Random Back Issues #29 - Power Company: Sapphire #1

Looks more like a flatworm than a serpent. Fear the overwhelming might of PLANARIA. No, I'm not coming up with some suitable acronym for that, you go to hell.

Power Company was a series Kurt Busiek and Tom Grummett did at DC Comics for about 18 issues in 2000-2001, about a superhuman investigative/security company. Before the series started, there were a bunch of one-shots introducing each member of the team, each with a different artist. Today, the youngest member of the team, with what I'm guessing is Mark Bagley's first DC work.

Candy is a teenage runaway who ends up in San Diego the same time the JLA shows up investigating some odd signals they can't pin down. Candy tries to taking advantage of everyone gawking to swipe some food, but the grocer spots her and she has to run for her life. She ends up at the docks, trapped within a forcefield where a battle breaks out between two factions of Kobra. One lead by old Naja-Naja himself, the other by Lady Eve. (We saw part of a later stage of this war in Random Back Issues #6!!)

Candy ends up inside Naja-Naja's giant ship (which does look more like a snake in a later panel where we view it submerged from the side), and learns that Kobra was here to steal a strange sapphire called the Serpent's Egg before Eve could get it. Ancient power, unlock its secrets, blah blah. Candy worries that she's going to die here, all because she stole olive loaf. That would be a hell of a thing to have on your tombstone.

Desperate, Candy sneaks in a steal the Egg, which then covers her entire body in the blue sheath. She finds herself resistant to weapons, able to fly, and able to more limbs into weapons. Kobra's got some sort of cloak the JLA can't track him through, so she trashes the machine producing the cloaking field, and the Justice League attack.

Candy uses the confusion to escape, and Kobra's goons buy him time to flee before he blows his ship up. After, Candy realizes she can't remove the Egg entirely, and worries she should have helped the JLA instead of running. Then she overhears a news report that the JLA are fine, but Kobra escaped as well. Meaning he'll be looking for the Egg, and the one who took it.

It was a desire for protection and safety that led her to join the team, the last of the main seven cast members to join. I tend to think she was less likely to be found as a lone homeless person than running around publicly fighting crime for a company that requires publicity to pay the bills, but the series was canceled before anything ever came of it one way or another.

Grummett would tend to draw the blue sheath as more of a second skin than Bagley does. Or maybe it was just that she wore a skintight uniform most of the time once she was on the actual team.

{8th longbox, 121st comic. Power Company: Sapphire #1, by Kurt Busiek (writer), Mark Bagley (penciler), Mark Farmer and Keith Champagne (inkers), Carla Feeny (colorist), Comicraft (letterer)}