Finally! POWER GIRL Solo Series Premieres This Year
DC Comics at last has green-lit a continuing book for another Kryptonian (the sexy one), and the creative team clearly is excited about it.
"It’s going to be big and over the top, just like she is, literally!"
-Jimmy Palmiotti, co-writer of Power Girl
The chairperson of the Justice Society of America received some much-deserved validation at the recent New York Comic Con, where it was announced that Kara Zora-L, aka Karen Starr, aka Power Girl, is getting her own long-awaited regular DC Comics title. These new adventures will be written by the dynamic duo of Jimmy Palmiotti & Justin Gray (Jonah Hex), with everyone's favorite P.G. artist, Amanda Conner, providing more of what she brought to 2005’s acclaimed JSA: Classified #1-4 (now part of the Power Girl collected edition).
Having served as inker for Conner's pencils on JSA: Classified, Palmiotti had developed a greater interest in the character.
"Whenever Jimmy and I discussed what we’d like to work on," Gray told Newsarama, "we kept coming back to Power Girl."
So, the writers bit the bullet a year ago and pitched P.G. as a series. Once they got the go-ahead, they had to decide on the artist, someone capable of delving beyond the cheesecake factor to the multi-layered personality they knew their lead character to be.
"Once we got Amanda to commit, which took a little arm-bending," Palmiotti told CBR News's JEFFREY RENAUD, "it all fell into place."
"One of the many benefits of having Amanda with us as the artist is she’s capable of bringing a natural and reactive female perspective to the scripts," said Gray. "Amanda is also free and clear to add or subtract anything she wants from the story and representation of Kara as a real woman despite her anatomical advantages."
"I think the most important thing to give Power Girl, besides great knockers, is a lot of personality," said Conner. "Part of it is her kicking ass, obviously. But a lot of it is also what she is up to when she is not kicking ass. She goes home, and she is hardly ever home, and her cat is pissed off at her and $h!t$ on the bed. [Kara] doesn’t have a social life but she’s trying to get one. She’s got no family. The JSA buddies are her friends and family. She’s trying to be a bit more normal but she can’t be normal, she’s Power Girl."
In the debut story arc, the writers and artist introduce their audience to Superman's "cousin" from Earth-2, who also stars in Justice Society of America. But Palmiotti wanted to assure new readers that they would need no previous knowledge of P.G.’s sometimes convoluted history to enjoy the new series.
"You can go in raw and you will understand it because we are going to explain her completely and set her up in her own book," he explained. "We also set up her world and her personal life and her secret identity. It’s an establishing story, book-ended with a massive amount of action."
"But we need to say that starting from the ground up doesn’t mean we’re ignoring or re-imagining anything," Gray qualified. "What it means is we’re in a position to add new dimensions to Power Girl’s mythology."
Palmiotti summed up the tone of the new series as "entertaining and fun with a bit of humor as well. The super heroics and over the top action will be there but we plan on establishing a real life and supporting cast for Power Girl and, given it's her own series, we will continue to build on these relationships. We want to give the reader a complete fix."