Wonder Woman #760 // Review
All over the country, people are acting a bit more crazy than normal. Maxwell Lord’s influence is suspected, but the government is keeping a close watch on him. All he's been doing is reading. (He's halfway through Infinite Jest, so...y'know...he's been busy.) Diana still has her suspicions as things get a bit more unraveled for her in Wonder Woman #760. Writer Mariko Tamaki is lowering thematic elements into place in what is likely to be an in-depth examination of the nature of heroism in another issue beautifully drawn by Mikel Janin. Color adds considerable depth to the page courtesy of Jordie Bellaire.
Society is suffering from dangerous psychotic fugues. People are continuing to fall into perilous hallucinations. Wonder Woman is confronting someone who might have something to do with the outbreak of insanity. Diana has little trouble securing Maxwell Lord with the Lasso of Hestia during a prison fight. He's able to intellectually maneuver into answers that leave her with more questions. It's the end of the day, though. She heads back to her new home for falafel with the neighbor girl. The next morning she's catching a wrecking ball. It's going to be a long day for her. It's going to be an even longer night as she is subjected to a fugue of her own.
It can be difficult to delicately balance scenes of investigative mystery with others of superhero-level action and lovingly cram them between the twin covers of a single comic book, but Tamaki does a beautiful job of doing precisely that with Wonder Woman #760. There’s a graceful flow of action from opening fight to issue's end. Tamaki manages a wide range of moments in Diana's life from work to debriefing to winding-down at the end of the day, on-the-job stress the next day and the horror of the following evening. Though it covers the end of one evening and the whole following day AND manages to do so with a degree of detail over the course of a slim 18 pages, none of it feels at all rushed.
Prior to working on comics ten years ago, artist Mikel Janin had been an architect. Janin has a deep respect for perspective, space, and angle that seems to draw a lot from an architect's unique vision. Janin appears to have an amazingly detailed layout worked-out for Diana's apartment, which adds a level of detail that's often overlooked in casual moments at home with an off-duty superhero. Elsewhere, there's a grand sense of metropolitan immersion in the background of exterior shots that give a remarkably vivid atmosphere to the issue. Bellaire adds to this with color that provides strikingly dramatic depth to nearly every panel. Janin's grasp of dramatic subtlety gently sculpts a complex emotional landscape on Diana's beautiful countenance that draws the narrative into deeper psychological realms as well.
Drama, action, and detail swiftly glide from opening to closing covers of a very well-executed issue. It's pretty rare for a reader to get such an immersive and organic single-issue date-with-a-superhero that hits quite as many levels as Wonder Woman #760. It's almost disappointingly difficult to find fault with the issue. Tamaki, Janin, and Bellaire make a genuinely balanced chapter of superhero-ing seem upsettingly easy to manage. Why aren't more superhero comics done this well?
