Comic Book Reviews 5/6/2009 - Part 1

I'm starting out the reviews this week with one great comic and one so-so comic. The rest of the reviews will show up in a day or two due to my work schedule, and I'll also have a quick review of the Free Comic Book Day issue of Atomic Robo which was a laugh-out-loud pleasure to read. Click below for the reviews of Power Girl #1 and Flash : Rebirth #2:

Power Girl #1
Story by Justin Gray & Jimmy Palmiotti
Art by Amanda Conner

OK, I’ll admit it up front…I did grab both Power Girl covers. The standard Amanda Conner cover that was solicited, and a surprise Adam Hughes cover that I was not expecting. I’ve been looking forward to this title for quite some time now and I must say that I was far from disappointed.

The story does a good job of introducing PG as her own character, giving us a little background but not enough to bog down the first issue, and setting up her secret identity which is something that Power Girl has been lacking. The action picks up and starts moving quickly and the end keeps you interested in what will happen next.

The art by Amanda Conner is quite impressive. I read somewhere that Conner was the “best artist working in comics without a monthly series”. Well, that has changed now because she has arrived in style. Conner has also done a good job of updating PG's costume a bit, there are just enough tweaks to modernize the look while retaining the ummm…classic focus. Speaking of her “special powers”, the cheesecake is kept to a tasteful level and the boob jokes are well done and amusing. My favorite being the scene where a quirky scientist is sitting at Karen Starr’s (aka Power Girl) desk and picks up two of her many snowglobes. Starr says “Please stop messing with my globes” as she casually sips a coffee and he holds the two globes up in front of her in a rather “Austin Powers opening sequence” type scene.

I will definitely be continuing with this title for the foreseeable future and would recommend it to anyone who is a fan of old school superhero comics.

Flash : Rebirth #2
Story by Geoff Johns
Art by Ethan VanSciver

I can honestly say I’m having some doubts about Flash : Rebirth but, due to the endless hours of enjoyment that Geoff Johns and Ethan VanSciver have provided for me in their prior stories, I will give it more of a chance.

What’s wrong with it, you ask? Well, it’s not that anything is particularly wrong, just not really grabbing me like I feel it should. Maybe my expectations were way too high, given the previous Green Lantern : Rebirth, or maybe it’s because I was never really a big Flash fan. But then, I think, I wasn’t really a Green Lantern fan when I read GL : Rebirth and it really turned me on to the character.

So I’m kind of stuck in the middle here between my loyalty to the creators and my concern as a consumer and comics enthusiast that I’m wasting my money on a story that I’m not really enjoying. This issue is decent, though, in that it gives us some more background on Barry and it does tie in some things from the previous issue. The final page was completely predictable, not in a bad way but in a sort of “meh” way. I am curious to see where this is going and I will keep it up for now, but I’m just really hoping that the pace picks up. In a book that stars all of the various Flashes, the story should be moving at lightning speed and not at this snail’s pace.