Comics: Power Girl and The Unwritten

By Lisa Fary

I’ve gotten so used to leaving the comic shop empty handed lately that it was a surprise to walk out this weekend with two comics in an unmarked brown paper bag that only made it look like I was carrying adult material down the street.

Power Girl #1

Written by Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti
Art by the fabulous Amanda Conner

I’m a little late coming to the new Power Girl series, but I got to it and wasn’t disappointed.

I’m not well versed in the history of Power Girl, and I’ve only really written about her in the obligatory discussions about her boobs – all I really know about her is that she’s Kryptonian, the Supergirl of a parallel universe. Anything that happened to her before Power Girl #1 is not in my realm of knowledge.

That said, I enjoyed the hell out of Power Girl #1. It’s friendly to new readers – not just in the context of Power Girl herself, but in the larger context of DC Comics. There no real need to know decades of continuity in the DC multiverse to enjoy Power Girl, which is what turns me off from so many mainstream comics and makes me not really give a damn about events like the “death” of Bruce Wayne and the Battle for the Cowl.

Power Girl’s pertinent background is summarized in a few thought balloons on the second page, then the Ultra-Humanite threat hits swiftly and the stakes keep getting higher and higher. Manhattan is attacked by robots and a psychic shockwave, leaving anyone who didn’t get flattened by the robots to attack each other.

The rest of the issue flips back and forth between Power Girl’s smashing of the robot attackers and the events of that morning: interviewing scientists for her company, Starrware, a progressive technology company looking for innovative twenty-first century solutions to the planet’s growing ecological and environmental problems. I love that Power Girl acknowledges that she can’t simply punch all of the world’s problems – it’s a nice compliment to the shift in thinking that’s happening in America (i.e., there are problems that can’t be solved by force, but can be solved by smarts).

Crazed scientist Mr. Bevlin, rejected for a job at Starrware, will clearly be back as threat in the future – he’s even broadcasted exactly what kind of threat he’s going to be (genus mad scientist) and how he’s going to threaten the world (mind control genetic engineering).

Amanda Conner’s artwork is fantastic – I love the range of subtle facial expressions in every character and particularly love that she made Power Girl a believable figure both in and out of the white leotard. My only complaint is the Gray and Palmiotti’s tendency in this issue to keep the thought bubbles coming rather than letting the art do its job, but then again, it’s also all stuff that helpful for new readers.

Anyway, I’m already more interested in Power Girl than I ever have been in DC’s other most powerful gal, Wonder Woman.

The Unwritten #1

Written by Mark Carey
Art by Peter Gross

I’ll admit it: it was the $1 price tag that drew me into this. $1 for a 40 page comic book? Damn skippy, I’m buying that just to support the pricing. But, now I have to keep reading it.

Damn it.

The Unwritten gives us Tommy Taylor, who like Harry Potter, is a spectacled boy-wizard with a series of books, movies, comics and video games about him. The Tommy Taylor character is fictional, but was based on the author’s son, Tom Taylor, who is now an adult earning a meager living riding on the coattails of his namesake. Tom Taylor’s own ambitions never got off the ground, he’s a joke on the convention circuit, and has a lot of anger about the whole thing.

The story kicks in when Tom Taylor learns that his identity may have been faked. And characters from the Tommy Taylor books show up with nasty plans.

There’s also a nice stab at sensationalist media as Carey and Gross portray news coverage of the Tommy Taylor story (thank you for not calling it “Tommy-Gate”): while the story is airing on DNN (The Unwritten’s stand-in for any cable news network, I’m assuming), the news ticker is running headlines like “Middle East Twelve Hours from War” and “Rwandan Drought: 20,000 Dead”.

The Unwritten has so many literary tidbits for an English major like me to lap up (the degree has to be good for something, right?). The real inspiration for George Orwell’s Ministry of Truth (The Senate House Library). The setting of Catch-22 (an Italian island which Tom notes is too small for the base Joseph Heller put there). The mention of Villa Diodati, where Tom Taylor’s father was last seen, which is also famed for being the summer residence of Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and Mary Shelley in 1816 (you can see this portrayed in Roger Corman’s movie, Frankenstein Unbound, if you can stomach it).

Initially, I thought The Unwritten would be sort of the Last Action Hero of comics, wherein fictional characters enter the real world of the comic book – that’s not something that would have sparked my interest. But, in the last pages, it’s indicated that there’s something much bigger going on here, something tied into the literature and stories of the world.

A literary mystery? I’m so there.

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Lisa Fary’s early exposure to classic Battlestar Galactica in 1979 is largely responsible for her lifelong interest in science fiction and her childhood ambition of being an intergalactic space cowgirl. She thinks diagramming sentences is a fun alternative to Sudoku.

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