This is ba­si­cal­ly a trans­la­tion of a Ger­man text I wrote a while ago; it can be found here: Das Ende einer Ära. Part 5 has no cor­re­spon­dence to the orig­i­nal Ger­man text, but a Ger­man essay with a re­lat­ed theme (with the em­pha­sis put on Fou­cault) can be found here: Die Liebe zu jun­gen Män­nern.

The theme of this six part text (seven parts if you count this in­tro­duc­tion) is Aman­da Con­ner’s run of De­tec­tive Comic’s title “Power Girl”, from Power Girl #1 to #12 (span­ning one year); orig­i­nal­ly, I fo­cused on Con­ner quit­ting this title, a startling tragedy, since Con­ner ap­pears to be made for draw­ing Power Girl, and Power Girl (a fig­ure oth­er­wise main­ly re­mark­able for the con­fused­ness of her ed­i­to­ri­al med­dling and a ridicu­lous cos­tume), to be made for being drawn by Aman­da Con­ner.

Since then, time has marched on. The title of Power Girl still ap­pears, al­beit with­out Con­ner, Palmiotti and Gray, less funny sto­ries and less charm­ing art:

Aman­da Con­ner her­self has moved on to other works, like a story ap­pear­ing in Won­der Woman #600 she not only il­lus­trat­ed, but also script­ed.

And some­how, Power Girl man­aged to ap­pear again in this story. And also some hen­tai.

So, first, who is Aman­da Con­ner?

The all-know­ing Wikipedia con­ceals her birth­day (1965-04-13) and only tells us that both her par­ents are artists; as a child, she played with the paint­ing uten­sils of her par­ents. After a first mar­riage and a di­vorce, she lives in New York to­geth­er with the pen­cil­er and tex­ter Jimmy Palmiotti: that’s the guy on the far right of the fol­low­ing pic­ture:

But hon­est­ly, who cares about the ex­ter­nal triv­ia of the life of an artist, since what re­al­ly counts are her works? So we’ll start with a look at some of her ear­li­er works in Part 1, and then pick up two of her pre-Power Girl clas­sics in Part 2. In Part 3, we’ll take a clos­er look at the art of her Power Girl run, while Part 4 will be more fo­cused on plot el­e­ments and their in­flu­ence on her style. Part 5 will be an in­ter­lude about the clas­si­cal Greek con­cepts of Erastes and Eromenos, which we will then apply in the final part 6.

Part 1 · The Early Years »

2010-11-13 · Jan Thor · www.janthor.com · jan@janthor.de