SUPERGIRL #12 & TERRA #1 - 4

"ROCK ON!"
Story: Jimmy Palmiotti & Justin Gray | Pencils: Amanda Conner
Inks: Jimmy Palmiotti | Colors: Rod Reis | Lettering: Rob Leigh
Associate Editor: Jeanine Schaefer | Editor: Eddie Berganza

My Thoughts: Somehow the complete works of Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray have become a major part of this blog, as clicking either gentleman's name in the "labels" at the bottom of this post will pull up seven mini-series written by the pair, and we've got more to come, starting with these early appearances of the new Terra.

First up, SUPERGIRL 12 is apparently this Terra's very first appearance, but I'm not sure I would've known that if the cover hadn't said so. She's given little fanfare. We begin the story with Supergirl -- Kara Zor-El, Superman's cousin -- suffering some personal crisis and blowing off steam by dancing at a nightclub. She comes across Terra fighting something called the Empathosaur -- an empathic dinosaur -- and Terra talks her into helping the fight. The girls defeat the Empathosaur and Terra lectures Supergirl about using her powers for good before disappearing.

There's a bit more to the story, featuring Supergirl ultimately coming to the decision that maybe it is okay for her to be selfish once in a while -- but that's it as far as Terra goes. Her first appearance teaches us that she has earth-based powers, thinks very highly of Superman, and wants to make a difference in the world. And that's about it. We'll have to wait for her limited series, two years later, to learn anything else about her.

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.