Wonder Woman #2

Written by Allan Heinberg

Art and cover by Terry and Rachel Dodson

 

I was pretty enthusiastic about the Wonder Woman relaunch after the first issue, but my enthusiasm has waned during the delay between then and the eventual release of #2 to the point that it's all but disappeared.

 

We as readers are awfully forgiving when it comes to delays in our "monthly" comics, and it seems pretty much universally accepted that it's the story and the art that matter more than what's happening to a particular fictional character, to the point that no one in the direct market calls for reprints and incredibly few call for fill-ins.

 

But in exchange for our forgiveness of tardiness, we need to be shown that the finished product is well worth the wait. Though Dodson's art on Wonder Woman is smooth, slick and boasts plenty of wonderful redesigns, it doesn't look as endlessly labored over and filigreed as that of, say, Ultimates 2, Doc Frankenstein or Shaolin Cowboy. In short, it doesn't look like the Dodsons spent that delay working to blast your eyes out of your skull with detail.

 

The story, likewise, doesn't reward the wait. All-Star Superman is perhaps the perfect example of an acceptable super-late script; each issue is a self-contained, complete story with a beginning, middle and end. Individual issues of the series are like little 22-page graphic novels. Heinberg's Wonder Woman is not; it's just a plain old chapter in a plain old superhero comic. I wouldn't call it decompression, but it's certainly not the hyper-compression one wants after waiting over 30 days.

 

Such delays tend to hurt Wonder Woman more than certain other titles—Think Aquaman: Sword of Atlantis, for example—because the characters appearing in it are virtually all over the rest of DC's product line all the time. Even minor villain Dr. Psycho, who plays a small role in this story arc, is currently featured in two other DC titles being released concurrently. With this many guest-stars—Batman, Robin and Wonder Girl, on top of the villains and Donna Troy—the traffic-copping and time-lining a reader does in one's head is more stress on a title, a title we're primed not to care for already.

 

Putting all those annoyances aside, Heinberg's scripting is quite decent, containing more action in each issue than any two or three story arcs from Greg Rucka's run on the series. He writes the characters and their interactions pretty well, and there's only two glitches with #2, one minor, the other major, and both having to do with her new secret identity, Diana Prince, a member of the U.S. government's Department of Metahuman Affairs (the equivalent of the military, which she served in on the TV show and during the Golden Age).

 

The minor one is that the identity is created by Batman and, Wondy suspects, Superman, and Bats delivers it to her while she's spying on Donna Troy battle some of her old villains. I have no idea when this occurs amid all of DC's time jumping associated with 52 and "One Year Later," but we were lead to believe in other titles that Batman and Wonder Woman haven't seen each other for a year, between the end of Infinite Crisis and the beginning of the new Justice League of America.

 

The major one is the identity itself. It works on a nostalgia level, but not a logic level. There's such a thing as hiding in plain sight, as Superman does being a reporter, but Diana is really pushing it, isn't she? Not only does she not change her first name, she doesn't change her appearance at all, she just puts her hair up and wears sunglasses. Her job is with a government agency dedicated to gathering intel on Metahumans. She's one of the most easily recognizable metahumans on the planet. It must be dozens of times each day that she's standing in front of a monitor showing her picture as Wonder Woman or walking past someone looking at a file with a photo of her in it.

 

Superhero comics are all about suspension of disbelief, particularly DC's iconic heroes, but this is a tough one, closer to Green Arrow and Star City Mayor Oliver Queen being the only two men in America with that particular beard and no one putting two and two together. It certainly isn’t like no one suspecting that alien hero Superman disguises himself as a human being.

 

Rating - 5