Julie Power’s original ability is acceleration, most visibly expressed through her flight and the colored trail she leaves behind. Lightspeed is a wonderfully direct name for a…

Julie Power’s original ability is acceleration, most visibly expressed through her flight and the colored trail she leaves behind. Lightspeed is a wonderfully direct name for a child flying through the sky with a rainbow following her. There is a practical side to that power that can get lost behind the visual. A team needs people who can reach somewhere, carry someone or move out of the way, not just people who can deliver the strongest hit. Flight changes what is accessible. A barrier that stops the others may be something Julie can move over. I’m keeping her abilities in the period being discussed rather than attaching every later development to her early appearances. A modern character page can list a lot of things, but those lists do not tell you what a particular story had established yet. Julie is also one of the two older children. Alex may be the oldest, but responsibility within a family does not all belong to one person. Her presence gives the group another sibling who is old enough to try to make sense of things while still being very young herself. The Morlock story makes the danger to their relationships especially clear. Manipulating a person’s memories can turn something as familiar as a sister trying to protect you into something frightening. The bond is still there, but the information guiding it has been changed. That is a more personal threat than simply putting the team in a cage. Julie’s powers make her easy to recognize on a crowded page. Her role in the family makes her worth following after the movement stops. Power Pack works best when those two parts remain together: the girl who can fly and the sister whose decisions affect the other three children.