Leah Williams' Power Girl Vol. 1: Electric Dreams feels hastily put together, rife with moments that move the story along but don’t truly make much sense. When I read this, I was honestly surprised to see the book still going at 20 issues — was there an audience out there getting something from the book that I’m not? (Cancelled not much later.) I was here largely for the run-up to the House of Brainiac crossover and picked up the second volume for the same, but I was rather sorry to see this book didn’t get a revamp with DC All In.

[Review contains spoilers]

Power Girl feels off-kilter from the first issue. We open on Power Girl, now Dr. Paige Stetler, debuting her new secret identity as Daily Planet tech reporter by talking about something she’s “genuinely passionate about” — the inequalities that underlie the technology supply chain. That’s part of a fundraising auction of alien artifacts representing sustainability successes in other cultures. But with no acknowledgment of the irony, we find out that Power Girl actually got the artifacts from a smuggler in exchange for a future favor — that Williams presents Power Girl as adopting inequality as a cause, but not so far as to not auction stolen artifacts in order to bulk up her credentials.