It was inevitable that Tom King’s Wonder Woman would get Tom King-ian; I just didn’t expect it to happen quite this quickly.

We were almost 50 issues in King’s Batman before he offered an issue of Catwoman and the Joker just talking to one another as they both bled out on a church floor; it was another 10 issues before dreamy Knightmares spun what-if stories from the book’s own narrative choices. So while this kind of meta-interpretive nuttiness was expected, even welcome, I am surprised to find it starting as early as King’s second Wonder Woman volume, Wonder Woman Vol. 2: Sacrifice.

And so we have one issue that pulls away from the forward action almost entirely to posit Wonder Woman and Superman visiting an alien mall, two more taking place within dreamscapes, and so on. Again, what seems awful early in this series, so many of these issues are akin to one-act plays, and that extends even to the Absolute Power tie-in issues — the premise of Wonder Woman and Cheetah trapped on an island together begets Wonder Woman and Damian stuck interrogating a suspect together. There is a loveliness to these pseudo-connected short stories — part reverential, part absurdist — if that’s what you’re in the mood for, those expecting more of the comparatively straightforward Wonder Woman Vol. 1: Outlaw might be frustrated.

[Review contains spoilers]

In considering the start of King’s Sacrifice, I’m reminded of Mark Twain’s admonition, “Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted.” The initial story, “Gifted,” is astoundingly blithe — in the wake of the Amazons being prosecuted in America, following Diana being bludgeoned to unconsciousness by Grail, we deviate to something shockingly flip, Wonder Woman and Superman shopping for a present for Batman. It’s hard to believe even that would really happen within the time frame the narrative says it does, Wonder Woman going shopping off-planet at the same time Amazons are being rounded up and deported from the United States.

And yet we’ve learned by now just to go with it, first of all. Second, even if this feels really like a Batman story in absentia in the midst of a Wonder Woman book, it is also wholesome and delightful, Superman cracking dad jokes such to make Diana spit out her movie theater popcorn and then the two of them getting pedicures at Superman’s behest. “Who would think of such a thing” and “why is it here” are questions with the same answer.

It’s an early indication of what we’re in for; if anything, “Gifted” might be the warm-up to prepare the uninitiated for “Sacrifice.” Of that story, two of three parts take place in Diana’s head, and here again, they are as much thought pieces set to motion as they are actual issues — some question of whether Wonder Woman is stronger than the ubiquitous lassos in her life, for one, and then an examination of Diana as a social creature, whether solitary confinement can break her like it would a mortal. In both, Diana is triumphant, unsurprisingly, though one senses suspense is not the point (the whole run is told from a future point where Diana’s defeated her enemy, the Sovereign), but rather it’s simply the noodling around of ideas, akin to “Wonder Woman and Superman at an alien shopping mall.”

The whole of Sacrifice is ultimately like that. In its third part, the question of why Cheetah should be Wonder Woman’s arch-nemesis; later, a debate as to what’s more powerful, Batman’s fear (channeled through Robin Damian Wayne) or Wonder Woman’s love (contradictory and occasionally violent as it is). Like that Catwoman/Joker story, everything here is a two-hander or at best a three-hander, far more into the realm of ideas than anything truly resembling a plot.

Like Chip Zdarsky’s Batman Vol. 4: Dark Prisons, where Sacrifice stumbles is where it leans into Absolute Power the most. It’s nice to see Diana with the Justice League Dark again, but in one of the book’s few “crowded” issues, King and artist Tony Daniel seems to lose the rest of the book’s pizazz, delivering basic action sequences alongside a bit of sloppiness — that Madame Xanadu shouldn’t know what poker is, for instance; a confusing transition when Captain Marvel is teleported from Washington to Paris; and the Amazo “Paradise Lost” incorrectly drawn and colored.

As a general Absolute Power note, it feels like all the creative teams passed responsibility to someone else for explaining the Amazo robots, such that ultimately no one did it, including the creators on the Absolute Power: Task Force VII miniseries. Paradise Lost speaks in Dickens lines (with annoying “click” interruptions) and King’s Detective Chimp says it sounds like Batman, which is frustratingly opaque to the audience since we can’t ourselves in any way “hear” Batman through soundless comics Dickens lines. We’re meant ultimately to understand that Paradise Lost is imbued with the essence of the Zur-En-Arrh Batman of Gotham by Gaslight’s Earth-19, but that mostly comes through piecing together pre-Absolute Power dialogue in Batman and confusing moments like here. In all, if it was important, someone could have addressed this facet more explicitly.

Sacrifice ends with a Trinity backup story, notable because there have been Trinity backups all along that were not collected here or in the first volume, but rather appear to all be being shunted to the Trinity: Generation S collection. I take it we get this particular one because it’s the backup to and a retelling of the same events as in this book’s last chapter, but still it’s interesting the powers that be chose to “break frame” for just this one (presumably it will also be in the Trinity collection).

With the next volume following Wonder Woman Vol. 2: Sacrifice, Tom King arrives at DC All In, ostensibly a jumping on point for DC’s titles including Wonder Woman. I don’t know for sure, of course, but Sacrifice still feels to me more incidental than intentional — given three issues needing to be devoted to Absolute Power, I can imagine putting off this Wonder Woman run’s second act till afterward and “noodling,” as I described it before, in the few issues remaining. Fine with me; I’m still chuckling over “just ice” and waiting for the right opportunity to use it myself.

[Includes original and variant covers — Odyssey! The Challenge of Artemis jacket!]