Dark Bilious Vapors

I have to confess complete awe and admiration for this post from Dave's Long Box, concerning a second tier DC hero called "Power Girl".

And Power Girl's power? Well, it should be fairly obvious:

I love Power Girl, and I don't know why. Well, actually, I do know why, but it's for completely juvenille reasons.

Power Girl is at once the most generic and most sexualized super heroine in mainstream comics. I believe that they key to whatever popularity Power Girl has is her generic, blank-slate quality – she is a tabula rasa that comic book fans and creators alike can project their conscious and unconscious desires on to.

That, and she is built like a brick outhouse.

Power Girl’s bosom is her most prominent feature, and prominent is the word. If she were real, and she showed up to rescue you, you would be going, “Daaamn!” Eye contact with her would be impossible –such is the er, power of Power Girl’s Magical Cleavage.

...

Power Girl rivals Lady Death, Lara Croft, and Battlechasers’ Red Monika in terms of cup-size, but there’s a key difference: The other characters I mentioned were designed with large breasts at their inception, whereas Power Girl has evolved over the years into her current statuesque mode through a sort of tribal tradition among creators. It's been said that when artist Wally Wood was inking over Ric Estrada's pencils on All-Star Comics, he kept making Power Girl's breasts bigger and bigger - just to see if his editors would cry "foul." Now it is an accepted and consistent convention in DC Comics – Power Girl must be drawn with giant breasts.

That is about the only thing that’s consistent about Power Girl.

Len on 10.01.05 @ 07:05 PM CST