What I Bought 7/22/2015 - Part 1

As promised, I ventured to the store and purchased comics, obtaining most of the ones I sought. They were missing a couple, but I’ll find those somewhere else and tack their reviews on later, maybe next week.

Harley Quinn and Power Girl #2, by Amanda Conner, Justin Gray, and Jimmy Palmiotti (writers), Stephane Roux (artist, pages 1-18), Elliot Fernandez (artist, pgs. 19-22), Paul Mounts (colorist, pgs. 1-18), Alex Sinclair (colorist, pgs. 19-22), John J. Hill (letterer) – Harley, you’re partially obscuring Peej’s boob window! How is she supposed to distract these guys when you do that? I guess she could just punch them without them being distracted first. Seems inefficient, though.

That’s what she spends most of the issue doing, trying to smash Oreth’s considerable army, while Harley flees from a cheerful killbot out to sew her orifices together. While Harley succeeds in transforming her foe into a cheerful pile of rabbit-shaped robot junk, Peej is overwhelmed by numbers, until a super-powered strike team of Vartox’ exes arrive to lend a hand. This team tends to bicker a lot and pointlessly shout their names, so it’s pretty much the ‘70s X-Men (albeit dressed more like the Mike Grell-drawn Legion of Super-Heroes). At least they don’t constantly describe their powers out loud. Harley shows up with a spaceship so they can rescue Vartox, who is busy being transformed into something by Oreth.

I’m guessing the chief bad guy is going to wind up have a lot of repressed urges he needs help getting in touch with. Good thing Harley’s a licensed psychiatrist. I was just joking about that, but I could see that being how this problem is handled, with liberal doses of trying to smash the problem with a hammer thrown in. Because it’s still not at all serious, from Power Girl telling Harley not to blow anything up, especially crap (and Harley didn’t blow anything up), to the XGF arguing about whether the one guy on the team should even be there, and him arguing that calling it an Ex-Girlfriend Force isn’t fair to him. Peej’s expression in that panel is great. She has her eyes shut and this sour expression, and you can tell she’s about to start hitting people if they don’t change the subject.

It does highlight a difference between pre- and post-Flashpoint DC. I think pre-Flashpoint Power Girl would have been exasperated, but she’d have rolled with the absurdity of all this, whereas this Power Girl just seems massively frustrated by everything about this world. Part of that is the old Peej had met Vartox, so she’d at least have context for some of these comments. But in general, she seemed at least a little more inclined to accept things were odd and enjoy it. Current Power Girl is a little more focused, but consequently much more easily aggravated by distractions.

Starfire #2, by Amanda Conner and Jimmy Palmiotti (writers), Emanuela Lupacchino (pencils), Ray McCarthy (inks), Hi-Fi (colors), Tom Napolitano (letters) – And on that day, Starfire learned parrots don’t like it when you try to remove their feathers to clean them.

Kori gets an introduction to severe Earth weather as the hurricane hits the island. She manages to get her landlord and her grandson to the school where everyone is hunkering down, then gets plastered with a big sign, which knocks her into some odd fellow’s bathroom, where he is hunkered down. He (and his pugs) go with her, but only because the Sun Goddess told him the Mistress of the Winds would be coming. I can’t tell if that’s going to be significant later, or if he’s just a random oddball Kori meets once. Sheriff Stella’s brother heads out in the middle of all this to try and rescue a couple in a busted boat, and they all get sunk. Fortunately the sheriff found Kori, and after a brief detour to rescue that freaking parrot again, Kori heads out and rescues them all, though it was a bit of a near thing with Gabe, who is possibly smitten with his rescuer. The storm passes, families are reunited, but Kori’s new home is destroyed. Wow, that didn’t take long, and this is why I don’t have much interest in living in coastal regions. Also, some odd thing crawled out a hole in the ground, looking for someone, and he at some poor guy with really obvious tan lines on his arms and legs. Possibly even worse than mine, which is impressive. Nice touch there by Hi-Fi, I assume.

One thing that concerned me about Conner and Palmiotti’s writing on Harley Quinn was that at times they seemed to just be throwing everything they can think of at the wall. The end result is that there are so many different things and characters around, most of them don’t really get developed. It still works to an extent there, because the title character is so scattershot herself, but I’m hoping a similar approach isn’t going to be taken here. Now that Kori isn’t going to be living at the trailer park, will we see Tina and Boone again, or is their part in the story done already? It’s too early to say for sure, and I feel pretty confident Stella and her brother will be regulars in the book, but it’s something to keep an eye on.

I’m curious how they did the rain in this issue. It’s a bunch of thin white lines, and so I don’t know if that’s something Hi-Fi did, or if Lupacchino drew all those in over the rest of the art, and it was understood not to color those in. In the places where they overlap other linework (a person’s hand for instance), you can still see that linework, but sort of faded. So maybe it’s not about not coloring those spaces in, but coloring them in with white? I don’t know, it was just something I noticed on the two-page splash on pages 2 and 3, and it got me wondering. I will say the characters don’t look like they’re inhabiting the same space as the hurricane. I feel like their clothes, and especially their hair, ought to be showing more effects from being in this storm. I’ve been drenched to the skin plenty of times in storms that are likely nowhere near as fierce as what those characters are supposed to be experiencing, and clothes sit differently on you in those situations. OK, Kori’s wearing some alien fabric, and she’s solar-powered, so maybe it’s different for her, but that doesn’t explain all the Earth folk. I mean, the poor joker who gets killed by the subterranean creature is wearing a shirt that ought to be clinging to him by the time he died, you know?