Written by Brian Azzarello
Illustrated by Cliff ChiangThe Gods walk among us. To them, our lives are playthings. Only one woman would dare to protect humanity from the wrath of such strange and powerful forces. But is she one of us — or one of them?
Anything but the “same old, same old”, and Wonder Woman is a character who’s needed anything but for the past twenty years. Dig your heels in and let’s talk about why I’m digging this, after the jump.
What DC Comics’ marketing division would have you believe is “the Trinity” was on shaky ground from the start. Two of its members were defined to the point of reductive hyperclarity: Batman, the obsessive-compulsive man-boy choking on barely withheld rage, and Superman, the awkward hybrid state of Ward Cleaver the Father and Jesus Christ His Only Son. This left Wonder Woman — but no one could really say where it actually left her, because no one was really sure where she was to start with — or who she was, for that matter.
In the Post-Crisis years, Diana’s role has essentially bounced around to occupy whatever spot a given writer’s stories required. To George Perez, she was a walking monument of mythological grandeur and wise tranquility. To Mark Waid, she was a militant noblewoman, whose stern countenance masked a fire in her heart that burned hotter than Batman’s. (This is the interpretation Geoff Johns seems to favor.) To Allan Heinberg, she lived on the line between prestige and camp, rotating between her duties as fabulously swimsuited supermatron and catsuit-chic Jane Bond. And so on.
Here’s the catch: Superman and Batman’s characterizations have become iconic through a process of strip-mining down to the bare essentials (n.b.: we are not talking about their brand identities). Batman is a set of standardized stainless-steel tools that any writer can turn into a readable story, and the best Superman writers have taken care to recognize that Superman, at his root, is the most morally conscious human being of all time (if not always morally prescient). Wonder Woman’s scribes have only ever built atop the last one, though, never digging underneath. There’s no shining core that can be taken as the definition of the Modern Wonder Woman. Navigating the morass of conflicting interpretations and ever-expanding mythological concerns leaves us with a character who can be known fleetingly, from story to story, but never quite held onto in the spaces between. It could be that Wonder Woman simply never had a zeitgeist-harnessing world-engine of a classic story to gather public and creative consensus around; no Dark Knight Returns, no All Star Superman. In any event, there’s a choice to be made.
Brian Azzarello, Princess Diana’s new biographer, could have gone one of two broad routes: 1. attempt to collate the conflicting personae and essences of Wonder Woman and fuse them into one new post-post-Crisis entity, or 2. disregard them all and forge ahead with something entirely new. I’ll speak frankly: I’m still not sure which road he took. What is immediately apparent, though, is that while Diana herself remains something of an enigmatic presence within her own title, he has changed the tonality of her adventures, striking a timbre I can never recall seeing. It took me a couple reads to get a bead on it, but I think he’s finally started the process of finding that “core” Wonder Woman, and optimism is the first thing to be thrown in the furnace.
What I mean by “optimism” is that even at her in her most apocalyptic crises, Wonder Woman has never really seemed to be in danger of being lost. She’s been incapacitated, blinded, given bad haircuts and strange leather belts, turned back into the clay from whence she came. She’s broken ranks with her friends, abandoned more supporting cast members than most heroes will ever get, and left villains dead at her feet. Still, throughout all of this, it’s never been forgotten that Wonder Woman is a child of paradise. She’ll overcome it all, and at the end of the day the sun will strike her magnificently curly hair just right and Man’s World will be safe from threats both self-inflicted and otherwise. This is not to say that this new Diana is hopeless, or even pessimistic. Now, that air of “everything will be okay in the end” is starkly absent.
Continued belowThis is most especially apparent in the way that Azzarello handles the mythological aspects of Wonder Woman’s world. Her tether to the Greek pantheon was always one of the brightest spots in her universe, and despite their constant troubles and power struggles, they were effectively Wonder Woman’s Big Old Upper Class New England Family. (After all, we don’t remember JFK’s infidelity or Bobby’s harsh temper on first blush, we remember their accents and their boyish smiles.) The mystical aspect of Wonder Woman’s adventures was always distinctly sacred, and was never meddled with on any truly humanizing level — most often, it was just switched on or off, like it had the two settings and nothing between.
In the sketched map Azzarello provides in Wonder Woman #1, the gods adhere to a more classical view, which is that they’re sleazy. They’re the Real Housewives of Mount Olympus; they don’t so much grace the world with their presence as leave the occasional benefit behind in the course of dragging objects of lust and envy through the mud. Godlings perform obscene scrying rituals on nubile young flesh, and Hermes is an alien figure, his human features either exaggerated into mockery or replaced by things more efficient to his ends. The pantheon have gone away, and left their bastard seed to be picked clean by scavenging forces, like the last strips of meat on the world’s bones. Mythology isn’t the security blanket (and colossal bore) it’s always been since Crisis on Infinite Earths. It’s the enemy, the dark corners that modern civilized humans should never find themselves stuck in.
The Wonder Woman we’re met with in this comic book is a warrior, make no mistake. Her takedown of a pair of fighting-mad centaurs is decisive, brutal and, in 21st-century DC fashion, messy (fans of on-panel limb removal, your book of the week has arrived). She barely speaks, and when she does, she’s forthright. We have a point-of-view human character, but by issue’s end, she has had no great revelations about Diana, only about herself. What faintly shocked me on first read is just how perfect the warrior-princess model of Wonder Woman is for Brian Azzarello’s writing. His characterization always comes most easily at the fringes of speech and behavior, in what passes for subtlety when you can only fix on a set series of still moments. We may not know who exactly Diana is, but she intrigues nonetheless, and that’s just as good if not better. We know that there’s a storm on the horizon and that it will test her — and if Azzarello’s knack stays put, those are the moments we’ll see her most clearly.
Speaking of seeing: I shouldn’t even have to write one damn word about Cliff Chiang’s art. You have eyes, don’t you? You have ways and means of seeing what he’s done here. I shouldn’t be wasting my words here talking about his mastery of composition, of the individuality and physicality he gives each unique body, of the winkingly off-kilter design sense he imbues it all with. I should be writing thank-you letters to India Ink bottlers and buying another copy to cut up and hang on my walls. You don’t get much better than Cliff Chiang these days, and certainly not in the New 52. I rest my case.
For those who got bored four paragraphs ago and cut right down to the end, here’s the deal: this is a beautifully drawn comic book. It’s also a comic book that seems to promise a sea change in the tone and tenor of Wonder Woman’s adventures by kicking out one of her most leaned-upon crutches. It’s new in a way that the New 52 largely doesn’t manage — rather than a fresh coat of paint, they went and screwed around under the hood. I can’t think of anything more promising for Wonder Woman, or more exciting.
Final Verdict: 9.5 – Pay money for it. Don’t even think, just do it.
