Punchin' Up - Justice League International #24

Across a Crowded Room…

Justice League International #24

Cover Date: February 1989

Released: 13th December 1989

⋅ Writers: Keith Giffen / J.M. DeMatteis ⋅ 

⋅ Pencilers: Ty Templeton  ⋅ Inkers: Joe Rubinstein ⋅ 

⋅ Colourists: Gene D'Angelo ⋅ Letterers: Bob Lappan  ⋅ 

⋅ Editors: Andrew Helfer ⋅ 

Let's start with a little story! 

When I was a lowercase symbol I wasn't really into superhero comics, reading 2000ad, Transformers, and Spider-man and Zoid, meaning I can honestly say I read Grant Morrison before they were cool! A sign of how out of the loop I was about super comics I knew about Detective deWolf and Sin Eater, but not about Venom, a character I completely missed until I got into comics proper at the turn of the millinium!

The one superhero comic I did get was DC Action, a reprint comic in the UK with the hottest DC stories from the US. Along with such stories as Morrison's Animal Man was the original Justice League International stories.

(This was conincidently edited by the lovely Martin Gray who has a comic review blog everyone should check out, Too Dangerous for a Girl).

Then when I did finally get into comics I went out to the new(ish) world of podcasts, something to listen to as I traveled or did boring work. One of the first I discover just happened to be a JLI podcast, Bwah-ha-ha-ha Podcast (and I'm sure everyone is sick of my "hot takes" by now :D ), which along with the Who's Who podcast were the main reasons I started this blog!

So I have a very soft spot for the JLI era, the one that I've probably engaged the most with over the last decade or so. Why did I force you to read (or at least skim) all this? To make you understand how much I do enjoy these stories because for a lot of them I will be very negative about the characterization of Power Girl through much of them.

So close to making my little shipper heart!

Giffen & DeMatteis's talent was to reduce the characters down to one or two core concepts and build the stories around those key points. Sometimes they even didn't know the characters before starting writing them, part of this was the fact they weren't allowed to use any of the A-list heroes and had to make do with the scraps of mostly C-listers. For characters like Blue Beetle, Booster Gold, Fire and Ice this works really well, with their personalities here more or less becoming the default for the character, for some more established characters it doe them no good at all, including Pee Gee, basically, they default to her earliest personality, she's angry at the world and that it! The smart capable woman who runs her own software company and is connected to a supernatural battle against the Lords of Chaos is all gone, and now she's mostly angry at the world. 

But on the plus side, we do get Stinky the Cat!

So what about the story?

We have three stories, or even chapters, in this issue two which involve mostly Maxwell Lord. The middle one is where we find Pee Gee, which is a classic recruiting new members issue. We have a series of talking heads that has a wide range of superheroes saying vaguely assuming things, before an attack from some previously imprisoned Khunds (the final remains of Invasion!) and the heroes get to beat down the aliens. To be fair to the comic, crazy I know, Power Girl is front and center of the fight and is pretty proactive in chasing down the aliens, something else I'm going to be quite negative on going forward! This part of the story ends with Maxwell putting together a new team, Justice League Europe, which is the point of this story at the very end.

There is something you hear from people who review comics for blogs, podcasts, and youtube that picking apart a comic for such things you tend to focus on negative things that had you just flicked through the comic you'd probably wouldn't have even noticed. As a whole the comic is fun and enjoyable, it's just with this blog's focus on Power Girl I can't help but focus on how poorly she's characterized, especially compared to all that growth that had been set up with all her previous appearances. 

Still, for a good long while, this will be her home...