Power Girl Returns by Leah Williams, Marguerite Sauvage, and Vasco Georgiev

Power Girl Returns

Collection published: 2023
Contents originally published: 2022-23
Acquired and read: October 2023

Writer: Leah Williams

Artists: Marguerite Sauvage, Vasco Georgeiv

Colorists: Marguerite Sauvage, Marissa Louise, Alex Guimarães

Letterer: Becca Carey

I had thought that I would wrap up my JSA journey (of almost four years!) with the Celebration of 75 Years collection, as I had no interest in the changes the New 52 wrought on the JSA characters (in addition to Earth 2, there was, for example, a World's Finest series co-starring Power Girl and Huntress) but while reading Amanda Conner's Power Girl run (see #47 in the list below), I bumped into some news about the character's recent revival, and saw that a collection was forthcoming. It had good reviews, so I thought, "why not?"

I'm not really in touch with DC continuity these days; I left off as a regular reader around the time of Convergence (which I never even finished), and that was over six years ago; I think the only things I've read since then have been some Tom King miniseries (are those even in continuity?) and N. K. Jemisin's Far Sector. So I didn't really have any context for this book; I think Power Girl's backstory has been rolled back to something approaching its pre-Flashpoint state, but I am not really sure. Mostly this doesn't matter to the story being told, but I didn't really know the status of the Super family, or why PG would feel excluded from them.

The premise of the book is pretty odd, to be honest. Some kind of event results in Power Girl obtaining psychic powers, so she and a new-to-me superhero with the not-very-heroic name of Ruin open a superhero counseling business. While Ruin talks to the heroes in the real world, Power Girl (physically?) journeys into their minds, helping clear away issues. I think probably there's a good story to be told about Power Girl adapting her often fists-first approach to something more nuanced, but this seemed to be more of a mediocre one. Like, it's not bad... but I also didn't find a lot to enjoy here. There's some neat puzzles to be solved, but Power Girl didn't totally ring true to me, and I would happily never see Johnny Sorrow in a JSA comic ever again—or, really, any kind of psychic manipulator trying to take down Power Girl.

The only convincing "explanation" for Power Girl's costume ever given, surely? Hopefully this means we can never bring it up ever again.
from Action Comics vol. 1 #1052 (art by Marguerite Sauvage)

Power Girl ditching her civilian identity of Karen Starr and replacing it with "Paige" struck me as pretty pointless. Like, why do that? Would you suddenly have Batman declare that his name is Ryder now? No, of course not; it's the kind of desperate fiddling one only does to a second-tier character... but it's the kind of fiddling that never works because it just confirms to the reader that they're reading about a second-tier character. Give it a decade or two and I'm sure she'll be Karen again. On the other hand, I did like the reckoning between her and Supergirl, which had some nice moments.

People just love unsolicited life advice from estranged family members!
from Action Comics vol. 1 #1053 (art by Marguerite Sauvage)

I like Maurgerite Sauvage's art style. She draws two-thirds of the book and has a distinctive, character-driven approach... but man, what is up with those thick black lines around everyone's eyes? It makes everyone look demented and ruins what would otherwise be a good effect.

Surely the real highlight of the book is the covers—and I say this as the kind of person who normally doesn't get very excited about comic book covers. I'm not very into the Stanley Lau cover for Power Girl Special #1 that was chosen for the collection cover (his stuff never looks very naturalistic to me), but the Warren Louw cover for Action Comics #1051 and the Will Jack covers for Action Comics #1053 and Power Girl Special were excellent, beautiful work. Plus, of course it's fun to get Amanda Conner back even if just on a variant (for Power Girl Special again) and I did like the David Nakayama variant for Power Girl Special, which features PG with her old Justice League International teammates Fire and Ice... though it seems a bit misleading DC used this on the back cover, given neither character appears in the actual book! My kids saw me reading this book and kept asking me about the characters, and now my five-year-old not only knows who Fire and Ice are, but can tell you that Fire used be called "the Green Flame" and Ice "Icemaiden"!

So, yeah, I do love Power Girl, but while this is a perfectly serviceable comic, it doesn't capture what I love about the character. Surely PG at her best will remain the Amanda Conner ongoing, as well as her old JLI/JLE appearances.

Almost four years on since All Star Comics: Only Legends Live Forever, this marks the end of my JSA journey! There is a new ongoing coming, I think, but I have no interest reading a third Geoff Johns–helmed revival; surely someone else out there has an idea for how to do the team. He's done his thing, let someone else do theirs. It's been twenty years since his first run! I might make some kind of summative post, but also I might never get around to doing so. We'll see. 

My next comics reading project will hopefully be much shorter!

This post is the last in an improbably long series about the Justice Society and Earth-Two. But wait, there's more! The next installment covers Showcase Presents Wildcat and Green Lantern / The Flash: Faster Friends. Previous installments are listed below:

Power Girl: Power Trip by Geoff Johns, Justin Gray, Jimmy Palmiotti, and Amanda Conner

Power Girl: Power Trip

Collection published: 2023
Contents originally published: 2005-10
Acquired and read: August 2023

Writers: Justin Gray, Jimmy Palmiotti, Geoff Johns, Amanda Conner

Artist: Amanda Conner
Inker: Jimmy Palmiotti

Colorist: Paul Mounts

Letterers: John J. Hill, Rob Leigh

When I reread the "Power Trip" arc of JSA Classified (see item #39 in the long list below), I was reminded of how awful Geoff Johns's writing was... but also what a brilliant artist Amanda Conner was, and what a good fit she was for the buoyant, expressive Power Girl. So I decided to pick up this collection, which contains all twelve issues of her run on Power Girl vol. 2. (Unfortunately, it also includes that terrible JSA Classified story, but I skipped it rather than suffer through it a third time. Note that Geoff Johns gets first billing on the cover for writing just four of the seventeen issues included here, whereas Amanda Conner—the only person to work on all seventeen and the volume's clear star—is down in fourth. Must be nice to be the former president of DC!)

The twelve issues of Power Girl collected here run concurrently with Justice Society of America vol. 3 #29-40 and JSA All-Stars vol. 2 #1-6, taking place during the time when Power Girl is leading the JSA. (When the volume opens, the team seems to be unified still; by the time of the closing arc, it has split up, and Magog has left.) But the story's focus is on the fact that despite what's happening with the Justice Society, Power Girl is no longer frustrated at her lack of a clear origin, and just trying to be herself—whoever that may be. So for the first time in a long while, she's reactivated her civilian identity of Karen Starr, and is using it to build a technology company while she moves out of the JSA brownstone into an apartment of her own. She develops friendships, and builds up her own supporting cast. There's even her cat from her JLI days.

I would not have guessed Wonder Woman was great with cats... except to the extent that she's great at everything, I suppose.
from Wonder Woman vol. 1 #600 (script & art by Amanda Conner)

It's one of those runs that you can't point to a single issue and say "this is an amazing comic book" but where you can point to the whole and say "this is what a superhero comic book should be." It's funny, it's charming, it's goofy, it has a unique personality all its own. Sometimes Power Girl is battling the Ultra-Humanite and his former lover Santana, but sometimes she's stopping alien girls gone wild and a virile alien warlord who wants to repopulate his sterilized planet, sometimes she's helping out a teenage boy by going comic book shopping with him. Writers Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti have admittedly produced some real shit in their time at DC, but this plays to their strengths—or at least to Conner's, who is surely in the Top Ten of superhero comics artists, and consistently elevates any material she is given.

Bring back Vartox.
from Power Girl vol. 2 #12 (script by Justin Gray & Jimmy Palmiotti, art by Amanda Conner)

In Conner's hands, comedy, action, and emotion all get good play, letting the whole story come alive. Sometimes the main conflict of one of these stories will end halfway through an issue, and the rest will just be about Power Girl chilling with her sidekick/new friend Terra—and it is always a delight. Conner hits the perfect note with PG's physical appearance, giving us a woman who is attractive but not objectified. I mean, Gray and Palmiotti definitely write in gratuitous moments, but they feel natural and part of the story. (Which is not always the case with Power Girl; shortly before writing this review, I read JSA All-Stars #1, where PG's costume gets strategically torn in such a way as to reveal her entire midriff, and where her boobs are always hanging in "attractive" unnatural positions... bleh.)

My favorite Atlee moment, though, is probably the bit where she pretends to be from Australia.
from Power Girl vol. 2 #3 (script by Justin Gray & Jimmy Palmiotti, art by Amanda Conner)

Like many great runs, the worst thing about it is that it wasn't longer; I gladly would have read another twelve issues from this team. I felt that the supporting cast at Karen's new company barely got started in what they could do, and I want more Kara and Atlee bonding in New York City. But even though this comic lasted another fifteen issues, Judd Winick took over as writer and it became (to my understanding, anyway) a Brightest Day tie-in; neither the writer nor the change of focus appeals. That said, it did make me interested in picking up PG's newest series... the journey never ends, does it?

This post is forty-seventh in an ever-expanding series about the Justice Society and Earth-Two. The next installment covers volume 2 of JSA All-Stars. Previous installments are listed below:

Review: Showcase Presents... Power Girl by Paul Levitz, Joe Staton, Dick Giordano, et al.

After her debut in All Star Comics, Power Girl got a three-month feature in Showcase, DC's title with rotating stars (for example, the Doom Patrol starred before her, and Hawkman after). I had originally skipped this in my Earth-Two reading project because the back issues are pretty expensive, and the trade they're in is half Geoff Johns shit with an awful Adam Hughes cover, but after early issues of Infinity, Inc. made a couple references to them, I looked into picking them up, and saw they were just $0.99 on Comixology. I don't normally like buying DC stuff on Comixology (unlike IDW publications, you can't download a PDF, so you have to read it in the terrible Comixology viewer), but $3 seemed hard to turn down.

It's a bit off. Since Power Girl was just one of an ensemble in All Star Comics, she didn't have much of a backstory there-- she's just like, "oh I'm Superman's cousin, hi"-- and these stories fill it in to an extent, and also give her a status quo outside of her JSA activities. But it's kind of awkward and weird. Power Girl was rocketed to Earth as an infant to escape the destruction of Krypton, of course, but unlike Kal-L, who landed on Earth still a small child, Kara Zor-L was raised to a young adult level in an artificial simulation of Kryptonian childhood before she reached Earth. I think there's real potential in such a situation, but the story doesn't make a whole lot of it: Kara's "symbioship" is trying to reabsorb her, she reveals her backstory, she defeats it with the help of Andrew Vinson (a Gotham reporter), the end, all in the space of two issues.

from Showcase #98 (art by Joe Staton & Dick Giordano)

It's over improbably quickly, and I'm not sure why the symbioshop had to attack Power Girl and try to absorb Vinson, but it is a set-up with some good dramatic potential. I like the idea that she fits so poorly into human society because she was raised in Kryptonian society... but that was an illusion, so the only thing she knows is fake. It's a much more tragic take on the Krypton backstory than Superman's. (Though All Star indicated she was raised by the Kents, who are never mentioned here.)

from Showcase #98 (art by Joe Staton & Dick Giordano)

But it's all over just like that. Between the second and third issues, she concocts a human identity as Karen Starr, Wonder Woman uses an Amazonian teaching machine to give her knowledge of human culture as well as software development, and Vinson gets her a job at a software company. Like, that's it? It seems pretty meh that she didn't even know what software was until the machine taught it to her, so her job doesn't even build on any preexisting interests or skills. I mean, she was raised in a computer world, the connection is right there, but the story never makes it! Why give her a dilemma she actually never confronts in a story? (I'll be curious to see if future Power Girl stories, in Infinity, Inc. or elsewhere, make more of this. Probably not, because the Crisis on Infinite Earths will wipe this whole backstory away.)

from Showcase #99 (art by Joe Staton & Dick Giordano)

There's a subplot in the first two issues about someone stealing technical equipment; it turns out to be the Brain Wave at the end of the second, and the third focuses on Kara's battle with him. For some reason he hates Power Girl more than the rest of the Justice Society because she's defeated him more (really?) than them. I thought his power was brain stuff, but here he's building tripod war machines and sending cities into dimensional limbo, which doesn't really flow from that as far as I can tell. I do really like how Joe Staton draws his enlarged cranium, though.

from Showcase #97 (art by Joe Staton & Joe Orlando)

As always, I like Staton's art. Lightly stylized but full of energy, too, and his Kara looks like a powerhouse. Power Girl wears a choker; so did Black Canary at this time if I recall correctly, so I guess it was a thing then.

Showcase Presents... Power Girl originally appeared in issues #97-99 of Showcase (Feb.-Apr. 1978). The story was written by Paul Levitz; illustrated by Joe Staton (#97-99), Joe Orlando (#97), and Dick Giordano (#98-99); lettered by Ben Oda (#97-98) and Shelly Leferman (#99); colored by Jerry Serpe (#97) and Adrienne Roy (#98-99); and edited by Joe Orlando.

This post is the sixth in a series about the Justice Society and Earth-Two. The next installment covers America vs. the Justice Society. Previous installments are listed below:

1. All Star Comics: Only Legends Live Forever (1976-79)
2. The Huntress: Origins (1977-82)
3. All-Star Squadron (1981-87)
4. Infinity, Inc.: The Generations Saga, Volume One (1983-84)
5. Infinity, Inc.: The Generations Saga, Volume Two (1984-85)