JSA CLASSIFIED #1 - 4

"POWER TRIP"
Writer: Geoff Johns | Penciler: Amanda Conner | Inker: Jimmy Palmiotti
Colorist: Paul Mounts | Letterer: Rob Leigh
Assistant Editor: Harvey Richards | Editor: Stephen Wacker

My Thoughts: The first four issues of 2005's JSA CLASSIFIED ongoing series are dedicated to cleaning up the history of Power Girl. This is an admirable goal, considering that I knew the bare minimum about the character coming into this series, but even then I was aware that her backstory was considered a royal mess.

To put it as simply as I can, Power Girl was a denizen of Earth-2, a parallel world from DC's Silver and Bronze Age past. But Earth 2 was destroyed, completely wiped from both existence and history in 1986's CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS limited series. And since the Power Girl of Earth 2 was Superman's cousin, but it was established post-CRISIS that Superman would be the one and only surviving Kryptonian in the newly re-formed universe, a new origin was required for Power Girl. Thus she became Atlantean rather than Kryptonian.

I don't know what happened from that point, but the gist I get from JSA CLASSIFIED is that Power Girl's powers varied in the intervening years, and perhaps even her origin was played inconsistently. Whatever the reason, writer Geoff Johns decided to fix the mess by simply declaring that Power Girl is from Earth 2 after all, having crossed over to Earth 1 (or Earth Prime or whatever DC calls it) sometime before the CRISIS ended.

POWER GIRL

I've been sitting on this one for a while, unexpectedly. Last March I picked up the POWER GIRL: POWER TRIP trade paperback, reprinting almost all of Amanda Conner's work drawing the character. I actually read this stuff last summer, before I began reading my NEW TEEN TITANS OMNIBUS collections for the review series that went up through the first half of this year. I wrote up some Power Girl posts at the time, but put them away for a rainy day.

My intention, as I stated at the beginning of this year, was that somewhere around this summer I would begin a series called "DC Saturdays" in which I would cover various DC trades in my collection. Obviously that never happened. I just haven't had time to read as much as I had expected when the year began. The Power Girl posts were intended to kick off that series, but since it didn't materialize, I have continued to hold them in reserve.

But now, with some weeks to fill as we come to the end of the year, I figure it's time to put these out there before they can get shuffled to the back-burner yet again. So we'll end 2015 the way it began: with some DC material.

The POWER TRIP trade reprints JSA CLASSIFIED issues 1 - 4, by Geoff Johns and Amanda Conner, then follows that with POWER GIRL issues 1 - 12 by Jimmy Palmiotti, Justin Gray, and Conner. Conspicuously absent from the collection is TERRA issues 1 - 4, a limited series also by Palmiotti, Gray, and Conner, which guest-stars Power Girl alongside a new character taking the name of the Teen Titans' Terra. This Terra actually debuted a little earlier in SUPERGIRL #12, which was also produced by Palmiotti, Gray, and Conner, though Power Girl doesn't figure into that one.

I got my hands on an out of print TERRA trade, which includes the SUPERGIRL issue and TERRA limited series, to make this series of posts as complete as possible. So, for the next six weeks we'll cover the following:

• JSA CLASSIFIED #1 - 4
• SUPERGIRL #12 & TERRA #1 - 4
• POWER GIRL #1 - 3
• POWER GIRL #4 - 6
• POWER GIRL #7 - 9
• POWER GIRL #10 - 12

Time to find out if there's anything more to like about the character beyond the costume that captured my imagination as an adolescent.

THE UNBOXING - MARCH 2014

This may be my smallest box ever from Discount Comic Book Service: two books. It was supposed to be three, but the CAPTAIN AMERICA EPIC COLLECTION: DAWN'S EARLY LIGHT volume dropped off my order to ship next month instead, due to a shortage from the supplier. I had no plans to read that book any time in the immediate future, however, so I'm fine waiting another month. Thus, without that sole Marvel offering, all I have this time are two volumes from DC -- and just as receiving only two books is a first, so is having my entire order be in the form of DC volumes.

First is BATMAN: MAD LOVE AND OTHER STORIES, a trade paperback collecting most of the Batman comics by Bruce Timm and Paul Dini set in the universe of BATMAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES, along with works from some of their other BTAS collaborators. I have most all of these stories in comic book format (I read the cover off of the single issue MAD LOVE when I was a kid), but this is the first time I will have purchased them as a trade. I believe this book came out a while back in hardcover format, but I passed it up. The trade may in fact have been released previously as well, but when this edition came up for pre-order a couple months ago, I jumped on it.