I was wrong Power Girl is on the cover of this comic, so I guess that one still counts! At the very end of the last comic (#51) we found a very eldritch bug like creature hatch from Skeets. Skeet’s Booster Gold’s floating bot from the 25th century has been off in there database since the start of the series, which we find is because Mr Mind, a mind controlling bug from Captain Marvel (the Shazam one) has been gestating inside Skeets for the entire series!
Fleeing through time Rip Hunter and Booster Gold, and his ancestor who’s been Metropolis’s mysterious hero Nova, the little group is fleeing through the multiverse against the giant bug. And I’ve just typed that all out, the most mind boggling sentence in history (at least until we get to Infinite Crisis) and one of the many reasons that I really love comics sometimes!
As they flee they enter or pass by various parallel Earths that are altered by the presence of the Bug, giving us some of the classic Earth’s that we had before the Crisis. These include a Nazi world (Earth-10), because you apparently have to have one of those, the world of the Crime Syndicate (Earth-3), Shazam world (Earth-5), Kingdom Come world (Earth-22) and obviously Earth-2, those last two are going to have some importance going forward for our Pee Gee. It’s also mentioned that there are only 52 universes, the other thing thats going to have a influence on the DC universe for a good decade.
To stop the bug from eating the multiverse the three heroes come up with a plan, that involves a barely functioning Skeets. Part of the plan involves time travel, obviously, and Booster meets Blue Beetle (the Ted Kord version) on the day just after the original Crisis in a really touching scene that not only has a bwahahaha but a mention of the Blue Scarab, one important to the past the other to the future of the DC universe.
They bait the bug back to Rip Hunters lab, shrinking him down and trapping him back in skeets, before Skeets is long passed through the timeline that de-ages Mr Mind until he’s a small caterpillar again who’s trapped by Dr Savanna at the start of the year.
Then we get a few of the lesser ending, with a de-powered Black Adam and the ghosts of Sue and Ralph investigating mysteries, some of these alas do not get as much attention as there potentials. And finally Dr Evo repairs Skeets so they are Booster Gold are together again!
I’m not sure I can really describe how good 52 is, with fifty-two issues I’ve missed out a big chunk of material, and it introduces a chunk of new ideas that stick around for quite a while, Batwoman is basically established in this run most of which is still more or less canon even almost twenty years later.
Basically go read this series!