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

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I started Tom King and Daniel Sampere’s Wonder Woman Vol. 1: Outlaw in the middle of last week, that evening's news leading with images of deportations on military planes: later that night, there was tragedy in the skies over Washington, D.C., and the next day a speech laid blame for the incident even before the black boxes had been recovered. King’s first issue of Wonder Woman was published more than a year ago, likely written well before that, but his assessment of the intersection of politics and human calamity could this past week as easily have been ripped from the headlines.

The value of fiction taking on the zeitgeist, especially cleverly and with insight, is that you can pause, rewind, and reexamine; we can try to understand how we got here, when real life often moves too fast for the same affordances. The first of King’s trademark Watchmen-esque nine-panel pages in the first issue takes us step-by-step as politicians and 24-hour news weaponize disaster for their own purposes: what the first row of talking head panels present as a murder committed by a lone Amazon becomes by the end of the second row an “Amazon situation” that “some people are saying” was “an attack … on American values” and “terrorism,” and by the end of the third row it’s metastasized into evidence of a “secret agenda to the Amazons” and the government’s gotten involved.

It is 18 pages into the first chapter before we see Wonder Woman in full, and by that time the Amazon Safety Act has been passed, Amazons are banned from the U.S., and we see Amazon families pulled from their homes at gunpoint and separated. This is superhero comics, and of course superhero comics pale in comparison to real human suffering, but the metaphor resonates because it rings true; tragedy between individuals becomes, maliciously or not, conflict between groups, and the losers are often those least positioned to defend themselves. Eight years ago, in 2017, reading an ashcan preview of the first issue of Doomsday Clock, I had hope it might be the comic that represented the current moment as well as Watchmen did before it; I’ve a sense now that Tom King’s Wonder Woman might be that comic instead.

[Review contains spoilers]

“No, thank you.” For those less tolerant of King’s eccentric style, this may be his Wonder Woman run’s equivalent of “I will break your damn back.” But in three words, the two contradictory phrases — “no,” a refusal, a site of disagreement, and “thank you,” an acceptance or show of respect — King has cogently distilled the inherent contradictions that make the Wonder Woman character so interesting. Diana is the warrior who uses violence, “no,” to achieve peace, “thank you”; in her etymology are ideas of bondage and submission, as re-explored most recently by Grant Morrison’s Wonder Woman: Earth One series — “No,” because there must be will for it to be subsumed, and “thank you.” This is not how we’re taught to conflict, and largely not how the politics of the day operate — Diana’s “No, thank you” represents exactly what her antagonists in Outlaw lack.

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It seems fitting when a hero reflects their city — Superman and Metropolis, Batman and Gotham. No offense to Gateway City, but Washington, D.C., too, seems more pertinent to Wonder Woman, also reflecting those same contradictions — a city ostensibly devoted to laws, to rules and order, to justice and to civil debate, but where often what’s stated and what’s meant are different, the purported agenda versus the real one. Among King’s motifs early on is when Steve Trevor tells Diana, in the shadow of the Washington monument, that “you can’t throw a rope around the whole country” — that even the former Goddess of Truth is powerless against lies that so often these days mutate into causes. And surely in that scene of shadowed conversation by the Washington monument in the rain, there’s shades of All the President’s Men; this story finds itself a genre, something other Wonder Woman runs of late seem to have lacked.

I rather had a feeling of “finally” reading King’s Wonder Woman, that after a significant drought — since Brian Azzarello’s run, really — the Wonder Woman title is good again, if unfortunately by reflecting the difficulties of our time. Certainly in the interim we saw moments of promise in the Wonder Woman titles, but we also saw Diana gain and lose a brother, be portrayed as a naif, pal around with a talking squirrel, and battle Dr. Psycho’s poisoned milk. As I often feel about the Superman titles when the Bat-titles perpetually outshine them, it shouldn’t be that hard for DC’s writers to produce Wonder Woman stories that aren’t juvenile or dull or mostly involve the characters moving from fight scene to fight scene. I’m pleased to see King’s still on the title as least at the time of this writing, and I’d be just as happy to see him complete a run at least as long as his Batman.

By the end of the first issue, I was already ready to declare King’s Wonder Woman the best take on the character since Greg Rucka’s first run, but the fourth chapter cinched it. That’s not just King’s brilliant, touching swerve to set Diana alongside a dying boy for a day as the trouble deepens all around her, but also the penultimate page suggesting multi-front war — Philippus and Steel and Trevor and villains Cheetah and the Sovereign. That echoes a similar page in Rucka’s run, both books distinguished as complicated, mature stories of Wonder Woman and her supporting cast.

Notably, though Outlaw does not ignore the mythology that’s so much a part of Wonder Woman’s history, there are no Greek gods here — a fact of some significance when you consider even Rucka’s West Wing-esque spies-and-diplomats run had the gods in it. I am far from complaining; often I find the gods contribute to that element of dullness in a Wonder Woman story, if not repetitiveness, bolstered mainly when writers like Rucka or Azzarello imbue them with much-needed modernity. I’d be just as happy for King to keep them out, letting this be a “simple” story of Diana against villains major and minor. In a similar way, there’s more than one nod to the characters' conflicting origins — including Diana’s own — where King-as-narrator’s resolution is just to live in the ambiguity, neither ignorant of nor bogged down by what came before (though “born of clay” seems to emerge the victor).

In the way of superhero comics, Outlaw does take an easy out in that there is, of course, a supervillain behind it all — the plausible deniability of superhero comics metaphors and a way for a real-life writer to avoid having to come up with solutions to problems that plague whole societies (no shade on King; if peace were easy, it would be here). In particular when dealing with Wonder Woman and a political conflict centered around Washington, D.C., the concept of a secret monarchy that never quite gave the United States its liberty is inspired. I also appreciate the usual intricacies of King’s narration — the story is being told in flashback and “the Sovereign” indicates that Diana ultimately won, such to suggest that narratively the battle isn’t the point. At the same time, we also know from King’s Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow that narrators sometimes have an agenda …

It is perhaps just as much a sign of Wonder Woman’s otherness among the superhero set that her comic should need to be “topical” when Batman’s, for instance, does not; at the same time, Batman surely has privileges that keep him from having the same overall concerns as people who look like Diana. Be that as it may, the result is that Tom King’s Wonder Woman Vol. 1: Outlaw is not only a prescient mirror held to the troubles of our time, but also a breath of fresh air for the title. The evening news moves on but we don’t forget; hopefully this level of excellence on the Wonder Woman title can continue on into better times.

[Includes original and variant covers]

Rating 4.0