Review: Wonder Woman Vol. 1: Afterworlds trade paperback (DC Comics)

I’ve commented before, there’s a thing writers sometimes do when they’ve just started writing a character and need to get acclimated, which is to take the character out of familiar elements and spin a story that may only have just tertiary ties to the character, for the purpose of getting “warmed up.” We’ve seen it with Superman before, to be sure, and we saw it most recently with Kelly Sue DeConnick’s inaugural “amnesia” story in Aquaman before that run settled in.

Indeed, Becky Cloonan and Michael W. Conrad’s Wonder Woman Vol. 1: Afterworlds has a lot in common with Aquaman: Unspoken Water — the hero, thought dead, but instead transported amnesic among a brand new supporting cast. All of whom, similar to the Aquaman story, seem to leave Wonder Woman Diana behind at the end of this book. So I’m left to wonder, what was the point of all of this? Are these all-important first 10 issues really what these writers see as their ultimate portrayal of a Wonder Woman adventure? Or is it that — for the purposes of Nubia, Wonder Girl, and Justice League — DC needed Diana out of the way for roughly 10 issues, and this is what the authors could come up with to do it?

There are actually bits and pieces of what I think is a really good portrayal of Wonder Woman in this book, and fun use of DC’s Infinite Frontier-era Multiverse, too. But I’m skeptical the way to get the Wonder Woman title to the top of the charts is by giving her a talking squirrel as a sidekick.

[Review contains spoilers]

Constant readers know my favorite Wonder Woman run is Greg Rucka’s — not devoid of ancient mythology by any stretch, but also a story set more among the political halls of Washington, D.C., than Mount Olympus. And so, in Cloonan and Conrad’s Afterworlds, four issues of Diana (who doesn’t remember she’s Diana) stumbling around Asgard, another two in the realms of Olympus, then a run-in with elves and fairies — seven of the 10 issues here — is a long Wonder Woman story not to my particular liking.

[See the latest DC trade solicitations.]

And neither am I totally set against Diana in a swords and sorcery setting — Gail Simone’s great Wonder Woman run had some of that — nor Diana palling around with talking animals — take the minotaur¹ Ferdinand from Rucka’s run, for instance. But again, it’s the sheer volume of all of it here, and also that it’s the writers' opening salvo — that their manner of attracting and keeping new readers is Diana and her horned squirrel companion climbing a giant Asgardian tree to steal an egg to feed to a mystical serpent to obtain a magic key, and so on. I grant there’s a place for this, and that Diana is the character among DC’s pantheon who lends herself to these type stories, but I’m not sure this is that place — a new creative team, and kicking off the Infinite Frontier-era launch.

It is not, by any stretch, all bad. The eighth chapter, assuredly the best, sees Diana land on Earth-11, home of the gender-swapped Justice Guild. Though nothing here is particularly consequential, it’s still an obvious and fun team-up given DC’s loosened multiversal barriers. (Travis Moore is the book’s primary artist, but Emanuela Lupacchino does nice work on that one.) So too Diana’s mini “DC realms” tour in the ninth chapter, including the Phantom Zone, the Fifth Dimension, Gemworld, and Skartaris. Which again, I recognize, speaks to my personal tastes — I’d rather see Diana against the background of the DCU than an elfin wonderland (even if, I grant, that chapter is drawn and colored exquisitely by another guest artist, Jill Thompson).

Also, Cloonan and Conrad introduce early on the Asgardian Siegfried, a hunky companion for Diana who is refreshingly without ego or possessiveness, unlike the whiny wet blanket Steve Trevor from G. Willow Wilson’s Wonder Woman Vol. 3: Loveless and so on. That, among other things, Diana and “Siggy” simply don’t sleep together and then do sleep together and then refer to each other as “friends” and then finally part without melodrama is far, far less angst-ridden than plenty of others have written Diana’s romantic entanglements. I’d be more than happy to see Siegfried appear here again as long as Cloonan and Conrad can keep things so mature (Ratatosk, the talking squirrel, can stay at home).

It almost makes up for a variety of reductive, if not outright regressive, character turns for Diana in Afterworlds. In the beginning, Cloonan and Conrad show Diana reveling in unrestrained violence on Asgard (everyone killed comes alive again), a take on the “fierce warrior” approach to Diana, but that the authors never quite make a judgment on either way. 

Often in the story Diana is not the arbiter of her own decisions, but needs the guidance of Deadman and others to know what to do next. And the end of the book sees Diana opining on not clinging to “how much safer the past is” nor “being defined by what has come before.” It’s a meta-argument that seems strangely after it’s time, more like what you’d hear when DC was trying to move solidly into the New 52 than now, when being defined by the past is almost DC’s entire paradigm. Again, it’s clear Cloonan and Conrad are trying to say something, but how in touch it is with Diana’s general present it is, I’m not sure. Their final statement that Diana will be “her own creator” now is admirable, but I’m not sure Diana lacked for self-actualization before as much as the story would like to suggest she did.

2.0

Rating

Wonder Woman doesn’t lack for doppelganger rogues, but still I found Wonder Woman Vol. 1: Afterworlds’s Janus compelling — the villain seemingly split from an ally, but then both Januses turn out to be suspect, a god-foe that I don’t think we’ve ever seen before. And now, Diana is back in the land of the living, and soon after this to be embroiled in “Trial of the Amazons.” Hopefully Becky Cloonan and Michael W. Conrad have all this myth-making out of their system and we can see a more earth-based Wonder Woman next time around.

[Includes original and variant covers, cover and character sketches]

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1. Excuse me, “kithotaur.”  ↩