Review: Absolute Wonder Woman #3

Review: Absolute Wonder Woman #3
[Editor’s Note: This review may contain spoilers]

Writer: Kelly Thompson
Art: Hayden Sherman
Colors: Jordie Bellaire
Letters: Becca Carey

Reviewed by: Matthew B. Lloyd

Summary

Diana attempts to inform the military and the people of Gateway City about the dangers of the Tetracide while we get a flashback of Steve Trevor’s departure from the Wild Isle.

Positives

Well, I am quite surprised with Absolute Wonder Woman #3.  After a very average first issue, and no desire to even read #2, this issue is quite good.  There’s a balance of action and exposition and most importantly something very substantial with character- not just the IDEA of a character, but actions that reveal the SUBSTANCE of Diana’s character.

Diana has to not only face the Tetracide in this issue, but also explain to the military just how dangerous the creature is, how it kills in four ways.  Diana comes off as serious, intense and determined.  Her personality is commanding and it comes off clearly.  The military has no idea what they are facing, and Diana is in fact the only option.  She tackles it head on in a pretty tense battle.  She has to break off the fight to regroup because…well, she only has one arm.

We learn in the flashback to the Wild Isle that in order to cast the spell to get Steve Trevor back home that she had to sacrifice her right arm.  Yes, she now has both a metal prosthetic arm and  magical one, but her original one is gone.  While being just as shocked as Circe, this act tells us A LOT about Diana’s character.  She’s willing to go a long way to do the right thing.  She’s putting others ahead of herself.  It is over the top, but I think this points to the difficulty this Diana has to face in this world influenced by Darkseid energy.  

Positives Cont’d

The issue is paced well and the flashback is perfectly placed in the story so that the reveal about her arm is maximized.  Hayden Sherman’s art, though idiosyncratic fits the genre of this book.  This is really fantasy, sword and sorcery stuff, not super-heroes.  I think it works for this title because this is not a traditional super-hero comic.  Additionally, the colors do a lot in setting the mood and tone and making this feel like a different world.  It certainly does not feel or look like the Gotham of Absolute Batman.  It’s going to be hard to imagine this being the same world as the other Absolute titles we’ve seen so far.

The colors do make me think of something in particular, and that’s the world of Michael Moorcock’s Elric of Melnibone.  Not surprisingly, it’s a sword and sorcery fantasy series.  Elric is a sorcer/ king and he comes from the Sorcerer’s Isle, the Isle of Melnibone.  He has a big sword…hmmm, starting to sound more familiar as we go.  Well, Elric’s sword, Stormbringer steals souls. Elric’s world is misty and grey, often colorless.  He’s an albino.  His armor is black and his runesword is covered in red glowing runes.  Jordie Bellaire’s colors in this series echo that grey misty world with red, black and grey being prominent.  The Cthulhu like creatures that Diana’s been fighting would not be out of place in Elric’s world either.  This may be the secret ingredient for this series to sustain.  I think it almost has to be a fantasy genre and stay away from the super-heroes.

Positives Cont’d

Hayden Sherman and Jordie Bellaire combine for fine looking Black figure style Greek Pottery.  My Art History degree perked up immediately to see this representation.  In story it functions as the source for the story of the Tetracide.  It’s a really nice touch, and Sherman and Bellaire pull off the visual wonderfully.  Thompson adds a line in Greek as well that Diana speaks as well, and it would be nice to see more of this instead of the gobbledygook we see when she casts a spell.

Thompson also gives us Diana’s naming as “Wonder Woman.”  It comes from her first interaction with Barbara Minerva, a scholar on the “mythological” Amazons.  It works well enough.

Negatives

Absolute Wonder Woman #3 isn’t perfect.  I feel like I’m missing the “why’s” for Diana’s motivations.  Does she just magically know she’s supposed to defend the world?  Why is this the purview of the Amazons in this world.  Even if she knows she’s an Amazon, how does she know to do these things?  Why is the Amazonian champion known as Wonder Woman.  There should be a more organic journey for Diana to learn these things and understand what Amazonian culture is about.  It’s fine if she becomes these things, but they seem like they are just thrown in without a story of substance.  It’s there because it has be.  This issue doesn’t suffer from superficiality like issue #1 because we get the very compelling sequence with the sacrificial arm.

It’s hard to see this as Wonder Woman.  The Wonder Woman elements actually hold it back some.  Overall, this character so far functions better if you don’t think about her as Wonder Woman.  Because…she’s really not.  Wonder Woman  who embodies the values of Amazonian culture and represents that ideology in Man’s World and attempts to share that way of life and she doesn’t even know what that is.  As it is, it’s really an exploration of what happens when her upbringing is taken away and given to Circe.  There wasn’t a lot of substance with that, so it seems like it’s more likely just the means to the end of getting Diana into the sword and sorcery realm.  There just seems to be disconnect from point A to B.

Verdict

Absolute Wonder Woman #3 benefits from providing some real substance for the character balanced with some action and back story that is actually meaningful.  Thompson can’t always rely on the “idea” of the reimagining to carry and issue and this is an example of how to do that.  The art from Sherman and Bellaire is evocative and they do a great job of creating a unique feeling world, even if it isn’t supposed to be different from the other Absolute titles.