HeroPress: Bottom Of The Pile: Power Pack #63

HeroPress A daily slice of super-powered geek life with a heavy emphasis on comics, old school tabletop games, general pulpy science-fiction, giant monsters, zombies etc

Bottom Of The Pile: Power Pack #63 Nov 10th 2017, 15:00, by noreply@blogger.com (Tim Knight) After 17 years without a dedicated title, Marvel's youngest superhero team - Power Pack - are back as part of the current Legacy initiative. A popular title from my early comic book reading days, I was looking forward to catching up with my 'old friends' and finding out what they were doing now. But what a disappointment Power Pack #63 turned out to be. The set-up for this return was very promising: the kids have grown up and grown apart, Julie 'Lightspeed' Power has gone to college, Jack 'Mass Master' Power is in High School, Alex 'Zero-G' Power has disappeared with the Future Foundation, and Katie 'Energizer' Power is left to her own devices at PS 87 Magnet School, New York City. I was expecting an interesting character study of maturing superheroes adjusting to the different pressures of life as they get older. But that's not what we got. Instead, Rarely Pure And Never Simple, by Devin Grayson (with pencils and inks by Marika Cresta), devotes about 90 per cent of its page count to Katie re-imagining a previously untold Power Pack adventure from their early days in the form of a fictional superhero story for a creative writing assignment. The pay-off is that she misses her older brother - a fact that could have been told in a page, or even a single panel, with the same (or greater) impact. Rather than a story about what the members of Power Pack are up to in the current Marvel Universe, we get pages and pages of a pedestrian, retro, adventure of no depth or imagination. There was no great substance or character development at work here, beyond Katie missing Alex - which she did on the first page as much as she did on the last. Having grown up myself reading the original run of this title back in the mid-80s, I welcomed the fact that Marvel has chosen to age the members of the Power family and I wanted to know more about them in the here and now. If I'd wanted to read a story from their early days I could have easily taken down a back issue from my shelves and read that instead. It's not that there was anything particularly bad about the Powers fight against the Bogeyman (a frequent villain of the team), it just wasn't anything special and certainly didn't merit wasting this one-shot issue on.

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