Sunday, April 27, 2008

Power Girl—the Last Daughter of the Multiverse—Finally Gets Her Due


FanBoyWonder was pleased by DC Comics’ recent announcement of an ongoing Power Girl solo series and it’s about damn time.

The new Power Girl series will be written by Jimmy Palmiotti and frequent collaborator Justin Gray with Amanda Conner to provide the artwork. Connor previously drew PG during the four-issue Power Girl story arc in JSA Classified #1-4 and we were quite impressed with her rendition of Kara Zor-L.

We’ve always been fond of Power Girl—even as her character and her origin had been tweaked and re-tweaked following the original CRISIS on Infinite Earths to the point of absurdity.

When she debut in the pages of All Star Comics during the mid-70s, she was the fresh new face of Earth-2, the parallel Earth home to the Justice Society and the heroes of the Golden Age.

But PG wasn’t just a pretty…..face. She was quite an original character. Sure she was a ball buster but she was her own girl. Like her Earth-One counterpart, her cousin was also named Superman but THIS last daughter of Krypton wasn’t content to be a derivative—no “Super” for this gal. She is Power Girl, hear her kick arse.

It was her independence that saved her from retroactive obscurity when her cousin Superman/Kal-L and the rest of Earth-2 was wiped out following the CRISIS.

The ONE good thing to come out of the GODAWFUL Infinite Crisis was to finally acknowledge Power Girl’s true origin as the last daughter of Krypton. But in a more dramatic twist Kara Zor-L isn’t just sole survivor of Krypton but of her entire universe.

On the character level, we like how Power Girl has ascended to become the Chairwoman of the Justice Society of America. The one-time team hothead is the leader and den mother.

So it’s from this point that Palmiotti and Conner pick up the ball and carry it.
Palmiotti told Comic Book Resources http://comicbookresources.com that the Power Girl ongoing would be new reader-friendly and requires no previous knowledge of the character’s sometimes convoluted past to jump in and enjoy the new series.

“When you read #1, and if you have never read her before, you’ll get it,” Palmiotti told CBR News. “You can go in raw and you will understand it because we are going to explain her completely and set her up in her own book. It’s her own story. We are going to create new villains for her, there will be some from the past, but we are going to create her own rogues’ gallery. It’s going to be big and over the top, just like she is, literally!”

Connor has her own take on the character as she tells CBR:

“I think the most important thing to give Power Girl, besides great knockers, is a lot of personality,” Amanda Conner told CBR News. “Part of it is her kicking ass, obviously. Of course, it has to be about her kicking ass because that’s what makes it fun. But a lot of it is also what she is up to when she is not kicking ass. She goes home, and she is hardly ever home, and her cat is pissed off at her and shits on the bed. I think it is a lot about what she is doing when she is not kicking superhero behind. I think it is a lot about what she is doing when she is not kicking superhero behind.”

In the series’ debut arc, Palmiotti, Gray and Conner introduce Power Girl to audiences and give her “a big problem to solve.” “We also set up her world and her personal life and her secret identity,” Palmiotti again told CBR. “It’s an establishing story, book-ended with a massive amount of action. We are definitely looking at it as an introduction for anybody who hasn’t read her before but at the same time, if you read [Justice Society of America], it follows right after that.”

It sounds like Palmiotti is coming into this project with the right attitude and motivation. Yet we are wary. FanBoyWonder and our best pal Kemosabe met Palmiotti and Connor a couple years ago at Pittsburg ComicCon (which is to say that the two of us and about 100 other comics fans were all in the same room pitching them questions) and they are both really, really super cool.

Palmiotti especially was as nice as could be and did his best to accommodate the fans. So it’s with that in mind that we feel really, really bad by admitting that we have hated just about everything that Palmiotti and his partner Gray have ever done.

Yet we’re pulling for him and hope that this time is the charm with Power Girl. We’ll be first in line when it comes out later this year.

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Fantastic news, I had no idea.

I talked to Conner at a con in Orlando a year ago, expressing my appreciation for the PG four-parter and it's take, and she mentioned the exact same interest in PG's off-hours, including the PO'ed cat. Awesome.

10:09 AM, May 05, 2008  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Fantastic news, I had no idea.

I talked to Conner at a con in Orlando a year ago, expressing my appreciation for the PG four-parter and it's take, and she mentioned the exact same interest in PG's off-hours, including the PO'ed cat. Awesome.

10:10 AM, May 05, 2008  

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