Wonder Woman #790 // Review
Diana is frustrated. A small group of supervillains has been giving her a great deal of difficulty. She’s not alone. Her colleague, Etta, is so frustrated that she refuses to sit through a single supervillain monologue. The gravity of the drama moves everything to a final confrontation in Wonder Woman #790. Writers Becky Cloonan and Michael W. Conrad close out another chapter in the life of a legend with the aid of the art team of Jose Luis, Eduardo Pansica, and Emanuela Lupacchino and inkers Julio Ferreira and Wade von Grawbadger. Writer Jordie Bellaire delivers an impressively complex dramatic back-up story featuring art by Paulina Ganucheau.
Etta Candy has been fighting wicked people in one form or another for nearly as long as Wonder Woman has. She might be a captive of a twisted mathematician deep beneath the halls of Holiday College in Washington D.C., but she’s no victim. All she has to do is break free at the right moment. Wonder Woman shows up, and she’ll get the information she needs. She’s looking for the warped maniac Dr. Cizko. When she finds him, she’s going to have a hell of a time holding herself back from killing him. Meanwhile in the distant past, Young Diana is confronted by her mother, Hippolyte. She’s in trouble, but she’s defiant. Her defiance leads to a deep argument between herself and the fiercely individualistic Antiope.
Cloonan and Conrad somewhat satisfyingly wrap up a big conflict between Diana and Dr. Cizko’s latest incarnation of Villainy Inc. Wonder Woman has been through a lot in recent issues. The big climactic moment might feel a bit rushed, but it hits all of the moods and themes it needs to resolve the central conflict. Bellaire does a very sharp job of delivering a remarkably enjoyable drama with her Young Diana back-up, which is pretty impressive considering the fact that it’s mostly just talking heads. The complex layers of drama that Bellaire is working with make for some provocative character study.
The art team on the main feature is given some very heroic beats to hit with Diana. She looks brightly iconic confronting some of the villains behind the scenes of her latest adventures, but the supporting cast is also given some impressive moments, including a particularly brutal jab involving Steve Trevor and Dr. Poison. Ganucheau is given a bit more of a challenge with the talking head drama at the issue’s end. She delivers brilliantly. The softness of Ganucheau’s manga-inspired style wouldn’t normally lend itself all that well to the kind of subtlety that Bellaire is bringing to the page. There’s something impressively expressive in the way Ganucheau animates the eyes of her characters that brings out a very sophisticated impression of deep and deeply conflicted inner emotions.
Things get complicated for Young Diana’s coming of age as the contemporary Wonder Woman settles down into a more relaxed formality with an old friend and a couple of lovers in the present. (The two men she’s loved are living together. “The initial shock has worn off,” Diana recently said of the situation. “And I’ve decided that I don’t hate it.” It’s been one of the better lines in Conrad and Cloonan’s run so far.) Once again, the number of people working on a single issue of Wonder Woman is impressive, but each issue is big enough to feel like something out of the Golden Age...something much bigger than a modern comic book. It may only be two features, but the editors make it feel like at least a couple of complete issues between the two features.
