Wonder Woman #33 – Review

By: Brian Azzarello (story), Cliff Chiang (art), Matthew Wilson (colors)

The Story: Among other things, Diana is queen of rejection.

The Review: Just a word of warning that there’ll be delays in reviews this week. It’s Bar Exam times in California, so at least you’ll know that I’m not shirking my semi-duties for the fun of it. Believe me when I tell you that I would much rather be spending my day discussing Wonder Woman with you guys. But since that can’t be, we’ll just have to content ourselves with this passing, though potentially enlightening, review.

I don’t much like monsters for villains, except in cartoons. They’re easy to hate and kill, but that’s not a very interesting use of a character. Needless to say, I’ve had my issues with the First Born as the main antagonist for this series. When his ultimate goal is simply to destroy everything—not for any particular reason other than just to make sure everything’s destroyed—there’s not much more you can do with him except hope his defeat comes sooner rather than later.

Wonder Woman #32 – Review

By: Brian Azzarello (story), Cliff Chiang (breakdowns), Goran Sudžuka (art), Matthew Wilson (colors)

The Story: Diana gets her Braveheart on.

The Review: This all started with a squabble among gods: to save a pregnant Zola from Hera’s wrath, Hermes teleports her into Diana’s apartment. Diana hasn’t been able to escape the Olympians’ domestic affairs since, and now she finds herself leading the effort to topple the balance of power on Olympus itself. That’s the interesting thing about this series: Diana is a reluctant heroine, whose involvement has mostly been to clean up her relatives’ messes.

That’s a small-minded way of looking at this storyline, but what else are you supposed to think when these divine struggles seem to have no overt effect on the world at large? In fighting the First Born, Diana may be saving humanity from certain disaster, but no one, other than the Amazons and the gods themselves, seems to notice. With the kind of stakes involved here—even the New Gods are paying attention, for heaven’s sake—shouldn’t the ramifications be felt by people outside of Diana’s direct circle of supporting characters?

Wonder Woman #30 – Review

By: Brian Azzarello (story), Goran Sudžuka (art), Matthew Wilson (colors)

The Story: Diana makes a call to motherhood.

The Review: Here’s a little experiment you should try. First, go back and grab your copy of #29 and read it to the very end. Done? Okay, now go pick up this issue and start reading. The challenge is to see how far you get before you ask yourself, “What the frick just happened?” For whatever reason, Azzarello has found it best to completely skip past what should have been the climactic resolution of his last arc so as to start the next.

It’s true that substantially, things haven’t changed much on Wonder Woman between this issue and the last. The First Born remains a threat—an even bigger one than before, in fact—and all of our principal characters are still alive and relatively well. But come on. How can Azzarello leave us on Hera confronting her long-lost son in all her restored, divine glory and then excise the actual confrontation altogether? How can he write Hermes, Dionysus, Artemis, and Diana in dire straits one moment and then another moment write them lounging around Paradise Island, talking shop?

Wonder Woman #29 – Review

By: Brian Azzarello (story), Cliff Chiang (art), Matthew Wilson (colors)

The Story: First Born takes the prize for Extreme Home Makeover.

The Review: Finally—this is the kind of issue I’ve been waiting for. For the past, oh, I’d say dozen or so issues, Azzarello has been stringing us along with storylines that have really led nowhere in terms of character or plot development. More often than not, Azzarello leads us to a destination and accomplishes nothing more than finding a reason to go someplace else, making you wonder why you followed in the first place.

And it’s not surprising that after all the jumping around, we end up back on Mt. Olympus, the site of one of the series’ very best issues, #12. What made this issue so strong, so different from what the series has become since, was the many, major changes in status quo, the final weaving of the many threads Azzarello had lain down before: Apollo’s rise and Hera’s fall; the birth of Zola’s baby and the betrayal of Hermes; and most importantly, Wonder Woman taking up and revealing her godhood.

Wonder Woman #24 – Review

By: Brian Azzarello (story) Goran Sudžuka (art), Matthew Wilson (colors)

The Story: Diana learns that family reunions are indeed the worst.

The Review: The end of Villains Month marks the official start of the DCU’s third year since its relaunch.  Needless to say, its landscape has changed a great deal during this period of time.  Nearly half of the original 52 titles are with us no longer, most of them deservedly, and many of those that are left have lost the spirit that made them seem so exciting when they debuted.  Only a few, like Wonder Woman, remain steadfast to the direction and principles they started with.

As critical as I’ve been about certain points of execution, I have to admire how Azzarello has managed to stick to his guns on this title, somehow staying above the fray of tacky promotional campaigns, pointless crossovers, and pushy Big Events.  In a market saturated with angst and loud, hyperactive action, the fact that Wonder Woman still makes a living off mythological intrigue and family dynamics is remarkable indeed.

Wonder Woman #23.2: First Born – Review

By: Brian Azzarello (story), Aco (art), Matthew Wilson (colors)

The Story: Needless to say, First Born has a well-deserved chip on his shoulder.

The Review: After introducing the First Born and building up to what was supposed to be a huge battle with Wonder Woman, their actual confrontation turned out a little disappointing.  To be clear, the fighting itself was fine, but the oomph wasn’t there; something definitely felt missing.  In retrospect, it just comes down to how new First Born is to the scene.  Not only does he lack a long, personal history with Wonder Woman, he doesn’t have much history at all.

The timing of Villains Month couldn’t have better under such circumstances.  I don’t know if Azzarello is clever or lucky or what, but he’s been able to use both of DC’s promotional campaigns to his narrative advantage.  Just as #0 developed a connection between Diana and Ares that proved crucial to later arcs on this series, this issue feels very much like a natural coda to last month’s events as well as a strong prelude to the next.

Wonder Woman #23 – Review

By: Brian Azzarello (story), Cliff Chiang (art), Matthew Wilson (colors)

The Story: Now’s our chance to see which era had the most badass warriors.

The Review: Troubled as some people were by the slow pace Wonder Woman had been running at for some time, it’s been even more troubling to see the title suddenly speed up in the last few issues.  Last issue in particular was something of a disappointment for how much it truncated Diana and Co.’s time on New Genesis when we had all been so longing to see the Fourth World’s standing in the new DCU.  It was the very definition of a missed opportunity.

In the same fashion, we’ve all hankered to see the ultimate throwdown between Diana and the First Born, yet now doesn’t seem like the right time for it.  To make the First Born a truly worthy adversary in Wonder Woman’s gallery, there has to be time for the two to develop a relationship, even an antagonistic one.  Given that in context, she’s only known him for about a few hours (setting aside the time she spent comatose), having a final confrontation now seems premature.

Wonder Woman #22 – Review

By: Brian Azzarello (story), Cliff Chiang (art), Matthew Wilson (colors)

The Story: Figures that Diana would sleep through her time in Paradise.

The Review: I’m not versed enough in comics and their history to make broad statements about certain works and creators, but I don’t think I’m out of line in saying that Jack Kirby’s Fourth World was and remains one of the most important concepts in DC lore.  Wildly unappreciated in its time, it is now one of the bedrocks of the DCU, inspiring comic book writers to aspire beyond the superhero to the neo-mythic.

Azzarello is the lucky man who gets to decide what the New Gods mean and stand for in the current DCU.  Yet despite putting Orion in an ongoing role on this title, Azzarello has otherwise kept mostly mum about the Fourth World’s purpose.  To be frank, even though this issue takes place almost entirely on New Genesis, we only learn about the blessed realm and its denizens in the most general, if wonderfully hyperbolic terms:

“[A] world caught up in the joyful strains of life!  There are no structures on its green surface—except those which serve the cause of wellbeing…  Destiny’s road is charted in the city, massive, yet graceful—gleaming on its platform—a skyborne satellite drawn in endless silence by its hidden mechanisms!  The true place of peace.“

Wonder Woman #21 – Review

By: Brian Azzarello (story), Cliff Chiang (art), Matthew Wilson (colors)

The Story: What say we cut the talk short and Boom Tube our way out of here?

The Review: I’ve made my remarks about the difficulty of writing Superman before, so I need not repeat them now.  I will say, however, that hard as it is to get a handle on a man who seems to embody superhuman virtue, it’s even harder to get inside a character who represents womanly perfection.  For a while, Azzarello has built up such an interesting story around his heroine that you could ignore her defects as a sympathetic, accessible protagonist—until now.

Now, Azzarello has fallen into a kind of trap, the same one that captures most Wonder Woman writers sooner or later: she has become a cypher in her own story.  Her character development seems to have stopped somewhere after her line to Hades about loving “[e]veryone,” and since then, our attention has largely been fixed on the characters and events around her.  You can see here that she rarely asserts her presence except when called to spar or defend her own dignity (“…I thought I told you to respect me, Orion…”).  You simply can’t generate an engaging personality from that.

Wonder Woman #20 – Review

By: Brian Azzarello (story), Cliff Chiang & Goran Sudzuka (art), Matthew Wilson (colors)

The Story: Diana versus Diana—round two.

The Review: I don’t believe I’m the first to compare the kind of intrigue that goes on in this title to that shared by any good mafia story, where family affections and attachments are ultimately subordinated to ruthless power plays, suspicion, and constant backstabbing.  This free-for-all is made even more interesting by the building of alliances, their eventual dissolutions, and the new ones that take their place.

In Wonder Woman, we’ve got a few set camps and their dear leaders: Apollo with Artemis and Dionysus representing the current Olympian regime; Hermes partnered with Demeter in a mission from some undisclosed higher power; Poseidon in cahoots with the First Born, who plans to retake Olympus for himself; and then Diana with her merry little crew.  Although all of these folks are related in some manner, only Diana’s group functions like a family—a “weird, wonderful family,” as Zola says.

Wonder Woman #19 – Review

By: Brian Azzarello (story), Goran Sudźuka (art), Tony Akins (pencils), Dan Green (inks), Matthew Wilson (colors)

The Story: A god can do with worse names than Zeke.

The Review: As we begin the title’s fourth arc, it seems only fair that longtime investors in this series get a chance to consider what we want from the story.  While I do appreciate that Azzarello has a very specific direction for his heroine, I feel it’s well past time for him to up the pace a bit.  He’s spent a lot of time establishing the principal characters, mythologies, and interacting forces for his plot; now’s the time to lose the reins and let them go wild on each other.

It seems Azzarello’s about to do just that by the end of this issue, though we have to sit through quite a bit of set-up first, not all of which seems entirely necessary or even useful.  The intro with Apollo, Artemis, and Dionysus basically reiterates most of the info we already know, and does little to round out their personalities or goals.  It doesn’t get simpler than gods wanting to retain their positions of power and wanting to shut down any threat to them, right?

Wonder Woman #18 – Review

By: Brian Azzarello (story), Goran Sudzuka & Cliff Chiang (art), Tony Akins (pencils), Dan Green (inks), Matthew Wilson (colors)

The Story: Who’s fastest—old god, new god, or demi-goddess?

The Review: I’ve officially reviewed Azzarello’s Wonder Woman for over a year and a half now, and I still feel like I haven’t quite grasped the nature of his craft just yet.  He doesn’t quite fall into any easy category.  He’s not really a character writer in the vein of Pete Tomasi or Paul Cornell; an ideas-man like Grant Morrison or Jonathan Hickman; or a weaver of universes like Brian Michael Bendis or Geoff Johns.  Of all writers, he truly stands alone.

In fact, Azzarello has something of all three elements in his writing, with such equal weight that it’s easy to take his work for granted.  While there aren’t any striking personalities in this title, over time the voices of the characters have grown distinct and recognizable, even unattached to a face.  Azzarello’s ideas are no less profound for being based in myth rather than science.  And by bringing old and new gods together, he’s done some of the most intriguing world-building of all.

Wonder Woman #17 – Review

By: Brian Azzarello (story), Tony Akins (pencils), Amilcar Pinna (art), Dan Green (inks), Matthew Wilson & Nick Filard (colors)

The Story: Clearly, Diana’s mother never warned her about leaving clubs with sketchy old men.

The Review: Whatever the naysayers might say (most likely but not guaranteed to be “nay”), Azzarello has accomplished quite a lot for this title.  For one, he made Wonder Woman Top Fifty, which hasn’t happened in ages, to my understanding.  For another, he introduced this incredibly rich new mythology to the character, allowing Wonder Woman to cross over between the grounded, the divine, and the cosmic all at once.

But if I had to pick out the most important thing Azzarello has given to DC’s first lady, it’s her irresistibly intriguing extended family, quite possibly the most compelling supporting cast she’s ever had.  For a while, you fell into the habit of placing the Pantheon gods into one of two camps: those on Wonder Woman’s side and those who aren’t.  That all changed once Hermes went rogue; now, you can’t trust anyone who calls Olympus home.

Wonder Woman #16 – Review

By: Brian Azzarello (story), Cliff Chiang (art), Matthew Wilson (colors)

The Story: And here Zola and Hera live the city high life while Diana ambles the sewers.

The Review: When the DC relaunch first started, Wonder Woman took nearly everyone by surprise with the particular direction Azzarello chose to run with.  You can associate a lot of different qualities with comics’ leading lady, but “horror” wasn’t really one of them.  In his first arc, Azzarello made you realize that Greek myth was full of monsters and horror, not all of it centered on actual monsters.

As Wonder Woman’s feats grew bolder and more adventurous, the visceral feeling of fear, established when we first saw a bloodied arm stretching from the fleshy torso of a decapitated horse, has slowly ebbed away.  This issue doesn’t quite restore that element of terror, but it does start building suspense once more; it distinctly feels that events are closing in on the plot, that traps are being laid around our heroes even as they still move freely.

Wonder Woman #14 – Review

By: Brian Azzarello (story), Tony Akins (pencils), Dan Green & Rick Burchett (inks), Matthew Wilson (colors)

The Story: Even the Olympians have the one family member they don’t like to talk about.

The Review: I’ve come down pretty hard on Geoff Johns for his weak-sauce approach to Wonder Woman in Justice League, and a lot of my ire comes from comparing his take to Azzarello’s undeniably impressive version of her in her own ongoing.  It makes me wonder if Johns even reads Wonder Woman.  How can you reduce the demi-goddess of that book into the often uncertain and simple-minded princess who doesn’t even know how friendship works?

Even though I still think she remains a kind of unrelatable character, Diana strikes such a compelling balance between warrior and nurturer, in a way few superheroes from either of the Big Two do.  It’s true that given the connection between her and Siracca, it wouldn’t be that extraordinary for them to reach an understanding.  Nevertheless, how often do you see your heroes showing compassion and offering peace to their enemies?  How often do you see such unashamed, non-cynical love from a character?

First Born: Aftermath – Review

Ron Marz, Phil Hester, (Writers) Stjepan Sejic, Lee Moder, Ryan Sook, (Artists) Larry Molinar, and Dave McCaig (Colors)

The Top Cow event known as First Born was one of the more exciting events in recent memory. A classic story of good and evil that was really cast in all shades of gray, First Born impressed with some incredible artwork by Stjepan Sejic and an epic feel. With Sara Pezzini’s child at stake, the forces of light and darkness brought the eternal war to our world in an attempt to gain control the Witchblade wielder’s daughter. The trade is definitely worth the pick up if you are a fan of the characters and it also serves as a decent, action-packed jumping on point for those curious about the Top Cow Universe. With First Born: Aftermath, a one-shot consisting of three short stories, fans can get some idea of where the characters are headed in the future. Since each story really is a stand alone tale, I will give each a short review before giving my overall thoughts.

The first story, “Stragglers,” is quite short but effective thanks to the artwork by Stjepan Sejic. Basically, the gist of the story is that some teens head down into the hole where the main battle of the First Born event took place and are being watched by some of Jackie Estacado’s Darklings. There really isn’t a lot to say about such a simple story, but Ron Marz has some fun with the dialogue and Sejic creates a couple of really impressive looking scenes.

The second story, “Armies of the Night,” is written by the Darkness’ Phil Hester and tells of some Darklings that stumble upon a statue of an ancient ruler who holds a bit of a grudge against the Darkness. We get a brief history lesson on who the ruler was and how his encounter with the Darkness changed his life forever. The writing is both darkly humorous at times, but has a nice dramatic weight overall. A good outing by Phil Hester with this story. The artwork by Lee Moder is serviceable, but I wish it had a more serious look that reflects the story being told. Everything looked too much like a cartoon. Still a fun read though and, again, the art does the job well enough.

The final story, “Faith,” is also by Ron Marz and tells about the Magdalena. She faces off with an “angel” of light and finds herself struggling with her place in the world. The writing is strong and it also gives some nice direction for a character that shows up from time to time throughout the Top Cow universe. Ryan Sook’s artwork is solid, especially some of the facial expressions, and the color work is very well done. A good closing story for this one-shot.

First Born: Aftermath is really for those that follow the Top Cow Universe. While the stories could be enjoyed on their own well enough, it helps to have some experience with the characters and story elements. If you recently came aboard with Witchblade or The Darkness, two series that recently developed new jump-on points, check this out for some idea as to what direction those particular stories will be taking. A fun, solid read all around that hints at future plot elements for those interested.

Grade: C+

-Kyle Posluszny