Power Girl #21 – Review

By: Judd Winick (writer), Sami Basri (artist), Jessica Kholinne (colorist)

The Story: She remembers every moment like it was yesterday…if only Batman will, too!

The Review: If you’re a writer, you’ll for sure have a moment where you realize all or part of your piece just doesn’t work.  When that happens, ultimately you have to face the option of cutting it.  Sometimes the choice is out of your hands.  One of the downsides of comics writing is once the idea is out there, you’re committed to it, even if it drags the story issue after issue.

In this issue, the sale of Starrware stands out as a plot thread that clearly should have been dropped a while ago.  By now, though, Winick has little choice other than to try to rework it and make it worth its page-time.  He brings in a new(?) antagonist in Ophelia Day, acquirer of Starrware, presumably to set up some motivation for Karen to take back what’s hers before it inevitably gets twisted in Day’s strident hands.

Still, it’s very difficult to summon up any interest in these developments.  You don’t really know much about what Starrware does, for one thing (tech R&D, yes—but to what end?), and besides Nico and Simon Peters, you’re not really in touch with anybody who works there.  Even Nico and Simon serve little more than as expository ciphers, when Winick needs to catch you up to speed on everything that’s not happening directly to PG at that moment.

Speaking as someone who works with legal cap now and again, I find the legalese in this issue slightly more credible than the bunk you usually get in comics.  Whether it pays off is more questionable.  After all, business/law drama seems like a niche interest even on television, where you get forty minutes to build the tension.  Comics just can’t offer that same kind of suspense, so basically the entire scene feels like filler.

In fact, most of the issue retreads old ground: the opening recaps the crossover events in Justice League: Generation Lost (a gimmick I always find distracting from getting to the present story’s goods); three pages of flashback to Power Girl’s last moments with Ted Kord; and some weird, vaguely amusing back-and-forth with Bruce-Batman convincing Dick-Batman of Max Lord’s existence.  This is all old material, so Winick really brings nothing new to the table here.

Power Girl #20 – Review

By: Judd Winick (writer), Sami Basri (artist), Sunny Gho & Jessica Kholinne (colorists)

The Story: These monstrous cloned freaks are trippin’!  And Max Lord has a job for Power Girl to do—wait, what?

The Review: The decompressed style of comic book writing has its pros and cons.  Pro: richer exploitation of a storyline.  When you can spread out the events of a plot across a few issues, it allows for great character moments and interludes that would be hard to squeeze into a done-in-one-or-two.  Con: pointless dragging out of a storyline.  Sometimes, the premise just isn’t strong enough to support a story for that long.  That seems to be the case we’re running into on the current arc of Power Girl.

A key to making a decompressed storyline work are the incidental scenes, the ones that don’t really advance the story, but offer opportunities for the characters to interact and develop.  Judd Winick doesn’t sell these so well.  Most of the issue involves Power Girl shouting at people, whether it’s ordering her assistant Nicco to offer impossible technical support or bantering with her foes about villainous clichés (“sick maternal love for your scientific abominations” is a good one, I’ll grant you).  There’s some humor to it, but besides that, you’re not really getting to know any of the characters better.  They just seem to be blustering until the next storyline starts and they have more to do.

That’s another key to selling a decomp’ed story: action—specifically, action with some kind of point.  Despite all the flying around and monster-pummeling P.G. does, none of it gets her anywhere.  Once she gets inside Cadmus and discovers its secrets, there’s little reason to prolong her stay by having her take down two dozen assorted genetically modified freakazoids, other than to kill time.  In fact, that’s exactly what all these opponents so far have been about—distracting Power Girl.  Hence, the reason why you learn so little about anything each issue.

Power Girl #19 – Review

By: Judd Winick (writer), Sami Basri (artist), Sunny Gho & Jessica Kholinne (colorists)

The Story: Power Girl remembers Max Lord!  No, wait—not anymore.  Or does she?  Meanwhile, PG’s search for her super-powered clone leads her to Professor Ivo, who’s back to making freaks for a living—that can’t be good.

The Review: Power Girl under the Jimmy Palmiotti-Justin Gray-Amanda Connor powerhouse team featured the title’s leading lady facing off against some of the weirder foes in the DC universe with a closed fist and a twinkle in her eye.  These antics set the series apart as one of the brightest, funniest spaces in the comics world.  When Palmiotti, Gray, and Connor departed, there was some concern that the title’s fun and games left with them.

Judd Winick’s takeover retains some of the series’ humor, although in place of wacky characters and situational comedy, Winick favors more Buffy-esque, self-referential, back-and-forth banter.  It has its funny moments, but seems a bit too proud of its own irony.  And it certainly doesn’t produce the same sustaining pleasure from reading Power Girl grossing out over Vartox the Space Pimp’s hairy calves.  Honestly, it probably will never get that good again (although PG kicking Ace of the Royal Flush Gang in the royal jewels is pretty good times).

On the other hand, scaling back the humor gives Winick the opportunity to write higher-stakes moments for Power Girl.  It’s obvious with each opponent Power Girl faces that Winick has a grand scheme for where he wants her character to go, and that her story will ultimately intersect with what Winick’s crafting over in Justice League: Generation Lost.  A final confrontation with Max Lord seems inevitable, despite the constant resetting of Power Girl’s memories.  Such a showdown with a fairly nefarious archenemy has a lot of potential to elevate Power Girl’s beyond the B-list she currently falls under, but that moment still has a ways to go, by the looks of things.

In the meantime, Winick keeps the present story lively by continually introducing formidable opponents for PG to rumble with.  Not so much in this particular issue, however.  Most of the issue touches on her past with Justice League International and her present mission to warn her super-heroic peers of Max Lord’s deception.  On this second point, Winick credibly executes the twists in trying to track down an enemy who can manipulate your memories freely, but that doesn’t prevent the scenes from coming off a little silly (nor our superheroes from looking a little goofy).  At least the final scenes set up the premise and opponents for the next issue, all of which look to be a little more imaginative than the last ones we’ve gotten so far.