Justin Gray

God exists, and He hates me. How do I know this? He permitted the existence of a second volume of Uncle Sam and the Freedom Fighters. (Actually, he permitted the existence of still more, but in His mercy He left those ones uncollected.) Only the sheer deep-rootedness of my completist instincts can explain why I read this: given that I'd read the previous volume and that it takes place during Countdown to Final Crisis, I felt compelled to read it, but now that I've typed that it out, it seems show more a wholly inadequate explanation for why I inflicted this on myself. Perhaps I, like God, hate me.

This is like the first volume, but worse if you can imagine it. Nothing that any character does in here mean anything; I want to give Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti the benefit of the doubt, but this reads like sheer hackwork, comics vomited out to fulfill some kind of contractual obligation. (Is DC required to publish stories featuring the characters/concepts they inherited from Quality Comics? Surely nothing else could explain their insistence of releasing terrible comic after terrible comic featuring them.) One imagines they wrote each issue in mere minutes, never edited a word, and then laughed as they cashed their paychecks. (2007-08 was a good time for them and shit writing, given they were also partly responsible for Countdown to Final Crisis.) As a fan of what I've read of Christopher Priest's run on The Ray, I'm glad he's not alive so he didn't have to witness their utter ineptitude in handling the characters he poured so much brilliance into.

The only person more guilty than the writers of this comic is its artist. Seriously, Renato Arlem's art is irredeemably bad and completely terrible. A heavy user of Photoshop, characters usually don't move from panel to panel, and images are reused in different contexts despite inappropriate poses and facial expressions, and what the dialogue and narration indicate ought to be happening is often wholly undepicted in the artwork. That anyone has ever hired him to "draw" anything boggles my mind. I can only assume that since 50% of his drawings are reused, he costs 50% of other artists. (Caleb Mozzocco has said much the same at me, but at length, and with pictures.)

Don't be like me. Don't make my mistake. Don't turn on God. Don't read this book!

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Access a version of the below that includes illustrations on my blog.

When I reread the "Power Trip" arc of JSA Classified, I was reminded of how awful Geoff Johns's writing was... but also what a brilliant artist Amanda Conner was, and what a good fit she was for the buoyant, expressive Power Girl. So I decided to pick up this collection, which contains all twelve issues of her run on Power Girl vol. 2. (Unfortunately, it also includes that terrible JSA Classified story, but I skipped it show more rather than suffer through it a third time. Note that Geoff Johns gets first billing on the cover for writing just four of the seventeen issues included here, whereas Amanda Conner—the only person to work on all seventeen and the volume's clear star—is down in fourth. Must be nice to be the former president of DC!)

The twelve issues of Power Girl collected here run concurrently with Justice Society of America vol. 3 #29-40 and JSA All-Stars vol. 2 #1-6, taking place during the time when Power Girl is leading the JSA. (When the volume opens, the team seems to be unified still; by the time of the closing arc, it has split up, and Magog has left.) But the story's focus is on the fact that despite what's happening with the Justice Society, Power Girl is no longer frustrated at her lack of a clear origin, and just trying to be herself—whoever that may be. So for the first time in a long while, she's reactivated her civilian identity of Karen Starr, and is using it to build a technology company while she moves out of the JSA brownstone into an apartment of her own. She develops friendships, and builds up her own supporting cast. There's even her cat from her JLI days.

It's one of those runs that you can't point to a single issue and say "this is an amazing comic book" but where you can point to the whole and say "this is what a superhero comic book should be." It's funny, it's charming, it's goofy, it has a unique personality all its own. Sometimes Power Girl is battling the Ultra-Humanite and his former lover Santana, but sometimes she's stopping alien girls gone wild and a virile alien warlord who wants to repopulate his sterilized planet, sometimes she's helping out a teenage boy by going comic book shopping with him. Writers Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti have admittedly produced some real shit in their time at DC, but this plays to their strengths—or at least to Conner's, who is surely in the Top Ten of superhero comics artists, and consistently elevates any material she is given.

In Conner's hands, comedy, action, and emotion all get good play, letting the whole story come alive. Sometimes the main conflict of one of these stories will end halfway through an issue, and the rest will just be about Power Girl chilling with her sidekick/new friend Terra—and it is always a delight. Conner hits the perfect note with PG's physical appearance, giving us a woman who is attractive but not objectified. I mean, Gray and Palmiotti definitely write in gratuitous moments, but they feel natural and part of the story. (Which is not always the case with Power Girl; shortly before writing this review, I read JSA All-Stars #1, where PG's costume gets strategically torn in such a way as to reveal her entire midriff, and where her boobs are always hanging in "attractive" unnatural positions... bleh.)

Like many great runs, the worst thing about it is that it wasn't longer; I gladly would have read another twelve issues from this team. I felt that the supporting cast at Karen's new company barely got started in what they could do, and I want more Kara and Atlee bonding in New York City. But even though this comic lasted another fifteen issues, Judd Winick took over as writer and it became (to my understanding, anyway) a Brightest Day tie-in; neither the writer nor the change of focus appeals. That said, it did make me interested in picking up PG's newest series...

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Access a version of the below that includes illustrations on my blog.

I was reading Power Girl: Power Trip, but a few issues into it, I was starting to wonder what the deal was with "Terra," Power Girl's sidekick and friend, who comes from a hidden nation of subterranean people. Well, it turned out the answer was in this book by the same creative team of writers Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti and artist Amanda Conner, so I paused reading Power Trip to delve into this long out-of-print show more collection.

Terra is a bit frustrating in that much of the time, we view this new character from the outside; we don't get much of her own struggle. What are her stakes? This is never really clear. The first issue here teams her up with Supergirl, in one of her particularly selfish periods; Terra's perky selflessness serves as a contrast. Then she meets up with Power Girl and Doctor Mid-Nite, then (groan) Geo-Force. Her deal is that she tries to take care of collisions between the surface world and the subterranean one, protecting the underground ecosystem from human intervention and humanity from subterranean creatures. She comes from a whole thriving underground world with a myriad different kinds of life. It's a neat set-up for stories potentially, but one the volume on its own ultimately doesn't make a ton of use of—and since Terra never got another series, I'm guessing was never really used in future stories, either.

Alongside this, there's a subplot about a guy digging underground who accidentally turns himself into a living diamond. This culminates in him attacking Terra's people, and she and Geo-Force team up to defeat him. It's pretty perfunctory stuff, I feel like more could have been made of the bad guy. (There's also some stuff about this Terra's place as the... third, I think, superhero of that name, but I don't know anything about the Teen Titans, so it was all underexplained gibberish to me. For some reason, Geo-Force's memory has to be erased even though he learned that someone was impersonating his dead sister; seems a bit mean. How his dead sister can be from underground, I don't really know.)

Then in a half-issue coda, Terra goes back to the surface and bumps into Power Girl again. This made me very glad I paused Power Trip to read this, because it's basically a set-up for that series, pushing Kara into the decision to resume living her civilian identity and lead a normal life.

So writing wise, it's basically fine. Decent idea, but mediocre execution—which honestly feels par for the course for Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti, who are hacks (meant in the nicest possible way, of course) if ever there were any; they did, after all, write Infinite Crisis Aftermath, Uncle Sam and the Freedom Fighters, parts of Countdown, and what is probably the worst superhero comic ever. But what elevates it is their collaboration with one of superhero comics' best-ever artists, Amanda Conner. Conner's art is fun, bold, sexy, and above all, character driven. You get a sense of personality from her faces that mostly fails to come across from the writing. It's delightful, I knew I would love it, I did love it, and it's the whole reason I bought this book as opposed to just reading the issues on DC Universe Infinite, and it was worth it. Get Amanda Conner to draw every comic book, please.

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I've not yet read Hugh Howey's hugely popular self-published novel Wool, but if this graphic adaptation is true to his storyline, then he is a fantastic storyteller. He creates a believable apocalyptic future in which the few surviving humans live underground in several independent silos. The behavior of the inhabitants is constantly monitored and rigidly controlled by the IT department. Any variation from established norms means certain death, as non-conforming individuals are sent to show more "clean", sent outside of the unit in a supposedly protective suit that always seems to fail within thirty steps from the silo.

Although kept from a holistic view of how the mechanical, IT, food supply and medical facilities work together as functioning units, and kept from the knowledge that there are other silos, some of the brighter mechanics begin to figure out that the lack of protection from the poisonous outside atmosphere provided by the cleaning suits may be intentional. Where this knowledge leads begins a deeply engaging adventure story. show less