Harley Quinn and Power Girl comes to the end of its 6-issue mini with a conclusion that settles the arrangement between Vartox and the object of his obsession: Power Girl. Harley lets her friend Peej take center stage for the most part in this one (it’s her wedding day, after all), but she doesn’t hesitate to step into the fight when they are confronted by a stepford village of mechanical insanity.
Jimmy Palmiotti, Amanda Conner, and Justin Gray had to wrap this up after last issue’s defeat of the big bad Odeox & company, leaving just a few loose threads to clip: Vartox’s determination to marry Power Girl and the slapstick duo’s return to their own time and place.
The result is a book that is mostly a fun coda to a story that’s pretty much done already. One last chance for us to spend time with this unlikely team-up that’s entertained us for half a year. The good news is we’ll get to see more wacky team-ups with Harley in her Little Black Book series. The bad news:
Fans should start more petitions
Winding Up
A whole cadre of artists contribute to this final installment including Stephane Roux, Moritat, Elliot Fernandez, and Flaviano. The art is generally consistent and the turnovers are not that noticeable except when we first land in suburbia and the faces all go a little doll-like and exaggerated for a few pages. Vartox conspicuously wears a purple suit to his wedding and in suburbia (don’t know if that was intentional), but it’s funny, especially when Harley gets all dreamy for him in a moment of weakness (which is nicely interrupted by Peej, who literally whacks her thought balloon apart). It’s weird meta-moments like this that make reading the book twice and three times. You don’t always catch everything in the first go-round.
And overall that’s one of the nicest things about this mini-series; it’s got plenty of re-read value. Not only in terms of the jokes you might have missed the first time around, but all the word and sight gags you’ve probably forgotten from when it all began seven months ago.
The concluding cover from Amanda Conner and Paul Mounts will serve wonderfully later as the cover for the trade, I suspect. The poses are nicely and deliberately reflective of the cheesy sort of space epic posters popularized since Star Wars was cutting its teeth almost 40 years ago!
Winding Down
Other than a few unflattering panels of Power Girl in the latter half of the book and the fact that this is really all just a wind up to get Harley and Power Girl back into the pages of Harley Quinn (this book leads right back into issue No. 13 of Harley’s regular series. If you haven’t been reading so far, there’s only some out-of-context value outside of the complete mini.
All the more reason to recommend you pick this up once it’s collected in the trade. The frame of it (Harley Quinn 12 & 13) aren’t crucial to your understanding since the first issue of this series quickly fills in the details that you need to know and this final issue resets the status quo.
Plenty to enjoy along the way, however. As is always the case with Harley Quinn!
Robots, Clowns, and Suburbia: oh my!
Recommended If…
- Power Girl putting Vartox in his place once and for all is what you’ve been waiting for.
- You can’t get enough of Conner, Palmiotti, and Gray’s non-sequitor humor.
- You want to see how it all ends (or begins? Interdimensional time-travel is so weird).
Overall
The conclusion of Harley Quinn & Power Girl feels like a long denouement, but still serves up a good heaping spoonful of the usual off-kilter antics that you would expect from our titular heroines. If you’ve been along for the ride, you’ll want to see how Harley and Peej finally close this chapter on their lives, escape a wedding to Vartox, and return to their own dimension. Solid, predictable plotting full of unpredictable gags along the way. If you missed this book in the floppies, I absolutely recommend it in trade as a (mostly) stand-alone story. Especially if you love either of these characters, space opera silliness, or just well-written pulpy adventure fun!
SCORE: 8/10
