Up until two months ago, I thought of Wonder Woman more as a brand than as a book. She could be bought on journals, t-shirts, wallets and more. But not so much in comic books I wanted to read. I knew about her first, bondage-heavy incarnation thanks to a collection of golden age Wonder Woman stories which randomly appeared in my grade 8 classroom. Everything I could find at the library told me we then passed through a Lynda Carter/George Perez heyday, only to get bogged down in the 1990s with convoluted stories and low sales numbers. After that, good things could have happened. But so did The Dark Knight Strikes Again. Wonder Woman having sky-shaking sex with Superman was bad enough, but the digital colouring job gave it a particularly mind-searing quality. I decided I no longer had the fortitude for her. Who could guarantee I wouldn't see her boffing Darkseid, printed on glitter paper? But the big DC 52 reboot brings renewed faith, in the form of Brian Azzarello's Wonder Woman.
Issue #2 has just been released, which means it's still simple and fiscally responsible to catch up on the series. So far it's shaping up to be less about typical superheroics than Maury among the gods. Zeus has been fooling around on Hera again, and Diana and Hermes try to protect his latest mortal conquest and the unborn demigod she carries. The family tree gets further complicated at the end of issue #2. Strife lets slip that Diana is also Zeus' daughter, instead of clay brought to life.
Perhaps my Maury comparison is unfair. Wonder Woman aims higher than that- Apollo, Hermes, Hera and other superstars of Greek mythology all make unannotated appearances, for example. For a truer ancestor, something about the dense, allusive writing reminds me of the Sandman series, Azzarello sounding as much like Neil Gaiman as his earlier, 100 Bullets self. Cliff Chiang's pencils are worth noting too. Although all of the female characters are drawn within society's set parameters of female beauty, Diana gets to look more athletic than pneumatic. It may be too early in Azzarello's run to get excited about his Wonder Woman. But there's something exciting about a book that aims for Mount Olympus while so many others settle for the gutter and a pretty thin conception of grit.
I feel as if a link to this Dresden Codak comic about Wonder Woman's costume is only appropriate: Why Cleavage Is Bad For Crimefighting
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