Poor old Wonder Woman. What a year – her 70th no less. She’s been having nothing but trouble. Let’s put to one side for a moment the problems of her intended TV adventures and look to her true home: comics.
Still trouble.
A year or so ago, lauded writer Gail Simone was just leaving the title. She’d left it in quite a nice state. Wonder Woman was getting to grips with “man’s world”, relationships, friendships, daughterhood, her new power (Zeus’s lightning bolts), et al. Achilles had settled down from his time as The Olympian. The Amazons were tickety-boo for a change. Everything seemed happy and all set for the next writer, J Michael Straczynski. They even reverted the numbering scheme for the comic back to #600 in celebration for the next issue.
(Forgive the gorillas – it’s a long story).
Then along comes JMS and everything gets shaken up. Everything Gail Simone did is thrown to one side. We get an alternative Wonder Woman with a new costume, who lives in a world where the Amazons are all dead, Wonder Woman is an orphan. Paradise Island is in ruins. The gods have gone. And she has a new costume, too. This wasn’t Wonder Woman as we knew it or her.
So lots of people stopped reading it, including me. By about issue #608, though, it soon became clear that Wonder Woman’s ‘Odyssey’ wasn’t exactly what everyone thought it was and in fact the major reboot was a bit more minor and Wonder Woman would in all likelihood get back to something like her normal self by the end of JMS’s run on the title. Which she did, although she got to keep her new costume.
I actually ended up going back over the run once it was done to read the earlier issues, because it was quite a clever subversion of the whole Wonder Woman mythos that led to something stronger. Trouble was, it took a year to do and at the end of it, turned out to be a little pointless.
Because DC had its own major reboot planned for no fewer than 52 of its titles, including Wonder Woman. Nothing was ever going to be the same again, just as at the end of the pan-DC ‘Infinite Crisis’ arc back in the 80s. The question was, how was everything going to be different? To be honest, no one yet knows and DC hasn’t exactly been forthcoming, beyond telling us everything was going to be different and every single comic was going to start from issue #1 again.
It’s an easily satirisable position.
Now, four weeks into the relaunch, we have issue #1 of the all-new Wonder Woman. Has it all been worth it? Have there been many changes?
Well, Diana does have a new costume – again…
Continue reading “Review: Wonder Woman #1”
