Power Girl Appreciation 2022

[Ascended]

Finished One Star Squadron.

Karen gets a good ending. Well, as good as anyone in the tale, anyway. It is remarkably dour, as far as superhero endings go. Which seems to be about par for course with Russel.

Spoilers, if anyone else still cares about this.

........

After the office burns down, Karen gets back to basics; saving lives as PG and not worrying about the capitalist rat race or who has the biggest bank account or which hero is most popular. She burns all the self-help books, apologizes to Red for trying to get him fired, they make peace, and she goes off on her way. Her role in the issue is pretty minor, everything came to a head already in issues 4 and 5, and this is largely just epilogue. But it *does* put her back into familiar territory. Nothing excuses the idea of her reading Max Lord's books but other than that, the entire thing could be written off as a short-term phase she went through. You could *almost* fit it into continuity if you were so inclined (though I question why anyone would want to).

So I guess the best we can say for this book, as PG fans, is that it gave her somewhere to be for a few months and didn't end up doing any legitimate damage to her. She was frustrated at her own lack of success and tried to achieve great things another way, by taking on business and economics, and after that failed experiment, got back to doing what she's good at. She screwed over a friend, but in the grand scheme it's not a huge mistake and her actions actually didn't really make a difference anyway; the business was gonna be sold regardless of what she did, and she had nothing to do with the office burning down.

Honestly, I think everyone else comes out looking worse than she does. Including Red. Still not a great story for Karen, but it ended far better for her than most of us feared it was going to.