Wonder Woman: Agent of Peace #21 // Review
Diana of Themyscira is no stranger to the trials of the ancient Greek pantheon. Near the end of the 20th century, she decapitated one of Ares' sons with her tiara. As 2020 ends, she enters Ariadne's labyrinth with her sister Amazon Donna Troy in Wonder Woman: Agent of Peace #21. Writer Dan Abnett leads the two heroes through a series of tests that are rendered for the page by artist Tom Derenick. Diana and Donna brave a few tests that reveal a bit more about the psyche and temperament of Wonder Woman in an enjoyable adventure that's over far too quickly.
Donna doesn't seem impressed until the walls come alive and start attacking her. She's expecting a big, dangerous place that seems imposing. She's not expecting a darkened place that looks like a decaying mausoleum. She doesn't have to wait long for the dangers to start coming. Get beyond the living walls, and there's a choice between light and darkness. Emerge from that, and there's the yawning pit of danger beneath the winding walls of the maze. Like so many other mythic tests, the heroes' greatest dangers are the ones they bring with them into the labyrinth. The horrors are but a reflection of the horrors beyond its walls.
Abnett has done a clever job of fusing ancient Greek Mythology-inspired heroic adventure with contemporary action storytelling. Donna and Diana's series of tests must overcome and engage the two heroes on both a physical and emotional level. At only 16 pages, the narrative doesn't have a lot of room to explore Diana or Donna's deeper psychology. Abnett manages a very tight conflict resolution, resolution, and revelation in a very tine narrative space. There's so much more that could be delivered in a longer journey with both characters working together. Abnett shouldn't have to crunch this much together to get two very compelling heroes from one end of the labyrinth to the other.
Diana and Donna have always resembled each other quite a bit. All too often, artists lean heavily on costumes to delineate between them on the comics page. Derenick gives the two heroes a very distinct difference in physical appearance that goes beyond the costuming. The action is brought to the page with great poise and energy, but it's the faces of Diana and Donna that give the danger a sense of emotional context that gives the dangers of the adventure their own gravity. The script doesn't give Derenick much of an opportunity to truly define the labyrinth's visual reality, but the deeper emotional aspects of the adventure come across quite vividly.
As with some of the previous issues in the series, Agent of Peace #21 gives Wonder Woman a crossover that continues to showcase some of the really compelling possibilities of contrasting Diana against a single other hero. Abnett's script makes the concept of a Donna/Diana series feel very, very appealing. The two heroes work well together in overlapping styles that are distinctly different.
