Reflections
Action Comics (volume 1) #650
Cover Date: February 1990
Released: 6th January 1990
- Writers: Roger Stern
- Pencilers: George Pérez / Jerry Ordway / Curt Swan / Kerry Gammill / Dan Jurgens
- Inker: Brett Breeding / Bob McLeod / Art Thibert / George Pérez / Dennis Janke
- Colourists: Glenn Whitmore / Brett Breeding
- Letterer: Bill Oakley
- Editors: Mike Carlin / Jonathan Peterson
My history with Superman is a little weird! Not going through my Superman (or Baman) phase most of my knowledge of this era of Supes is from a UK reprint comic called Superman ft Justice League. The only comics I remembered from the time is the infamous Big Barda does a Porno, okay so it’s …A Walk on the Darkside! (Action Comics #592) but I think it illustrates the plot fairly well, and a Mxyzptlk story no one else probably remembers!
Anyway being one of those big numbers Action Comics #650 is part celebration, part continuing plots, but we won’t be looking at the whole comic (it’s like two comics in one, be kind to me) just the few pages that contain PeeGee (obviously).
PeeGee is hanging out with the JLI, a common thing of this era with her appearing in so many group shots in this era (I will do a background images update one day soon), in what seems to be the old Happy Habour base. Flash is telling Kara, plus Fire and Ice, about a recent story of him racing Supes, one of those background issues for PeeGee I just mentioned, which she indeed points out to Wally!
We then get J’onn telling a story of his time on the League with supes coming in o save the day and getting the admiration of the League of the time. This was when Supes wasn’t a founding member of the League, and instead of Diana we had Dinah because only one woman was allowed on the League at the time!
Then we have PeeGee interrupt Flash, who actually comes across as a likeable character, and tell of her first meeting with Supes. And weirdly it’s not only a JLA/JSA crossover story, it’s a version of one I’ve covered on this very blog! We maybe kinda, it involves the two teams going to Apokolips to stop Darkseid from tipping the balance in his favour, it’s only a few pages but you get the general idea.
It’s werid because it kind of implies that the 70s JSA stories are still in continuity, despite them originally being on Earth-2, but PeeGee wasn’t trained by Superman despite the whole Atlantis retcon happening well after when she would have arrived on Earth. It’s one of those moments that show how little they cared to nail down PeeGee’s history, and why people consider her history to be really confusing (but not as bad as Donna Troy obviously).
Deep into it’s continuity heavy era, which isn’t a bad thing in the slightest, it’s hard for me to really judge the comic as a whole. It looks good, but I can’t really pick apart all he plot beats to tell what important or not. Really the only reason it’s here and not just a few background images is that it answers the question on PeeGee’s relationship to Supes, a occasional team-up buddy it seems, even though she might have the memories of being trained by Earth-2 Supes. This really won’t be properly settled for a good decade or so, the writers of the time not being interested in telling stories of PeeGee’s origins.