Broken Frontier

Gog has sent Power Girl "home" but where that turns out to be is a version of Earth that is familiar and yet different.

Writer Geoff Johns gets to go back to the Earth-2 playground – a place that has not been since seen Crisis on Infinite Earths rearranged the DCU neighborhood and wiped it off the map. A criticism often leveled at Johns is that he delves too often into continuity… for this issue that criticism seems well-founded and the result is something that is liable to throw off even fans and regular readers.

On Earth-2, that world’s version of the Huntress (the daughter of Batman and Catwoman) is pondering the recent miseries in her life and considering a plan of action that would change her life forever. Into this explodes (literally) Power Girl – arriving courtesy of the power of the being Gog! As Power Girl struggles to deal with her connections to Earth-2, she simultaneously worries about her friends back on "New Earth". One thing she does understand, though, is that Huntress needs someone by her side before she makes a terrible mistake!

There is no argument that Johns has an amazing grasp of characterization and character development. Here he really plays up the dichotomy that Power Girl suffers. She feels at home on Earth-2 and there are people alive here that are dead and gone on her world. She has always been searching for the "perfect" place for her to belong and now that it seems Gog has given it to her… she cannot stop thinking and worrying about those whom she left behind on New Earth. Where the story falls apart somewhat is with Johns delving into Justice Society of America history and continuity from the 1970’s to the early 1980’s. He writes the characters as if the runs of Paul Levitz and Roy Thomas and titles like Infinity, Inc. were just a couple of years ago – rather than two and three decades past. There is a lot of back history to Earth-2 here that anyone other than a fan of DC’s older material is just not going to get and the problem is that a lot of the story hinges on this knowledge.

Another blast from the past here is artist Jerry Ordway. A veteran hand with the pencils, Ordway has his own history with the Justice Society as well as the Infinity, Inc. team. Here his work is as solid as ever and one has to appreciate the level of detail he puts into his work but his facial expressions occasionally seem "off" and some even go so far as to border on "creepy".

This Justice Society of America Annual will be a must-have for those who have been following the title since it ties directly into the current story arc and presumably leads off into a new sub-plot for that arc but newer fans, not steeped in the history of the DCU are likely to be bemused, bothered, and bewildered. For those who are new to the Justice Society and/or new to the DCU in general, the issue is liable to send them to Wikipedia to try to figure out what is going on. It’s not particularly a good thing when a reader has to do research to understand a plot.