Our heroine Suzanne is confronted by the warrior woman Emu, who was meant to inherit the Power of the Valkyrie that Odin accidentally gave Suzanne back in the first issue, though he now claims it was all part of his plan to bring the world of man into the eternal battle between Odin and Loki. This is all according to Thor, who somehow knows all this despite knowing nothing of Odin's plans in Issue Two. Thor also explains to Suzanne the TRUE power of the Valkyrie is raising the dead - a fact that enables Suzanne to kill Emu after she summons a horde of ghostly vikings.
Pissed off about the whole affair, Suzanne says she doesn't want anything to do with any of this and tells Odin that she wants to go home. He agrees to open the way to Earth if she'll agree to hide the magical sword that may or may not contain the true Power of the Valkyrie somewhere Loki can't find it. She tosses it into a lake and thinks that's that. Unfortunately, Loki's spies (who were disguised as Agents Scully and Mulder from The X-Files) figure out that Suzanne has returned to Earth and notify Loki of this fact. And so the comic ends with Loki planning to bring his entire army to Earth to search for the sword.
Read Parts One and Part Two and Part Three. It won't make any of this clearer but I need the hits.
Our story opens with another flashback to Suzanne's childhood. We see her in the hospital as doctors work to save her sister, who was hit by a car while chasing a ball Suzanne threw out into the road. This really has nothing to do with the story except for giving Suzanne another weird speech about blood and its' importance in healing people, so I'm not going to bother showing it.
Our story actually begins several pages later as Pegasus appears on Suzanne's front lawn as she contemplates why she can't get Asgard out of her head after three days. She quickly figures out, in grand Lassie/Flipper tradition, that Pegasus has come to warn her that Loki is close to the sword. If you're wondering why the sword is so important since they clearly showed the power was inside Suzanne in the first issue or how Pegasus was able to travel between worlds when it took powerful magic or the power of a god to do that before, congratulations - you've paid closer attention to the story than the people who wrote it!
Suzanne arrives at the lake and summons the sword to her hand. She is then greeted by The Valkyrie Spirit. Yes, there's a Valkyrie Spirit now. The Valkyrie Spirit tells Suzanne of how the first valkyries acted as healers to dying male warriors and bodyguards as they went into the afterlife, because even if you're a badass warrior woman you're still expected to be subservient to men.
...
Have I mentioned before how much I really hate this book as a feminist and as a Norse mythology buff?
Before we can find out how there are multiple Valkyries when the comic treats the power of the Valkyrie as something that can only be wielded by one woman at a time, Gideon shows up. You know? Gideon? The shape-shifting demon who was disguised as Agent Mulder? It turns out that he was Emu's love and he's out for revenge on Suzanne.
Wait... he was Emu's love? But I thought she was dating Thor! And Loki called her 'my love' as he cremated her body last issue! Damn. I guess Emu got around. So much for that myth about valkyries being chaste.
Um... the Valkyrie didn't chose you! Odin stumbled across you by accident! Or he chose you! Hell, I don't know anymore! I don't care anymore, either...
Anyway, the battle goes about as well as you'd expect, given Suzanne's track record fighting demons so far. Gideon dies but Suzanne is shot with arrows in the back while she's running Gideon through. The sword flies out of her hand and is levitated into the hand of Loki.
Huh. That's weird. The artwork doesn't match the captions at all. Suzanne doesn't fall into the water. And the rest of the dialogue seems like an odd non-sequitur, even for this comic.
Did anyone else hear an echo just now? The hypothermia must be getting to Suzanne. She's repeating herself. Either that or she's developing Torgo-ism. I mean, the only other explanation is ...
...
Oh my gods.
Ladies and Gentlemen, I am flabbergasted!
We've seen some bad continuity in this comic. This writers can't decide if the Power of The Valkyrie is in Suzanne or her sword. The artist can't decide if Pegasus has wings or not. Hell, for the first two issues, we didn't even know for certain what our heroine's name was or how it was spelled! But this... this is an achievement in incompetence. Not only did this comic go to press as a monthly title with the dialogue balloons for one page printed twice across different artwork, but Bluewater Productions couldn't be bothered to fix the mistake in the trade paperback collection of this series!
To quote Joel Hodgson, "They just didn't care!"
Suzanne jumps out of the ice and starts to struggle with Loki over the sword. Suddenly, Odin, Thor and a bunch of burly vikings show up and begin fighting the demons. Odin commands her to join him in battle. Suzanne, not surprisingly, gets pissed off. And she summon a bunch of viking ghosts who break the frozen lake everyone is standing on, sending them tumbling into the water like so many preppies in an 1980s frat comedy.
To make a long story short (too late), Suzanne orders Loki and Odin to play nice or she'll use her power to destroy them both. Thor warns her that the peace she's created is temporary and that sooner or later the power will have to pass to another and that he and Odin will be waiting for that day.
The comic ends with Suzanne visiting her sister's grave, where we finally learn our heroine's last name. She says something about her memories of her sister keeping her sane through this ordeal which doesn't make a lick of sense since all they seemed to do was make her angry, but whatever. The story ends with Suzanne having a power she doesn't really understand, no direction as to what to do with it and no particular purpose or inclination to use it to help people - not surprising since Suzanne's only consistent desire in this whole story is to be left alone and not have people telling her what to do.
Power Of The Valkyrie is a waste of time. Poorly written, badly drawn, completely unoriginal and totally inaccurate to the mythology it is "based" upon. It lacks continuity. It lacks coherence. It lacks any reason to exist, save serving as fodder for smart-ass Internet comic book critics.
You want to know the sad thing? This isn't even the worst comic I've read that Bluewater Productions has published. We'll get to that book another day...
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