This is a feature called "Beg Steal or Borrow," which is about when comic book characters are abruptly pulled from one book to another. I'm not talking about when comic book characters simply migrate from one title to another (I spotlight examples of that in my feature, "Looks Like I'm Moving"). I mean examples where a writer has a character taken out of the book against their wishes. It almost always happens in team books, but sometimes it occurs in solo titles, as well.

Today, we look at how Power Girl came and went from the Sovereign Seven.

The Sovereign Seven was a unique superhero series that Chris Claremont and Dwanye Turner launched for DC in the mid-1990s. It was a creator-owned series, but it was set firmly within the DC Universe, as Darkseid shows up in the first issue of the series, which was about a group of seven princes and princesses of their respective worlds who are the last survivors of their planets...

They're on the run from the malevolent force that destroyed their planets, which happens to also be the mother of the Sovereign's leader.

Anyhow, Claremont worked a number of DC characters into the series, but about two years into the book, he decided to REALLY integrate it into the DC Universe. In Sovereign Seven #25, the team was attacked by a powerful being who was possessed by the goddess Nike (earlier in the series, the leader of the team, Cascade, had been possessed by Nike, as well)...

When they succeeded in defeating her, they discover that the woman who was possessed by Nike was none other than Power Girl!

Power Girl was left very unsettled from being used like that, so she decided to hang out with the Sovereigns for a while...

Tragically, one of the original Sovereign Seven was killed in battle (talk about a dark use of DC's "close up on faces" cover gimmick month!)....

Since Power Girl was, at the time, believed to be Atlantean royalty, she was a "Sovereign" herself and so she joined the team as their newest member to make the group seven again...

However, then the book was canceled and obviously the stuff that Claremont had done to tie the book to the DC Universe was now pointless, since this was a creator-owned series and if Claremont ever wanted to do something else with the characters, he obviously couldn't use Power Girl.

So how did he get her off of the team?

In the final issue (by Claremont, Ron Lim and Chris Ivy - Lim and Ivy had taken over from Turner when he left the book about a year into the run), the last story arc wrapped up and then we learned that the whole run was actually a work of fiction by two women (not even characters from the series, as the Sovereigns lived with two eccentric sisters) and thus, Power Girl was free to do whatever, as the series really didn't actually happen...

Trippy stuff.

If anyone else has a suggestion for an example of a comic book character being ripped from a series, drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com!