Rating: WARTY!
With the upcoming Wonder Woman movie, to which I look forward immensely (and depressingly almost a year away as of this review!), and from the fact that Gal Gadot was by far the most impressive character in the rather sad and confused Batman v Superman movie, I decided to take a look at this one, which my awesome public library had sitting right there on the shelf. I was disappointed. Worse than this, it betrayed the original concept dreamed-up by William Moulton Marston and his wife wife Elizabeth.
This is evidently some sort of reboot in the Earth One series, although why a character which has been continuously in print for over three-quarters of a century was felt so lacking in oomph that she needed a reboot is a bit of a mystery. The blurb told me that this was "a wholly unique retelling that still honors her origins" so since I knew squat about the comic book character, I decided this might be a good place to start, but in the end I was not impressed. The art work wasn't bad at all, but some of the images made little sense, and the story itself left a lot to be desired.
We learn here that Princess Diana did not derive from clay brought to life, but as a daughter of Hercules (himself very much a villain here). That's really the only significant difference. We still get Captain Steve Trevor, who is back in this incarnation, and who Wonder Woman delivers to the USA for treatment after his plane crash. The problem is that the story really bogs down at this point, with Wonder Woman made to look like a village idiot with her lack of understanding of the modern world. She's not as much of a moron though, as the army officer who doesn't know the difference between a Humvee and a Jeep. Maybe he'll do better when the Oshkosh L-ATV comes into common use.
Wonder Woman isn't really likable in this story, and especially not when she compares the ineffective soldiers to little girls - like little girls are somehow feeble and useless. This was so far out of left field that it could only have been written by a male writer who turned-off his brain before he wrote this or was so completely out of touch with his subject that he knew no better.
I can't recommend a graphic novel about Wonder Woman in which she's portrayed (and betrayed) so badly and where she is so bizarrely forced into delivering dumb lines insulting to women, and where her entire oeuvre consists of offering nothing more than a few cheap shows of super-strength. Wonder woman was supposed to be so much more than this - a different kind of super hero, and the writer failed dismally to deliver in this retelling. There was nothing unique here, and worse, nothing antique (unless you classify those ineffectual chains wrapped around her on the cover as harking back to the purported 'bondage' themes of the original Woman Woman comics). But when you got right down to it, there was nothing to empower women in this character. Quite the contrary. This was a golden opportunity to deliver so much more, and it failed. Instead of an up-armored Humvee, we got an old jeep.
