Power Girl # 1-12

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Power Girl # 1-12 (DC, 2009-2010)



I've mentioned a time or two how very much I enjoy the artist Amanda Conner, and so when I got the chance to pick up the twelve issue run of Power Girl at a nice discount, I figured they'd be good for a read or two. The book, written by Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti, is continuing beyond these initial twelve issues with a different creative team, another aggravating reminder that the major two comic companies have a really hard time keeping top talent on a book for very long.

So Power Girl is a DC Comics C-lister, a frequent supporting player with a confusing backstory who occasionally gets fandom's spotlight on account of her stacked figure. Not entirely immune to the charms of a really great artist drawing a really fit superheroine, I was glad to give this a try and found it mostly charming and occasionally hilarious. I've mentioned many times that mainstream DC books seem to have become an impenetrable, tangled mass of crossover continuity, but happily the publisher does put out a few books, like this one, that don't require any real knowledge of what is happening in every other book to enjoy it.

Power Girl is a much-beloved protector of New York City in this iteration. She has a few recurring baddies, such as the body-hopping super-genius Ultra-Humanite, and she deals with all her confrontations with a very amusing exasperation. This builds until a wonderful peak in issues 7 and 8, which sees her dealing with an alien from a 1970s-themed planet. Sometime in the (real) seventies, DC had introduced this character as an odd take on Sean Connery's bizarrely-costumed character in the film Zardoz. These comics use the very outdated character intact, as the ruler of a planet that's all lava lamps, chicka-chicka-bow soundtracks and groovy afros, and he is all about the lovin', baby. Power Girl's rising aggravation is played beautifully, with a great payoff, and Conner had me in stitches with the expressions on the characters' faces.

It's certainly not perfect, but the flaws are not too obnoxious. Like most comics of this type, the need to keep character subplots moving results in a strange compression of time. Unless I missed something, the whole series takes place over the course of about four quite ridiculous days. The creators' decision to leave after just twelve chapters means that most of these subplots are wrapped up far too quickly and unbelievably in the last issue. It doesn't pretend to be high art, but for a fun superhero book, you could easily do a million times worse. There's a trade collection of the first six issues, but really, there's no reason why DC's collected editions department couldn't have bound all twelve in one book. Recommended if you're in the mood for this sort of thing.

Wednesday Comics # 1

Here's how this works. I read a book or two and tell you about them and try not to get too long-winded. This time, a review of Wednesday Comics # 1 (DC, 2009).



Well, this is almost terrific. With Wednesday Comics, DC is trying a very interesting experiment, showing off fifteen new stories in an oversized format, like the Sunday funnies used to be. It folds out twice to newspaper size, and each feature gets its own page, for fifteen serialized stories.

It's not completely perfect, and I think fans will be spending the next twelve weeks Monday morning-quarterbacking things they might have done differently. I think they missed a trick by insisting all fifteen be serialized adventure stories; surely they could have given the space to the incoherent Wonder Woman feature over to a classic kid's comedy like Stanley and His Monster. The first issue also suffers from each being a set-up page. It might have been nice to join one adventure already in progress. The Flash story almost accomplishes this, and it's pretty fun. Best of all, the stories are continuity-free. That the publisher has spent the last forty years hammering the characters into one timeline is irrelevant here; it's presented as fifteen separate storyline.

Highlights include Kyle Baker's completely awesome Hawkman story - and no, I don't think I've ever used the phrase "completely awesome Hawkman story" in my life before - along with Paul Pope's gorgeously designed Adam Strange tale, which does suffer from some truly ugly lettering. I like Brian Steelfreeze's art on Catwoman a lot, and Jimmy Palmiotti and Amanda Conner's Supergirl looks like it's going to become a very fun tale. Dave Gibbons scripts a Kamandi story that will probably be great reading, but while Ryan Sook's artwork is really lovely, I can't help but wish Gibbons drew it as well.

Neil Gaiman and Mike Allred are off to a good beginning on Metamorpho, and while Joe Kubert's Sgt. Rock starts a little slower than most of the other features here, you know that Kubert on Sgt. Rock is always worth looking at. I only disliked two of the pages - Wonder Woman and Teen Titans, so that's a pretty good batting average. At $4, the price point feels a bit high, but then again, I think everybody in the house is going to enjoy this comic, so it's probably worth it.

T & A Edition with Power Girl and Vampirella

Here's how this works: I finish reading something, and I tell you about it, and I try not to bore you to death.



I found a used copy of this and... well. When I was a little kid (little kid, y'all dirty-minders, before Bart Sears gave her the biggest breasts in mainstream comics), I really liked Power Girl, but on the strength of the episodes reprinted here, and in some recent collections of '70s Justice Society titles, heaven only knows why. She's an abrasive character and her stories (these by Paul Levitz) are incredibly overwritten, with hideously rushed art by Joe Staton.

DC Comics has revamped and revised their continuities several times, and Power Girl has always been on the shit end of these odd editorial decisions, so this bizarre book collects stories from three iterations of the character. It culminates in a four-part miniseries from a couple of years ago, when Geoff Johns and Amanda Palmer tried to finally "work out" her origin. They couldn't do this by just issuing a new editorial fiat and starting fresh, because that would make sense. Instead, it's a braincurdling mess where various characters remember all these discarded old comic stories and if you, the reader, don't, tough fucking luck, because this book won't make any sense whatsoever.

To their credit, Johns and Palmer do make the character much more fun and vibrant, and you have to laugh at her patience with every male stealing a glance at her mammoth hooters, but it really is a missed opportunity. I had a good giggle when Jimmy Olsen sneaks a peek, anyway. By far the best thing about this book, and the only reason I would recommend it, is Conner's art, which has improved remarkably in recent years, and which I would love to see more of. The only DCU book I buy these days is Legion of Super-Heroes, which currently has terrible art. Can Ms. Conner draw that, please, Mr. DiDio?




Oddly enough, Amanda Conner also drew three episodes of Vampirella sometime in the mid-90s, but I don't like the style she was using then as much, although her pages are streets ahead of the three issues that followed her. I never read Vampirella before this collection of eight episodes by Grant Morrison and Mark Millar was released a couple of years ago. A reread doesn't persuade me I should've bothered. I do not understand Vampirella at all.

It's like this... I understand why superhero comics will have Power Girls with big bosoms, and why everybody from your Mary Janes to your Storms will have shower scenes with strategically placed thought bubbles or wisps of steam to hide the nudity. It's to titilate twelve-year olds, so kids can think "oooh, if only this word balloon wasn't here, I could see a nipple!" But kids aren't supposed to buy Vampirella comics, are they? So why does a comic with such patently adult-skewing business as this resort to the same silly artistic censorship as a book only kids can buy? Who's the target audience for this? (I probably don't want the answer to that question.)

As for the writing, it's much of what you'd expect from the mid-90s Morrison/Millar team, with high-concept oddness that reads like Invisibles-Lite in places filtered through the same "I'll keep you alive in torment for decades" tough guy schmaltz that made their 2000 AD collaborations such a struggle to read. There's even a character who survived an incident in the book and, thirty years later, came back to change history, kind of like Ragged Robin. And there are Anti-Vaticans and Judas Iscariots and serial killers that exist as viruses which take over people, kind of like John Sublime from his X-Men.

So there's just enough Grant Morrison fun to make this at least low-priority for his fans, but just enough Millar to temper it, and just enough confusing art to make it look like some of Morrison's more frustrating (non-Yeowell, non-Bond, non-Quitely) comics, where you're supposed to figure out what's going on based on something a minor character in the third panel on page twelve does and the artist forgets to draw.

Incidental to the proceedings, there's a tough-talking babe in a red one-piece who gets tied up and caressed by half-naked ladies every thirty pages or so. Just don't expect any payoff. Recommended if you really want everything Morrison's written, and have already shelled out for his crummy Spawn fill-ins and Mystery Play.

(Originally posted March 28, 2008 at hipsterdad's LJ.)