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I was reading Power Girl: Power Trip, but a few issues into it, I was starting to wonder what the deal was with "Terra," Power Girl's sidekick and friend, who comes from a hidden nation of subterranean people. Well, it turned out the answer was in this book by the same creative team of writers Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti and artist Amanda Conner, so I paused reading Power Trip to delve into this long out-of-print collection.

Terra is a bit frustrating in that much of the time, we view this new character from the outside; we don't get much of her own struggle. What are her stakes? This is never really clear. The first issue here teams her up with Supergirl, in one of her particularly selfish periods; Terra's perky selflessness serves as a contrast. Then she meets up with Power Girl and Doctor Mid-Nite, then (groan) Geo-Force. Her deal is that she tries to take care of collisions between the surface world and the subterranean one, protecting the underground ecosystem from human intervention and humanity from subterranean creatures. She comes from a whole thriving underground world with a myriad different kinds of life. It's a neat set-up for stories potentially, but one the volume on its own ultimately doesn't make a ton of use of—and since Terra never got another series, I'm guessing was never really used in future stories, either.

Alongside this, there's a subplot about a guy digging underground who accidentally turns himself into a living diamond. This culminates in him attacking Terra's people, and she and Geo-Force team up to defeat him. It's pretty perfunctory stuff, I feel like more could have been made of the bad guy. (There's also some stuff about this Terra's place as the... third, I think, superhero of that name, but I don't know anything about the Teen Titans, so it was all underexplained gibberish to me. For some reason, Geo-Force's memory has to be erased even though he learned that someone was impersonating his dead sister; seems a bit mean. How his dead sister can be from underground, I don't really know.)

Then in a half-issue coda, Terra goes back to the surface and bumps into Power Girl again. This made me very glad I paused Power Trip to read this, because it's basically a set-up for that series, pushing Kara into the decision to resume living her civilian identity and lead a normal life.

So writing wise, it's basically fine. Decent idea, but mediocre execution—which honestly feels par for the course for Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti, who are hacks (meant in the nicest possible way, of course) if ever there were any; they did, after all, write Infinite Crisis Aftermath, Uncle Sam and the Freedom Fighters, parts of Countdown, and what is probably the worst superhero comic ever. But what elevates it is their collaboration with one of superhero comics' best-ever artists, Amanda Conner. Conner's art is fun, bold, sexy, and above all, character driven. You get a sense of personality from her faces that mostly fails to come across from the writing. It's delightful, I knew I would love it, I did love it, and it's the whole reason I bought this book as opposed to just reading the issues on DC Universe Infinite, and it was worth it. Get Amanda Conner to draw every comic book, please.

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