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No look at the various characters that make up the Justice Society of America would be complete without a look at the one and only Power Girl. She has got to be the most enduring character to never have her story straight - and I am betting you know why.

My wife is quite fond of pointing out to me the pulchritudinous nature of most women in comics, but Power Girl sort of puts them all into second place -- in a hurry. I honestly feel sorry for the woman. They have meddled with her legend so much over the years that now the "official" story is that even she doesn't know where she came from or how she got her powers. They have tried a few 4 issue miniseries with her, but she has always been a part of team books, and right now she has been reduced to an ill-tempered shrew good for little more than the occassional wisecrack about the size of her bosom. That's a shame.

They tried to give her a solo launch by pairing her with someone and changing her costume, removing the cleavage, but it didn't catch on.

This is my personal theory mind you, not the official story, but I think they just couldn't figure out what to do with the character so they kept drawing her breasts larger and larger to keep fans interested. They really were not this plastic surgery apparent when I was a kid. Of course, her super hard skin would prevent actual plastic surgery -- Superman's heat vision is the only thing that can penetrate it. To be honest, the way things have been going with this character lately, I think they are going to reveal that her breasts are the actual source of her power, but I digress.

Originally, she appeared as a Kryptonian -- that's right, just like Superman with the powers to boot.

For whatever reason, female Kryptonians have never really caught on. There have been more Supergirl's than you can shake a stick at. The current one also suffers from egregious amounts of feminine attractiveness, but in a very different package.

Now, before I get too carried a way, I should point out that there is a good reason female superheroes are very curvaceous. The idea when drawing comics is to draw distinctively, but rapidly. It is a lot of art to produce under deadline. Drawing faces and other subtle reminders of identity is difficult and time consuming -- thus costumes, they make the character very distinctive, very rapidly. So also it is easier to draw an idealized somewhat extreme female figure, but with PG they have definitely gone beyond "idealized" into...well, I'm not sure how to sum it up in a word.

In the end, I think it is a crying shame that this is where this character has ended up.

Since I first encountered her in her kryptonian days she has been one of the more fascinating females in comics, and in those days whe was not so well-endowed. Powered like the Supergirls, but not operating in the shadow of the big guy she had the possibility to be the real deal. The fact that they removed her from the kryptonian legend is probabaly the reason she has survived all these years continuously, unlike the S-girls, but at the same time she has ended up such a tangled mess that you can never really get your hands on her and learn to love her.

I am hoping, given the current emphasis in JSA of not knowing her legend at all that they are setting the table to give her a new legend, one worthy of a genuine visual icon in comics.

Related Tags: comics, comic books, Justice Society, Power Girl, fun, pulchritude