Sunday, August 27, 2023

Sunday Splash Page #285

 
"Public Works Disaster," in JSA Classified #1, by Geoff Johns (writer), Amanda Conner (penciler), Jimmy Palmiotti (inker), Paul Mounts (colorist), Rob Leigh (letterer)

Again, on my first attempt, I typed it as "Geoof". The universe clearly wants me to lean into it, but I do try to avoid typos.

JSA Classified was an earlier attempt to get two titles out of the Justice Society, following in the footsteps of JLA Classified. Rather than splitting the cast into two teams, JSA Classified tended to give characters a solo spotlight. I bought one arc, the first four issues.

On the plus side, you have the Amanda Conner/Jimmy Palmiotti/Paul Mounts art team doing good work. Conner's great at background details that help it fell like the story takes place in an actual world with people and things that have their own lives going on, and also can add a bit of levity. The body language Conner gives Power Girl - alternately confident and fragile - does a lot to try and carry along the story.

On the negative, you have Johns twisting himself into knots trying to resolve Power Girl's conflicting origins.

Except, not really. Because while he does provide an answer - she's not from the future, not Atlantean, but a Kryptonian from a dead universe - he doesn't really spend any time on why that matters. Lots of pages on Power Girl insisting she doesn't care where she came from, when Conner's art reveals she clearly does. Because Johns saves the reveal for the very end of the fourth issue, during a whole thing with Psycho Pirate that feeds into Infinite Crisis, he doesn't show us how this knowledge affects Power Girl. Does it make her feel happy, to finally know (or remember, maybe?) Is she sad, that (almost) everyone she knew is even more dead than she thought?

She's a strange artifact of a multiverse that no longer existed. She hasn't had much success building a new home or life on Earth, and now it seems there's no previous home left to go back to. Seems like that might prompt some sort of reaction. To the extent there's any of that, it's buried under Old Earth-2 Superman yelling at Earth-1 Superman to get off his lawn, while Superboy-Prime and Alexander Luthor do their thing.

Oh, this is also the story where Johns tries to explain the boob window in Power Girl's costume as being because she never decided on an appropriate emblem to put there. I suppose it could tie into the way her origin had drifted for years, leaving the character looking unsuccessfully for something to anchor to, but it doesn't really fit. She's had costumes without a logo that also didn't have any sort of window over the chest. The (in-universe) explanation up to then seemed to be, "it feels comfortable to her, and she's confident enough to rock the look." That was probably good enough, unless the writer was fixing to give her a logo, which Johns evidently was not.

No comments: