Review: Power Girl Returns trade paperback (DC Comics)

Once I finished Leah Williams' Power Girl Returns and did some research and rereading, I was impressed with the history Williams is drawing on. Underlying no small part of Returns are events from All Star Comics and Power Girl’s stint in Showcase #97–99, and indeed Williams' characterization of Power Girl seems generally consistent with those comics from the late 1970s.

The difficulty is that nowhere in my collection is there an editor’s note that references, for instance, that Power Girl destroyed her rogue symbioship back in Showcase #98 from 1977. As a reader, I’m left to wonder, did that happen recently? Is it a new event Williams created? Arguably if I’d been more familiar, I might not be complaining, but we’re talking about events in a comic from almost 50 years ago, and with Power Girl’s characterization having seen a lot of twists and turns since then. There are deep cuts, and then there’s downright confusing.

Such is the push and pull of Williams' Power Girl, a series I sense I’m going to struggle with. If you pitched me on a book about psychic, odd couple heroes who help other heroes process their trauma, I’d be much intrigued. Ditto if one of those heroes is Omen, the Titan Lilith Clay, who’s spent more time in limbo of late than out. But using Power Girl here is a tough fit, from the wholly new psychic powers that Williams grafts on to her, to Williams' characterization of Power Girl as a naif who doesn’t understand English idioms. This may be true to her Bronze Age depictions, but it’s a far cry from the Power Girl in Justice League Europe or JSA, and that’ll take some getting used to.

[Review contains spoilers]

On one hand, I’m inclined to agree there’s some wise and detailed psychology within Williams conception of Power Girl “Paige” nee Karen Starr. This is someone, as we’re told, who’s lost her world not once but twice — Krypton, then the original Earth-2 — and who grew to adulthood in a spaceship’s virtual reality in between. Not to mention, as Williams notes, that Power Girl entered the virtual reality as a child and exited as “a fully grown woman” with a much-noted physique, subject to “strangers … with their stinging words and their hungry eyes and their impatient hands.”

[See the latest DC trade solicitations.]

As such, when Williams establishes that “Paige” (I’ve got to start getting used to it) tends to push people away, that she’s asked the Super-family to leave her alone but then complains they treat her like the “odd one out,” we can see that as a direct response to her trauma of abandonment and isolation. At the most extreme, in the Knight Terrors: Action Comics issues collected here, Williams has Paige offer that “nobody hates me … like I hate me.” That seemed to me at first overblown, but on further reflection it's a clear statement of Paige’s survivor’s guilt, having lived when so many worlds around her have died.

On the other hand, for a character that’s often struggled with her identity both in-story and out — Superman’s cousin, a character presented largely as epitome of the male gaze, an Atlantean created for the sole purpose of childbearing, etc. — I’m not sure Williams' addition of psychic powers does the character favors. Surely Williams is trying to distinguish Power Girl and give her an identity of her own — specifically, different than Supergirl’s — but psychic powers are another example of fitting the character to a story’s shape rather than letting the elements of her original creation — the Earth-2 Kara Zor-L — shape the stories she works in.

Further, I wasn’t always so sure Williams' own depiction of Power Girl was consistent, perhaps reflecting the competing influence of the various Power Girls over the years. Williams' Paige is so naive as to not know who Julie Andrews is, yet makes a comment when she appears to be condemned to hell that she knows she wasn’t “the most virtuous of beings.”

I read that as a reference to the more libertine characterizations of Power Girl from Worlds' Finest or Amanda Connor and Jimmy Palmiotti’s Power Girl series, which is hard for me to square with being so culturally naive. Too, Paige is joking with Omen about having a “keyhole” in her costume to avoid “boob sweat” — Williams having Power Girl “own” her costume in a way I think is worse, not better, but that comment also seems in conflict with Williams' insistence on Power Girl as a relative innocent.

We learn nearly nothing about Omen in this volume — where she’s been, whatever she was doing before the teamed up with Power Girl; I’m not even sure the name “Lilith” is anywhere in the book. To that end, as the seemingly problem-less Omen teaches Power Girl how to live — “The only thing holding you back is your own self-doubt” — I felt a bit uncomfortable. As far as Returns is concerned, we’ve essentially got an authorial straw man teaching our protagonist a better way, and I fear continuing on that path will make for bland storytelling.

This volume also has the difficulty of taking place largely in virtual, imagined mental spaces. Artist Marguerite Sauvage is great, tonally spot-on for this book, and often coloring herself with bright pinks and greens that distinguish this book among others in DC’s line. But Williams' script involves psychic defense mechanisms and people subsuming shards of the “astral plane,” a challenge for anyone to draw; when, for instance, Power Girl severs her psychic connection with Omen because she uses an “astral-punch” on villain Johnny Sorrow, Williams has to tell us that through narration because there’s no way the audience can intuit it from the visuals. That kind of “telling” abounds, something that often plagues stories built on gossamer concepts.

Take it back to the premise, though — a fluorescent-colored series about superhero counselors — and I’m along for the ride, never mind that it’s called Power Girl Returns. If Leah Williams' goal is to find a place for Power Girl in the DCU — created in the 1970s, revamped in the 1980s, returned to her original origins in the 2000s, and really only just now reconciling all that — I’m interested to see that attempted, though not yet convinced this is how to do it.

[Includes original and 15+ variant covers]

Rating 2.25