The main reason it took me a long time to get around to reading Power Girl is because the covers looked quite silly. Sure, they had those Silver Age-esque colors popping out at you, and uh, Power Girl’s two main assets, but Amanda Conner portrayed our heroine in a vampy, sort of cartoonish manner. Don’t get me wrong, I love fun, self-aware titles (i.e. Booster Gold), but this just rubbed me the wrong way. Negative first impressions aside, the graphic novel collection Power Girl: A New Beginning is not too shabby. It collects the first six issues of the series and it’s a fairly fun and sometimes exasperating read.

It’s well known that U.S. comic strips, films, and TV shows from the height of the Cold War stripped away several of the fantastical elements from 1930s and 1940 space opera. Before the Soviet Union launched their first satellite into orbit in October of 1957, heady science-fiction was a household commodity as essential as electricity. Its new fans desired smarter and more socially aware narratives, that mirrored the dramatic tensions of the real world. One of the genre’s worthy and long-lost entries to this literary legacy, is New York Herald Tribune’s Jet Scott.

Madame Xanadu: Exodus Noir collects issues 11-15 of the DC/Vertigo series. I mentioned when reviewing the House of Mystery: Halloween Annual No. 1 last October that the art of Amy Reeder Hadley in the Madame Xanadu chapter was a standout. Accordingly, I was excited to review a chapter of Madame Xanadu, and somewhat disappointed when I discovered that Hadley was not the artist in this trade. But that disappointment didn’t last long.

Where to start with Mysterius the Unfathomable? I suppose it should be the creators, who were able to combine so many wonderful elements into this story that it must have been their clarity, vision, and cohesion that created this standout tome.

Colt Noble and the Megalords is a 64-page, $6 one-shot comic published by Image. At once, it is both paying homage to, and poking fun at, the He-Man line of action figures, and cartoons, that were popular in the 1980s (with a dash of Thundercats and Transformers to boot).

The inherent problem with reviewing SuperF*ckers is that my love for it is unqualified and fierce, but, having read cape-and-tights tales for a decades, I’m in on the joke. I’m not sure a casual comics reader would be.

Fables: The Great Fables Crossover collects a storyline that ran through the main Fables series, the Jack of Fables off-shoot series, and the three-issue limited series that spun out of events from Jack of Fables called The Literals.

Silver Streak Comics No. 24 is Image Comics’ second entry into its “The Next Issue Project,” wherein Image creators create the “next issue” of long-gone Golden Age series centered on public domain characters.

The realistically drawn and emotionally written, Secret Origin, retells the beginnings of the Silver Age Green Lantern known as Hal Jordan. Geoff Johns (Action Comics, The Flash: Rebirth) and Wizard 2007 Artist of the Year Ivan Reis (Infinite Crisis, Rann-Thanagar War) deftly revisit Jordan’s childhood, Air Force recruitment, his fateful encounter with Abin Sur, and eventual training on Oa under the tutelage of Sinestro.