Jimmy Palmiotti

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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Dark without feeling forced, Manhunter manages to bring together memorable characters and a great concept. Although the lawyer-by-day-vigilante-by-night idea may seem played out, Kate Spencer feels unique. She's inexperienced without being naive. She's tough as nails without being a cold bitch. She's worried about her fractured family without becoming mawkish or saccharine.

Ah comics. I absolutely love the medium, because it's given me so much joy over the decades. I get genuinely excited over certain titles and creators when new stuff is coming out, or when I find stuff I haven't read in decades.

But there is a dark side to this love of mine. My ever-hopeful nature often entices me to head down dark alleys, toward creators or works I'm not as familiar with, in hopes that I'll find something mind-blowing (like when I first discovered Claremont and Cockrum's show more Uncanny X-Men, or O'Barr's The Crow, for example).

Last September, I attended the Toronto FanExpo show, and bought up a ton of graphic novel collections, some in trade paperback, some, like Queen Crab, in hardcover, getting each for a measly $5.

I'd seen QC around quite a bit, and I will say the cover is both funny and slightly disturbing...usually a good sign. But I'd never seen one that wasn't shrinkwrapped, so I'd never picked it up. But hey, $5? I coughed up five hundred pennies for it.

Obviously, I wasted those pennies.

I have no idea what I just read. It starts out as a rather salacious story of a woman and her fiance, both fucking around on each other, but only the guy is really made out to be an asshole. Then there's the confusing post-wedding section, that just left me confused as to what Palmiotti was trying to get across.

Then comes the moment where she turns up with crab claws. There's not even an attempt to sell this to us, just, hey it happened, let's move on.

Blah blah blah, more pages. Blah blah blah, more boobs. Then the reveal of powers in the last few pages, and that really stupid ending.

Honestly, this book was lazy, ambiguous, poorly-paced, nonsensical, with absolutely no likeable characters.

Yet, at the end, Palmiotti says something about, this isn't the normal stuff I write, but I want to do more of this.

Yeah, okay. You get on with yer bad self there, Jimmy. I'll take a pass.

$5? Yeah, I got ripped off. I want both my money and my time back. show less