Power Girl: Power Trips

   For a brief period of time, Power Girl was treated as the IT Girl of DC Comics. I never really got into her mostly based on her appearance. With her Amazonian physique and huge assets, I tried to steer away from her stuff thinking it was mostly a sex comic.

  Then about 3 years ago, something changed. I had just finished up my collection of the Giffen and DeMatteis run of Justice League titles from the 80s and 90s. Being one to hate cliff hangers, I waited until I had these runs complete before I read them. Power Girl, who takes up residence at one time or another in most of these titles, was a dark horse character that I came to love due to her scrappy work ethic and the mystery of her true origin and place of birth. Plus, she’s was/is/ and then maybe wasn’t after all the Earth-2 version of Supergirl. Well, that in my book made her not so bad.

As I read more books starring Kara Zor-L, I became even more of a fan of hers. From her earliest appearances in the 1970s reboot of the Justice Society in All-Star Comics to finding her missing family in Infinite Crisis, Power Girl cemented all of the hype that surrounded her almost a decade ago.

Two titles that boosted Power Girl to a temporary super-star status were JSA and her own self-titled series. Power Trips is a treasury that collects two stories from this era. The first 4 issues is from JSA: Classified, a series devoted to unpublished mini-series starring some of the members of the JSA. In this storyline, the Psycho Pirate seeks to make Power Girl release the truth behind her jumbled origin. I liked this story because it really did help correct some of the mess behind just Power Girl was. After the Crisis, we’d been told that Power Girl was really the granddaughter of the Atlantean wizard Arion, a Legionnaire sent to the past for a mission but stricken with amnesia, and the real cousin of Superman. But Psycho Pirate, who never lost track of what the multi-verse was like before Crisis on Infinite Earths, knows the truth about Kara and will manipulate time and space to help her see the light.

I liked this story, but there are too many open ended plots that never get resolved. At the end of chapter 4, we learn that Lex Luthor is behind this plot and then in the epilogue to Power Trips, we see Power Girl get attacked by Clayface. But by chapter 5, which is a reprint of her premier self-titled series, Kara has moved to New York to star up a research company. There’s no mention of the assault by Clayface and Lex Luthor is never heard from again.

What’s up with that? And do those plot lines ever get resolved?

Thankfully, the next storyline helps me get over this confusion pretty quick. Written and drawn by the dynamic team of Amanda Conner, Jimmy Palmiotti, and Justin Gray, the first 12 issues of the 2009-2011 series of Power Girl is awesome. This epic tale has Power Girl battling the Ultra-Humanite, dealing with a photographing Peeping Tom, and fighting off the advances of a hormonal space Casanova that looks an awful lot like Sean Connery in Zardoz. (Don’t believe me, then why does this guy fly a giant stone head for his space ship?)

Power Girl: Power Trips is a massive volume filled with 16 issues. For only $30 and in full color, that’s a freaking steal! The art of Conner and Gray is fantastic and I love the covers, especially to PG #10. Kara’s facial expression on that cover is just classic. While this volume is gigantic, it’s in no way an omnibus. So, there’s still 15 issues of Power Girl out there waiting for me to collect and devour.

I’m trying to collect all of JSA and JSA Classified and with my search for the remaining Power Girl issues now underway, hopefully, I will find out why Luthor wanted Power Girl to know the truth about the multiverse so bad and why Clayface attacks her. I highly recommend this edition and I hope you’ll over look some of the inconsistencies from the first story line and the second. If you can, you’ll be in for a visual treat that’s funny, sexy, and extremely smart.

Worth Consuming

Rating: 9 out of 10 stars