Power Girl #25

Cover by Sami Basri

Power Girl #25 (June 15, 2011)

Writer: Judd Winick

Penciller: Hendry Prasetyo

Letterer: John J. Hill

Eh.

That’s really all I can say about this comic, to very loosely paraphrase an early Lady Gaga song.

I haven’t been this apathetic about a comic in a long time and my complete indifference is quite staggering.

It’s partially my fault; I picked Power Girl #25 totally arbitrarily (well, the cover has Power Girl taking a bolt of lightning to her dangerously exposed breasts and I was both curious and embarrassed for her) and of course, this was part 2 of a story arc though I have to wonder just how strong of an arc it was based on this very lackluster conclusion.

Basically, Batman and Power Girl team together to stop the rampage of Rayhan Mazin, a wrongly imprisoned victim of racial profiling who also happens to possess super powers. This was the entire plot of the comic. There weren’t even awesome fight scenes or any real sense of the threat of Mazin. If anything, he appeared to be a slight inconvenience to both Batman and Power Girl. Their inner monologues and interactions with each other only illustrate a profound sense of irritation. Due to this, I was also just mildly annoyed while reading the issue.

What really threw me about this comic, however, was the complete lack of suspense or conflict at the climax of the plot. In comics, there’s usually that moment where the hero[s] either figures something out or receives some sort of device/power to help them win the battle. No matter how it’s illustrated, there’s always that turning point that solves the problem.

Do you know how the problem is solved in this comic? Batman disappears for a few panels and, I guess, sends Power Girl a text or something updating her, and she turns to Mazin/the reader and says, “Don’t worry, Batman solved it.” That’s it. We don’t see Batman solving anything and we don’t even know what he did exactly. All we know is that Batman came through again.

That was so astonishingly weak, I can’t believe it was actually published in a DC comic. It read like a piece of fanfiction that a kid couldn’t figure out how to end properly. Though, because of how weak this conclusion was, it was the only moment I felt any sort of real reaction to the comic.

Mazin was also a terrible “villain” (as it turns out he’s just misunderstood) and both Batman and Power Girl had absolutely no personalities. Overall, after finishing Power Girl #25, I feel as if I didn’t read a comic at all today.