You are warned, here be spoilers.
Power Girl #5 is a touch cluttered, but a lot of fun. I’m still strongly reminded of Kirkman’s Invincible, though it’s a touch more grounded than Invincible is. Power Girl has a life, and is aggravated when villains interrupt that life with their villainy. She rolls her eyes at their grand-standing. She screws up. She gets knocked off-balance, and doesn’t feel the need to posture dramatically about it. And she jokes around with a fireman who helps her up.
Watching her civilian life and her superhero career butt up against each other is one of the great joys of this series. It’s not an angst-inducing life-obstacle the way it’s traditionally been to, say, Spider-Man; it’s almost sitcom-ish. For example: Karen Starr is interviewing a job candidate. A man with a rocket pack flies by the window, and then a postal truck goes flying by. She hires the applicant on the spot and then ushers her out the door so she can change into her Power Girl uniform. If this were happening to Spider-Man, he’d be the applicant, and his escape from the interview to go save the day would cost him the job.
I’m still loving Amanda Conner’s art on this book. It has exactly the right amount of whimsy and weight. On the one hand, an ill-tempered cat has the most hilariously expressive face. On the other hand, Power Girl’s uniform is drawn with practical details evident – zippers running down the backs of her gloves, and seams running down her unitard that give me the impression it’s made of something more substantial than, say, spandex.
This issue finally springs some antagonists on Power Girl that the writers have been teasing us with for the last few issues – some sort of space-hopping gun-toting galactic valley-girl fugitives, whose flying saucer is staffed with beefcake eye-candy androids. On my initial read-through, I was underwhelmed by these women, but looking back, they suggest a story more about antics than danger, which is just fine with me.