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Leah Williams now has an ongoing solo series for Power Girl, the first one since 2009 (Palmiotti, Conner, Gray).
First of all, although it's not essential to do so, you might want to check out these previous issues which have established the 'reboot' of Power Girl
in the "Dawn of DC" Universe following the events of Doomsday Clock which (I think? though I could be wrong) reset the DC Universe possibly thanks to Doctor Manhattan.
-Lazarus Planet: Assault on Krypton, Action Comics #1051-1053 (a 3-part backup story in Action Comics)
- and Power Girl Special (just featuring PG and Omen, which I bought and regrettably did not really enjoy much)
They're the four introductory issues to this book, and they've already been collected (according to Google) in a Leah Williams TPB called "Power Girl Returns". So, look for that if you're completist and/or like Power Girl TPBs.
If not, you can move on without them because the new Power Girl character is gradually explained in Power Girl #1:
- She's from Earth 2 but her version of Earth was entirely destroyed, so she's now living on Earth Prime under the tutelage of Superman, as well as being the "older, wiser" counterpart of Supergirl.
- She's a tech wizard, like before, but her Karen Starr persona is gone, and her name is Doctor Paige (PG) Stetler. In her civilian persona, she has a close-cropped short hairstyle and wears "nerdifying" glasses (which on blondes produces the "Felicity Effect").
- Streaky is now apparently her cat, not Supergirl's.
- She has a sidekick and advisor: Omen, who used to be called Lilith (Lilith Clay from old Teen Titans days) and I imagine still has vast mental abilities (we know she can both read minds and attack people telekinetically from the battle in Issue 1).
If you ask me, someone at DC sat down and said, "Hey, that Captain Marvel/Carol Danvers thing over there at Marvel? We need one of those! So we can catch up with Marvel on sociopolitics, and also hopefully make a movie at some point." But they couldn't do it to Supergirl because reworking her would piss far too many people off. So they did it to Power Girl. Makes perfect sense from DC's current perspective. She's been bounced around so much, and sometimes completely ignored, so she's nearly a tabula rasa. I'm surprised they kept as much of her original appearance as they did.
As if she wasn't already OP'd enough, as much as Superman, Leah gave her even more powers: she can punch through dimensions and spaces to create portals, and she has certain vast psychic abilities which are as yet undefined. Because, y' know, she's got to be *more* powerful than Clark.
So, here's Power Girl #1.
The plot is as follows:
There's an auction of priceless alien items which Paige is using to introduce her alter-ego identity to the tech world.
It gets invaded by a criminal and his gang looking to steal all of the high-tech items (because of course it does).
This criminal, whom you might think is Black Manta because of the presence of Atlanteans in the story, is not Black Manta
but apparently a brand-new character named Amalak (get it? He's Amalek, the Biblical mortal nemesis of the wandering Israelites - whom the Kryptonians have often been coded as, through references like 'Kal-El'. But he's 'blak' and has dreadlocks, so he's Amalak. Maybe I'm over-explaining it, but I doubt the selection of the name was just a coincidence and that Leah had never heard of Amalek.)
An alien himself, apparently, Amalak fights PG with high-tech alien weaponry that first 1) causes her great pain and 2) paralyzes her with sound, so there are a handful of peril panels. Then he plants a bomb which would annihilate Metropolis, allowing him to speed away with the loot.
PG idiotically teleports the bomb (using her portal punch) into the Mariana Trench, nearly starting a war with the Atlanteans which Superman has to smooth over. This established that she needs Superman's guidance because she is rash and incompetent at superhero-ing.
Then Superman tells her he needs her help in stopping a Kryptonian virus which is killing humans, and the twist is that the "virus" (which isn't even possible since Krypton conquered viruses long ago) is from her Krypton in the former Earth-2 universe, which doesn't exist anymore.
So, she goes off to do that, and the next issue promises more punching and more kittycats.
Which is pretty much the premise of this series. The editors sat down and said, "How can we keep, or bring back, the legion of horny middle-aged dudes who would read a story about Power Girl, but without offending the tiny minority of fringe weirdos who may or may not even buy our books but explode all over Twitter at every imagined offense? And maybe still keep the approximately 10% of our actual customer base who are female buying superhero comics?"
Power Girl is the recent result (or, one of them: I've noticed Hawkgirl and Zatanna are the others). Everything about it is a compromise.
The costume is back to the sexy tight catsuit which has the boob window but has once again eliminated the high-cut leotard and bare legs.
But she's also now wearing one of those ubiquitous little "fashion jackets", and this one has the House of El logo both on its back and shoulders.
The weird thing is that she just doesn't wear the jacket - she CLOSES IT UP. There are several pages where it covers her boob window, as if the book is saying, "See, fanboys? We can take away those boobs whenever we want! So you'd better toe the line and buy this comic so you can catch a glimpse!"
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The book is a compromise, too. For the horny middle-aged dudes, there is punching, action, peril, and a hot transformation sequence where she removes her hair clip, unzips the back of her dresses, removes her glasses and places them in her cape pouch (wherever the costume came from, that's magic or superspeed, I guess). Then, she burns her lovely dress with her heat vision, and we see the tight costume in all its usual glory. Artist Eduardo Pansica is good at drawing a nice tight sexy female body with all the curves and rippling muscles when he really concentrates on it.
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Sustainability!
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(see that long anti-immigrant backstory in the later seasons of the Supergirl TV show)
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See? Buzzwords and angryface inserted.
Whew! Crisis of Infinite Wine Aunts averted!
So, am I buying this book at my LCS? Answer: probably, because of the transformation page. (or is that Transformation of Paige?)
On to issue 2.
