Issue(s): Power Pack #37
Cover Date: May 88
Title: "Seeing the light!"
Credits:
Louise Simonson - Writer
Sal Velluto - Penciler
Stan Drake & Don Hudson - Inker
Marc McLaurin - Assistant Editor
Carl Potts - Editor

Review/plot:
Don Hudson does background inks. This issue begins Sal Velluto's professional comics career. I like Velluto's later work on Black Panther, but his early work here is stiff and disappointing after June Brigman and Jon Bogdanove.

This issue begins a story that will get interrupted by another fill-in next issue. But it introduces the character Rebecca Littlehale, who is a new mutant (as the cover says: This Issue: Meet A New Mutant!" And no, we don't mean a New Mutant). And her power kinda sucks - she automatically teleports to the brightest thing she can see. She's taken to wearing sunglasses but some bullies at school knock them off...

...and she winds up teleporting around until she's attracted to Power Pack, who were playing with a flashlight while testing out a new signal light.

She accidentally teleports away again and winds up in a bright television studio, where someone called her parents and where she might have been safe...

...but Power Pack decide to sneak out of their apartment in the middle of the night again and "rescue" her by having Alex power up and stand outside the studio window. At least they leave a note this time, although their parents don't wake up to see it.

They do manage to subsequently bring her home, although she now knows about the Power Pack kids, if not their secret identities.

On top of that, they are getting threatening calls from someone saying that he knows who they really are.

And the debate about telling their parents about their powers continues.

Statement of Ownership Total Paid Circulation: Average of Past 12 months = 103,150. Single issue closest to filing date = 73,749.

Quality Rating: C

Historical Significance Rating: 1

Chronological Placement Considerations: This issue compounds the problems with Power Pack #35 and #36 (see the relevant entries, but shortly: The Thing is shown unmutated in #36 even though #35 is a Fall of the Mutants tie-in and the Thing was mutated by FotM, and i've therefore swapped the order of those two issues) but referring to the events of issue #36 has having happened "yesterday" while also referencing the events of Fall of the Mutants. What to do about it? Right now i'm opting for "willfully ignore it". Basically i'm pretending that the announcer who said "yesterday" actually made a slip of the tongue.

References:

• The television replaying the scene of the X-Men's death in Uncanny X-Men #227 gets Power Pack talking about the dangers of their own adventures.
  
• They also mention the parade given for X-Factor, and while there's no footnote, that was in Fantastic Four #312 and is the issue that shows that the Thing was mutated by the time of Fall of the Mutants.

Crossover: N/A

Continuity Insert? N

My Reprint: N/A