Who'd Like A Cocktail? #7

This week's cocktail was another tricky one to choose: Justice League of America #14 worked at pitting the League against the Injustice League; Black Adam #3 had a fight between the main character and Hawkman - always worth a read - and ended on a great cliff hanger; Shadowpact #18 seemed to recover after last month's so-so issue; and the New Gods started dying in earnest in the appropriately titled The Death of The New Gods #1.

Give me a comic that features Power Girl, however, and it's a safe bet that it's going to the top of my reading pile.

I make no apologies for being a big fan of the character - she's ballsy, smart, feisty, has a great rack and enjoys hitting people. What's not to like?

We may as well get this out of the way at the start: Power Girl has large breasts. Get over it.

There's a fair amount of discussion on the net about this apparent issue and what a lot of people fail to realise is that some women have large breasts. Some women are famous because they have large breasts; other woman are famous for something that has nothing to do with the size of their breasts. In the DCU, Power Girl - to me - fits into this latter category. She's a great character, an able leader of the Justice Society, cousin to a Superman from a universe that no longer exists, and just happens to have large breasts.

Now if the number of mentions of breasts in that one paragraph doesn't increase the number of hits to this blog I don't know what will.

Anyway, The Brave And The Bold #7 teams Power Girl with Wonder Woman in a relatively convenient manner - PG helps Wonder Woman with a sudden infestation of mummies and at the end of it, happens to be holding her magic lasso which makes her confess that she's off to murder Superman. So begins a somewhat strained team-up that pits the two superheroes against Dr Alchemy, the villain behind PG's assassination attempt.

The perennially patient Wonder Woman acts as foil for Power Girl who's intent on finding Alchemy so she can beat the crap out of him for invading her mind. Constantly advising caution, Wonder Woman is simply ignored by PG on more than one occasion and it's this recklessness that - for me - makes her such a fun character. Dr Alchemy, in possession of PG's body and mind, at one point claims that her soul has told him that Power Girl prefers Alchemy to Wonder Woman because for all his faults, he's not perfect. There's no way to be positive that this statement is true - it could just be Alchemy messing with Wonder Woman's mind - but it feels right because Wonder Woman is perfect and for we imperfect creatures, that's got to be bloody annoying.

Anyway, there's a welcome accord at the end of the issue when, despite all her protests that brute force isn't necessary, Wonder Woman helps save the day by simply crashing her invisible plane into Superman's Fortress of Solitude.

While the two women are unlikely to ever become best friends, it seems they've reached an understanding.

As enjoyable as the issue was, it did seem little more than a placeholder in writer Mark Waid's plans for the series: there's an epilogue of sorts dealing with the Challengers of the Unknown and the Book of Destiny that figured largely in the first six issue story arc. It seems Waid's saving his less generic plots for something bigger that, I'm sure, we'll see at some point down the line.

Still, it's nice to see Power Girl outside the pages of Justice Society of America in more than a one panel cameo for a change. I can only hope the rumours of a Power Girl ongoing series next year turn out to be true.