Power Girl #7 - Vartox fails to protect his people from a contraceptive bomb, which renders them all sterile. Or infertile. Whichever. Rather than concern himself with his entire planet, Vartox focuses on finding someone for him to get his groove on with, and picks Power Girl. Lucky her. He interrupts her helping Dr. Mid-Nite capture the Blue Snowman, nearly kills Mid-Nite with seduction musk, which doesn't work on Power Girl, then releases an Ix Negaspike, which he plans to fight to impress her. This also fails miserably.Vartox is quite the putz. He's like a more arrogant and stupid version of Hercules, which is saying something. However, I am intrigued by the glimpses of his homeworld. Chancellor Groovicus Mellow. General Peacemonger. Ghost Poets of Dimension Seven. I don't know whether these are concepts that were already with Vartox, or if Gray, Palmiotti, and Conner came up with them on their own, but either way, I wouldn't mind seeing more. It could be the start of a world-building process, like what Brubaker and Fraction did for Iron Fist. Maybe they could ditch Vartox and join Power Girl's supporting cast? Also, I like the inclusion of Blue Snowman. Pity what happened to her. There aren't enough villains using their stuff to rob banks these days.
Thunderbolts #139 - It was another small week, this has Parker writing the Agents of Atlas, so what the heck. Osborn sends the Thunderbolts to an Atlas chemical weapons facility in the swamps of Louisiana. They blow it up, Atlas arrives, stomps most of the T'Bolts, until Scourge, who is actually Nuke from Born Again goes nutty and possibly disembowels Bob.Parker does a good job of getting people who may be unfamiliar with Agents of Atlas up to speed. I think he so, anyway. I was already familiar, so perhaps I'm a poor judge. The fight goes about like it ought to. The Thunderbolts are not only severely outclassed, but they don't work well together. Which is something else Parker did well. I'm not a regular reader, but it was easy to pick up on the various tensions within the group. Ant-Man wants out, and is worried he'll be killed first. Mr. X can barely tolerate his teammates. Headhunter doesn't like Mr. X. Nobody trusts the Ghost unless they have to. Like some of the team, I'm not clear on why Osborn sent them. Scourge thinks it's acceptable losses, but usually for losses to be acceptable, you have accomplish something. At that point, nobody on Atlas was hurt at all, let alone dead. So perhaps Norman is just removing people who outlived their usefulness.
I'm not a fan of the art. The coloring doesn't help, as everything is murky and frequently overshadowed, which seems to make the work less detailed. There are other times where I don't think it's the colors, it really looks as though Sepulveda didn't have a chance to add details, so some of the faces look poorly done. In one panel, I couldn't even tell who the character I was looking at was supposed to be. Duing the fights, there's more posing than any sense of movement to the characters.
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