Power Girl #20

By: Judd Winick (writer), Sami Basri (artist), Sunny Gho & Jessica Kholinne (colorists)

The Story: These monstrous cloned freaks are trippin’! And Max Lord has a job for Power Girl to do—wait, what?

The Review: The decompressed style of comic book writing has its pros and cons. Pro: richer exploitation of a storyline. When you can spread out the events of a plot across a few issues, it allows for great character moments and interludes that would be hard to squeeze into a done-in-one-or-two. Con: pointless dragging out of a storyline. Sometimes, the premise just isn’t strong enough to support a story for that long. That seems to be the case we’re running into on the current arc of Power Girl.

A key to making a decompressed storyline work are the incidental scenes, the ones that don’t really advance the story, but offer opportunities for the characters to interact and develop. Judd Winick doesn’t sell these so well. Most of the issue involves Power Girl shouting at people, whether it’s ordering her assistant Nicco to offer impossible technical support or bantering with her foes about villainous clichés (“sick maternal love for your scientific abominations” is a good one, I’ll grant you). There’s some humor to it, but besides that, you’re not really getting to know any of the characters better. They just seem to be blustering until the next storyline starts and they have more to do.

That’s another key to selling a decomp’ed story: action—specifically, action with some kind of point. Despite all the flying around and monster-pummeling P.G. does, none of it gets her anywhere. Once she gets inside Cadmus and discovers its secrets, there’s little reason to prolong her stay by having her take down two dozen assorted genetically modified freakazoids, other than to kill time. In fact, that’s exactly what all these opponents so far have been about—distracting Power Girl. Hence, the reason why you learn so little about anything each issue.

Over the course of this issue, the only new pieces of information you get is Cadmus has been performing genetic experiments (which it has only been doing in the DCU since forever), and who their mastermind is (which Winick has practically highlighted every issue since his run began). It’s frustrating to think this whole time Winick has been dragging out the events on this series for as long as possible until he can intersect it with his bigger venue over on Justice League: Generation Lost. In the process, Power Girl loses a purpose to call her own, leaving little reason to follow her adventures in her own title.

Sami Basri’s art ends up the biggest positive for this series. Everything just looks clean and vibrant, offering some liveliness to the otherwise plodding script. The designs for the monsters are particularly great, so it’s a shame that you don’t get to see more of them in action. Basri still tends to offer little variation in the battle choreography—it gets a little dull seeing P.G. just punching everything in the face—but at least there’s a great sense of movement to the fighting. Sunny Gho and Jessica Kholinne pale colors slightly washes out the imagery and dips the energy level from time to time, and the story really needs all the excitement it can get.

Conclusion: There’s still plenty of action and self-referential humor, but it’s become clear that there’s little direction for any of these things. Winick’s attempt to cross storylines with Justice League: Generation Lost strips Power Girl of any development and mission personal to the character, which is too bad for a heroine who even considers herself redundant in the DCU.

Grade: C+

- Minhquan Nguyen

Some Musings: – This Batman wears the oval shield of the Bruce Wayne version, but I can’t imagine Bruce being breezy enough to anyone, especially Nicco, to reply to a request with “Sure.”

- No, no, no—I do not like Krypto with red eyes. That’s Cujo you’re thinking of.

- Seriously? Every single byte of data about Cadmus’ scientific work is unencrypted? Talk about lazy.