Harley Quinn - Harley und Power Girl!

As anyone who read Harley Quinn #2 will remember, Harley and her amnesiac Kryptonian friend Power Girl were sent through a transporter ring held by the Sportsmaster and the Clock King twice. Readers were treated to their first adventure in space in volume 2. If they wanted to know what happened in the second adventure, which ended with the girls returning with Power Girl in a wedding dress, they had to wait for this.It seems that Power Girl once helped Lord Vartox of Valeron repopulate his planet after he visited Earth in 1974. How is not made clear. He became obsessed with both her and the counter culture. He turned his world into the grooviest place in the universe and filled it with statues and androids that looked like PG. Alas, the girls find him in distress, for his utopia has been invaded and his person captured by a tyrant determined to wipe out hedonism in the universe, the square Oreth Odeox. PG has no memory of Vartox and despises him when she meets him, but he has a teleportation ring that can return her and Harley home, so they must placate the womanizer by liberating his world. I liked the art, usually. Artist Roux has largely overcome her early difficulty with putting emotion into Harley’s doll face. I didn’t react to the humor with enthusiasm. I didn’t hate it, but I expect to laugh at loud when I’m reading a humorous comic, and I only did that once, during a re-reading. And, honestly, I didn’t like hippies when I was young and I now feel about them the same way Power Girl does.

Amanda Conner expands what began as a between-the-panels joke in Harley Quinn #12 (collected in Harley Quinn, Vol. 2: Power Outage) into a six-issue miniseries in Harley Quinn and Power Girl. The story follows the titular characters as they battle to save Vartox (a comical version of Sean Conner's "Zed" from Zardoz) in the Sombrero Galaxy. The story is everything readers expect from Amanda Conner's run on Harley Quinn, but with sci-fi themed jokes thrown in and even more fourth-wall-breaking. The only downside is that the story, occurring between-the-panels, has no lasting affect on characters or continuity. If readers only follow Harley's solo book, they would lose little in skipping this miniseries. That said, it makes a nice companion piece.