The second-to-last chapter of Power Girl Vol. 2: More Than a Crush is a surprisingly effective romance issue; writer Leah Williams leverages a unexpected, familiar setting and a stunt artist appearance into 20 pages that succeed despite nary a supervillain around. If only it felt more like an actual Power Girl story.

More Than a Crush offers two three-part stories, one a tie-in to the Superman: House of Brainiac crossover and the other following events among Power Girl and her cast while “Paige” is out on a date. Within these rather tight constraints, I’d say Crush is better than Williams' Power Girl volumes previous; at least Power Girl protecting Metropolis from aliens while Superman’s out of town is something Power Girl would do. But as before, the book is plagued by leaps of logic, questionable character decisions, and just plain silliness that continually pulled me out of the story. Even at Crush’s most impressive, it’s trading on a tie with another series' story, and an ill-fitting one at that.

[Review contains spoilers]

Over 12 issues, Williams has been hinting at the secret life of Power Girl’s love interest Axel Gust; Power Girl thinks he works for a spy agency but the cut scenes suggest he’s some kind of techno-thief. So it is a shock when Axel reveals himself to be from Asgard, working to recover their lost artifacts — and not just any Asgard, but that of Siegfried and Ratatosk, whom Wonder Woman met in the Infinite Frontier Wonder Woman Vol. 1: Afterworlds and appeared throughout the Becky Cloonan/Michael Conrad run.

Afterworlds was problematic all on its own; Cloonan and Conrad’s first Wonder Woman story involved an amnesic Diana completing quests in a fantasy realm, arguably not really a Wonder Woman story, though things improved eventually. But that makes it a loaded choice for Williams even under the best of circumstances. Despite the joy of seeing “Siggy” again, who turned out to be a favorite, and that the issue is drawn by Travis Moore, who also worked on Afterworlds, if visiting Asgard was already a stretch for the mythologically-inclined Wonder Woman, it is doubly so for Power Girl.

And so. The issue is fun, seeing Asgard again as drawn by Moore, the humorous dialogue, the romance, the glimpse into Axel’s adventures, and that Williams bucks the pressure to put a fight scene in here and just makes it about the characters. But really what we’re reading here is a pilot for a (perhaps interesting) Axel Gust series, with little resonance for the Power Girl character herself; this could as easily be Diana or any other character as it could the so-called Paige Stetler.

Not that supporting characters can’t sometimes take the spotlight, but no small amount of the difficulty is that this swerve doesn’t feel earned. At their date ahead of this, Paige amuses Axel with scatalogical fish facts because she “love[s] fish,” something repeated a number of times within issue #11 but never before or since. It seems very much like the kind of attribute Williams made up for the character on the spot (never mind Power Girl’s fraught association with Atlantis), this idea of Power Girl as an empty vessel for what the story needs rather than vice versa, and that kind of anonymizing is troublesome right before she becomes secondary in the story entirely.

That same chapter kicks off with an astoundingly tone-deaf scene where Daily Planet editor-in-chief Lois Lane essentially fires Paige both because she spends too much time as Power Girl and so that she can be Power Girl in far-off locations and write stories about it. At worst it’s nonsensical; at best it’s an unethical move by Lois, playing on both her familial relation to Paige and her knowledge of Paige’s dual identity. Plus that, as Paige says, she “constructed [her] entire new alter ego identity around this opportunity” that she’s now been fired from. Williams' text seems oblivious to the weirdness of all of it, from Lois' cruelty to Paige’s codependence, never treating this as anything but normal.

See also Crush’s intimation that Paige’s roommate, Omen Lilith Clay, psychically spies on Paige on the regular, a creepy comics no-no that the book treats as cute. (At another point, given the opportunity to learn any secret in all the world, Power Girl equally chooses to spy on Omen.) Later, Omen attends a young professionals gala with Natasha “Steel” Irons, seemingly as Natasha’s “wingman,” before Omen makes a sudden pivot to read the minds of the partygoers from up in the rafters because her “telepathy is visible when activated.” Sci-fi’s got its own rules, but by definition that’s not how I thought telepathy worked. Lilith does get some comeuppance from partygoer and “precog” Ejecta, though how no one saw this woman with gold gauntlets enter the room is another of the book’s imponderables. (“Ejecta” is perhaps a play on “Projectra” of Legion fame, though the names in the book are also particularly bad, given also Aquus, the aquatic villain, and the ever-present Symbio, the symbiote spaceship.)

As compared to all of that, the beginning is better; Power Girl protecting Metropolis and teaming up with Lobo’s daughter Crush is seamless by comparison. Having Crush paired with the Holliday Girls biker gang is inspired and I hope see more of them (come to think of it, this iteration is also from Cloonan and Conrad’s Wonder Woman). Strangeness still abounds, as when Power Girl professes a friendship with Harley Quinn (and the cognitive dissonance of suggesting this Power Girl and the character from Harley Quinn and Power Girl are one and the same) but that’s balanced out by such priceless moments as Power Girl fighting the Big Belly Burger mascot.

The next volume of Leah Williams' Power Girl is the last, and surely cancellation needed to happen even as Power Girl Vol. 2: More Than a Crush is a mild upswing. I would venture DC doesn’t have much success with books that venture into romance and slice-of-life comics as much as this, though credit to Williams for trying it. In saying, “this is not a Power Girl” book, I’m led to ask what is a Power Girl book, and I’m not sure I have an answer. To me, that suggests the character’s best place is perhaps with the Justice League or Justice Society and not in a solo title, though I respect some might feel otherwise.

[Includes original and select variant covers]