Power Girl #14

Credits: Written by Judd Winick; art and cover by Sami Basri; lettered by John J. Hill; coloured by Sunny Gho; edited by Rachel  Gluckstern (associate) and Mike Carlin.

Synopsis: Against the very load protestations of its owner (Karen Starr alias Power Girl) Starrware Labs has been put into administration by the Loan Officers of First Federal and Savings Bank. Her finance officer Donna has disappeared with the contents of Starrware’s bank accounts and has fraudulently sold off the company’s patent portfolio. However, Karen’s attention is diverted from her company’s urgent problems when she is called away as Power Girl to answer Booster Gold’s questions about Maxwell Lord and then to investigate a problem at the docks. A clandestine meeting between competing arms dealers Randall Mikavic and Benjamin Vitale has gone wrong. The stolen pod they were bargaining over has opened and something seized Mikavic.It copied his mind into a synthetic android that is now destroying everything in sight. Power Girl challenges the surprisingly chatty android and it reveals that its programming is still booting. She thinks she has it subdued until the boot up finishes and it declares its intention to destroy New York City.

Continuity/Commentary

• The scene between Power Girl and Booster Gold would match a montage in Justice League: Generation Lost #2 in which the members of the JLI try to establish who remembers Maxwell Lord. However, in Generation Lost the person who talks to PG isn’t identified beyond her saying “Did Booster put you up to this?” (or words to that effect), i.e., it’s not Booster speaking to her.
• The Mikavic/Android says it has three objectives, one of which is Power Girl, and then says its primary objective is the destruction of New York City. Its origin is unidentified in this issue, but the pod has something like “crash” written on its lid.

Opinion: Judd Winick’s second issue seems to do a lot less than his first. The bank subplot is used, but isn’t advanced. Ditto with the Maxwell Lord angle. However, both of those sequences are still interesting. The exchange between the arms dealers is fun, but I found the resulting big-purple-meanie (BPM) to be be decidedly less interesting. Winick has been really good in Generation Lost and here with Power Girl herself in hitting a character’s “voice”, but the BPM just comes across as uninteresting and two-dimensional. However, this is only the first part of a story so we’ll have to see where it goes. The art by Sami Basri and colouring by Sunny Gho is brilliant and works really well.