matches the other. It’s this discrepancy that defines the purpose, and it’s why Alcock’s portrayal should be judged on the merits of all those other versions of Kara. See below, where every significant animated appearance of Kara Zor-El has been ranked against Alcock’s.

Quick reference:

Title	Supergirl
Director	Craig Gillespie
Main Cast	Milly Alcock, Matthias Schoenaerts, Eve Ridley, Jason Momoa, David Corenswet, David Krumholtz, Emily Beecham
Premise	On her 23rd birthday, Kara Zor-El meets a young alien named Ruthye whose father was killed by the warrior Krem of the Yellow Hills. The two embark on an intergalactic quest for revenge.
Release date	June 26, 2026
IMDb rating (as of July 8, 2026)	6.1/10
Rotten Tomatoes Score (as of July 8, 2026)	54% | 75%

This ranking favors depth of character over duration of screen time and fidelity to the scars of Kara over fidelity to the comics. Basically, how compelling the depiction of the Girl of Steel is compared to Alcock’s.

10 Lego Kara Barely Counts

Lego DC deserves its exemption from serious critical scrutiny — it is, definitionally, a toy commercial with jokes — but Jessica DiCicco’s brick-built Supergirl in Justice League: Cosmic Clash is worth noting only as a floor. There is no interiority here, no burden of Krypton, just quips and physical comedy scaled to eight-year-olds. Alcock’s Kara, whatever else she is, has never once been mistaken for a toy line. This is why this version of Kara is ranked last.

9 Justice League Action‘s Kara Is a Format Casualty

The Justice League Action episodes were only 11-12 minutes long, meaning that all the characters they featured, including Supergirl, were boiled down into one characteristic and sent on their way. Joanne Spracklen’s Kara is effective and positive, fully functional and adequate. She is also structurally unable to carry the build-up of terror and grief that Milly Alcock is asked to go through over the course of two hours. Short-form animation has never done justice to any character, especially not Supergirl, who relies entirely on her slow-burning trauma of coming too late to save herself.

8 The Original DC Super Hero Girls Kara Is a Rough Draft

Until Nicole Sullivan stepped into the part and added some bite, Anais Fairweather had lent her voice to Kara in those initial DC Super Hero Girls shorts web-series — the Lauren Faust-coded, pastel-colored, very early-installment-wacky take on the Metropolis High premise. It’s agreeable but forgettable, as is character development that occurs in a show’s pilot season, just waiting for someone else to color it in. And that, in effect, is exactly what transpired.

7 Nicole Sullivan’s Kara Is Loud on Purpose

Sullivan’s Supergirl is what DC animation always went back to when they needed to inject some comic relief into the action. She is bold, a bit of a wreck, the kind of friend who breaks stuff with good intentions. Across Super Best Friends Forever shorts, guest appearances in Teen Titans Go!, 2019’s DC Super Hero Girls series (after Fairweather), and even the feature-length Teen Titans Go! & DC Super Hero Girls: Mayhem in the Multiverse, it’s a steady and endearing read, but one intentionally designed to avoid depth at all costs.

It’s the opposite of Milly Alcock: while Milly’s Kara broods, spirals, and gets drunk on red-sun planets in an effort to numb something, Sullivan’s Kara just wants to punch that something in the face and order a pizza. They’re both great Supergirls. One of them isn’t taking itself seriously.

6 Harley Quinn’s Kara Cameo Punches Above Its Runtime

Harley Quinn, an adult animated series and one of the best things to come out of the DC universe in the last decade, doesn’t have patience for reverence. Its brief use of Kara — voiced by Lacey Chabert in the episode Getting Ice Dick, Don’t Wait Up — treats Supergirl as a punchline generator, deploying her with the same gleeful, profane irreverence the show applies to the entire DC pantheon. She plays the role of an ophthalmologist. It’s a cameo, not a characterization, but it’s a genuinely funny one. And wasn’t she frequently written as a joke about girlhood before she was written as a person? So, it’s sort of fitting.

5 The Tomorrowverse Turns Kara Into a Weapon

It is here that things get truly interesting. In Justice League: Warworld, Kara, as voiced by Kari Wahlgren, is hardly even around before she is turned into Harbinger, the, um, harbinger of an upcoming multiversal Crisis, while in the subsequent Crisis on Infinite Earths, Meg Donnelly (who had previously portrayed this character elsewhere in the Tomorrowverse) assumes the role at its most epic proportions. It is a grand, apocalyptic take on the role, and one that is barely concerned at all with Kara being Kara. She becomes a means rather than an end, a plot device, an engine of storytelling rather than a person, which is an incredibly interesting contrast to what Alcock’s Girl of Steel is about. It also features one of Jensen Ackles’s best Batman performances in this movie.

4 Superman: Unbound Gives Kara a Real Wound

Superman: Unbound isn’t a Supergirl movie. It’s a Superman-Brainiac movie (and one of the best Superman animated movies) that happens to feature the two Kryptonians. But Molly Quinn’s take, rooted in the Kandor mythology (Kara and her parents fleeing the bottled city before Brainiac’s theft), gives the character a genuine wound to carry: survivor’s guilt, displacement, the particular horror of watching your home shrink to the size of a snow globe. It’s a small performance doing large thematic work, closer in spirit to what Alcock is attempting than almost anything above it on this list.

3 Superman/Batman: Apocalypse Is Kara’s Nightmare Origin

Translating much of Jeph Loeb and Michael Turner’s Superman/Batman: Supergirl storyline relatively wholesale, Superman/Batman: Apocalypse gives Summer Glau a Kara who crashes in Metropolis feral and afraid, gets abducted by Darkseid immediately after landing there, and is brainwashed into becoming a Female Fury until Superman and Batman rescue her.

Dark, loyal, sometimes nauseating in ways the 2010s DC animated movies never let themselves be, it is a movie made possible by Glau, who brings a trauma-ridden background of Firefly and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles typecasting as the abused and armed little girl, and this is the animated Kara who knows instinctively that Supergirl has always been a story of a teenage girl being claimed by powerful men before getting to do so for herself. In that sense, Kara of the DCU movie drinking her way through red sun planets is a light version of the very same wound. This Kara is absolutely fascinating, but not as good as Milly Alcock’s and the top 2.

2 Legion of Super-Heroes Is Modern Animation’s Best Kara

This Kara is more of a refugee than an immigrant. She is short-tempered, grieving, prone to property damage, and shipped off to the 31st century by a cousin who doesn’t quite know what to do with her anger. The slow-build romance with Brainiac 5 (this one is a superhero, not a supervillain, if you didn’t know) gives the character something animated Kara almost never gets: a relationship that isn’t about being rescued or being weaponized, but about being understood, wrongheadedly, by another outsider who also doesn’t fit. This is also the film that seeds the version of Kara who later becomes Harbinger in Tomorrowverse. She is ranked second because she is the most interesting, just not as iconic as the one ranked first.

1 DCAU’s Kara In-Ze Is Still the Gold Standard

This is the one against which every other animated Kara is implicitly graded, Alcock included, whether the people making these newer versions know it or not. Introduced in Superman: The Animated Series‘ Little Girl Lost (one of the show’s most essential episodes), Nicholle Tom’s Kara In-Ze — not Superman’s cousin here, but a fellow Kryptonian refugee from the sister world of Argo, thawed out of cryo-stasis decades too late — got what almost no other iteration on this list gets: time.

She is allowed to be a realistic teenager who is reckless, jealous, prone to violence, and distrustful before she finally becomes a more mature person in Justice League Unlimited. She is the only animated Kara whose story arc has a proper development of her character before and after the story starts, the only one who is given the time to develop properly for the premises of the story. Everything interesting that later Karas do is, in some sense, a variation on Tom’s version that got there first. She is simply the best Kara, live-action included.

Here are all 10 animated versions of Supergirl, summarized:

#Animated VersionVoice ActorDescription

10	LEGO Supergirl (Justice League: Cosmic Clash)	Jessica DiCicco	A lighthearted, brick-built version of Kara who joins the Justice League to stop Brainiac in a comedic LEGO adventure.
9	Justice League Action	Joanne Spracklen	A cheerful, action-focused Supergirl who assists the Justice League in standalone adventures with little emphasis on character development.
8	DC Super Hero Girls (Original Web Series)	Anais Fairweather	A younger Kara attends Super Hero High, balancing teenage life with superhero training in the franchise’s original web shorts.
7	DC Super Hero Girls (2019) / Super Best Friends Forever	Nicole Sullivan	A boisterous, comedic Supergirl whose boundless energy and optimism make her the team’s lovable powerhouse.
6	Harley Quinn	Lacey Chabert	Kara makes a brief but memorable guest appearance, bringing classic superhero optimism into the irreverent adult animated comedy.
5	Tomorrowverse Supergirl (Justice League: Warworld, Crisis on Infinite Earths)	Meg Donnelly	A mature Kara whose story evolves into the multiversal Harbinger, becoming central to DC’s animated Crisis saga.
4	Superman: Unbound	Molly Quinn	Kara struggles with survivor’s guilt and adapting to Earth while confronting Brainiac, who destroyed her home of Kandor.
3	Superman/Batman: Apocalypse	Summer Glau	After arriving on Earth, Kara is manipulated by Darkseid and must reclaim her identity before becoming Supergirl.
2	Legion of Super-Heroes	Meg Donnelly	A grieving Kara travels to the 31st century, where joining the Legion helps her process trauma and embrace her destiny.
1	Kara In-Ze (Superman: The Animated Series / DCAU)	Nicholle Tom	The definitive animated Supergirl, an Argo refugee who gradually finds a family, purpose, and identity within the DC Animated Universe.

Which animated Supergirl is still your favourite, and where would you rank Milly Alcock’s version? Let us know in the comments.