Alright, long-texters. Let's do this.
Wonder Woman #32
Rise of the Olympian: Finale
So.
Let's check back with this book, shall we.
And let's get the unexpected praise out of the way at once: this final issue and the issue immediately prior were both damned good. This praise is unexpected, because a whole busload of things
before these two issues threatened to positions this arc as one of the most frustrating Wonder Woman stories I've ever read. And y'all? I've read a lot of Wonder Woman stories.
So what went wrong? What went right?
First of all, there were seven whole issues of this arc. Right off the bat that should raise alarm bells. Very few writers are capable of giving readers even
six whole issues of outright good issues. Virtually no writer does a seven-issue arc much justice. Simone's first arc on this book, ever so glorious in retrospect, was only four issues. Only four issues, and she managed to do so much! And now we have "Rise of the Olympian, " a seven-issue arc that ultimatesly does depressingly little, considering that three whole issues out of those seven whole issues were devoted to one thing: Genocide. In particular, Diana fighting with Genocide.
This Was Not Good. Why? Not just because three whole issues of the same two people fighting each other is ******ed beyond belief, but also because, in case you didn't get the memo, Genocide
sucks. She is not a good character. People. We are nearing Forerunner levels of critical mass here.
I've said it before and I say it again: Genocide's basic conception is to be Diana's dark mirror, and this has been both done to death and done better. Cheetah, as Perez originall conceived her, was Diana's dark mirror. Circe, also, has taken up that role slowly but surely throughout the '90s and '00s. Devastation played the part during a drawn-out saga by Eric Luke. Hilariously, Genocide even
looks a lot like Devastation, almost like someone took all of Deva's traits -- already bordering dangerously on 90s excess -- and decided to make them even
more XXXXXtreme. Even their names are similar, which doesn't help matters.
But unlike any of those prior characters? Genocide isn't interesting. She really doesn't do anything, and she has nothing to say. She keeps talking about
death and
darkness and
hurting and
pain and then she keeps beating people up. She's just a bully, and she's mean, and that's it. She doesn't
say anything. Put her up against, oh I dunno,
Wolverine or something, and all of a sudden you can get some growly grisly fight scenes and call it a day. Put her up against Wonder Woman, though? It doesn't work. Wonder Woman
says things. She represents things. What's Genocide supposed to represent? Death? Evil? Hatred? Meanness?
The reveal in #31 that Genocide is made from Diana's future corpse is...well, it's a freaky twist, sure, but still...so what? What does this bring to the character? What possible purpose does this serve? Even though this character is supposed to "be Diana," she still doesn't look, act, talk, or behave anything like Diana. She doesn't have Diana's memories or her powers. She herself doesn't seem to even
know. So why should we care if she's made from Diana or not if it has no affect whatsoever on the character, tactile or otherwise? There's a lot to be said for the potential of an "evil Diana." Not just "Diana's dark reflection," but literally an "evil Diana." Given Diana's narration in this issue I believe that's the subtext we were supposed to glean from this character as a whole but, again, it just doesn't actually come across in practice because Genocide doesn't feel like Diana -- evil, reflected, or otherwise -- but like a whole separate character. A
boring separate character.
A great deal of attention in this arc -- and throughout Simone's whole run so far, really -- was fixated on Diana's great fear of turning into a heartless monster from constantly losing herself in the heat of battle, something that she secretly enjoys. It's a characterization that, well, does have its merits, although the vast majority of her writers have never really emphasized it as a valid trait. Even as legions of WW writers made her out to be nothing but a battlin' warrior who does nothing but fight all day long, none of her writers have ever truly suggested that she's in danger of losing herself to it. And almost every single good WW writer -- Perez, Rucka, Jimenez to the extent he was able -- have actually made it quite clear that she
doesn't enjoy the battle so much and would much rather be doing other things. Some others like Busiek, Luke, and Moehler have hinted at a darker nature that she fears in herself but, again, never gave it a
great deal of weight.
Simone, on the other hand, seems to be giving it a great deal of weight. I remember some months ago -- gosh, has it been a year? -- that my biggest complaint about Simone's run was all that waxing poetic she had Diana do about the glory of war and the rages of battle fury sun blood-drenched blood battle war blood battle blood war sun. Even today, even after it's become pretty clear that she's actually going somewhere with all this and it actually serves a greater story purpose, it's
still all I can do not to roll my eyes whenever a passage like that appears in an issue, and believe me they do appear. For someone who has continually expressed her understanding that WW is equal parts warrior and peacemaker, Simone's shown a pretty clear favoritism of one personality over the other. My point is, it doesn't take a genius to read between the lines of all this Genocide business to see that this character is what Diana without her scruples is meant to be.
Again, though, it Just. Doesn't. Work. Genocide is not going to remind anyone of Diana, with or without her scruples, because she doesn't have
any of Diana's traits. Imagine if someone made an evil Reed Richards...except that this Reed -- let's follow Simone's example and call him "Black Death" because it's an evil-sounding name --doesn't actually stretch, nor is he smart in any way. He doesn't have Reed's gray temples, his hair is long instead of short, he wears flaming red armor, and he has no family or friends, much less any that remotely resemble the family and friends that Reed would usually hang out with.
So...who the f*** is this character? It would certainly not be Reed. Just like Genocide makes no sense as anything of Diana's since she has no connection to Diana at all. Simone simply keeps
telling us that this is Diana at her worst, but doesn't show us.
Which is the other great, destructive fault of this storyline. Simone tells instead of shows. It's been brought up before and not just by me, and it needs to be re-brought up because it is so pertinent to why this arc underwhelms on a whole. Simone just...she doesn't
show. She
tells us things. She tells us what Diana is feeling and what Diana feels about other characters and she
tells us how other characters feel about her, etc. She tell us how they feel about events. She tells us what those events are that they feel things about. She tells us about how scary something is, or how epic, or how funny, or sad. In short, she over-abuses Diana's textbox narration to a
criminal extent. I can't recall if Birds of Prey ever suffered from this problem, but I'm seeing tiny shades of it sprinkled throughout Secret Six. In any case, almost every great moment throughout this arc -- and there are quite a few, in spite of my overall cynicism -- are those that mostly just
show what's happening, letting the moment speak for itself, letting the characters tell us
of the moment instead of
about it.
With this latest issue, Simone seems to...well, she doesn't exactly finally
get it per se, because there's still so many instances of Simone
telling us what we're supposed to think about something instead of showing us something to make us think. But she seem to finally be able to strike a balance of sorts, so she's not really using all those Claremontian text boxes as giant crutches for actual storytelling.
It also helps a lot -- a whole
f***ing lot -- that Simone really upped the ante for this fight, as you can see from the above scan.
This is the kind of **** that would happen when two god characters collide, not that short scrap way back in #26. I mean, something like that is perfectly serviceable for, again, someone like Wolverine, but did little justice to characters like Wonder Woman or even Genocide. Ooh they're punching each other, how dire, etc etc. So, yes, on the upside, holy **** the fight in this latest issue was goddamn awesome. On the downside, why the heck wasn't this the first fight? They fight once and neither one of them does anything impressive, and then they fight again and neither one of them does anything impressive, and then they fight for a third time and it's finally impressive? I'm not sure whether to praise or criticize Simone for that. Regardless, it makes this issue stand out.
It also really helps that Lopresti friggin' delivered the
goods for this issue. With this issue,
he finally seems to
get it. This was the first of Lopresti's issues that I was really impressed by, where in my opinion he's found his stride.
This is the first picture of WW I've seen from him that actually feels 100% like
her. Just, um, please to ignore that dialogue by Simone there which is just more blood blood war battle drenched on battle warrior blood angry war battle.
Which brings me to another reason for this lackluster arc, one that I hate to say but am I going to say anyway: Lopresti. I understand that this guy is apparently a very respected, long-running artist. And his work is
fine. He's a very good artist, better than most. But I struggle with his work in this series. I actually prefer it when Bernard Chang comes in to replace him on the occasional fill-ins. For a guy known for his fantasy works, I find his rendition of Diana's arms and armor to be chronically awkward. Hell, even the worst artists seem to do okay on that eagle armor that Alex Ross designed, yet Lopresti makes it look like the most oblong, clunky thing to wear. And add colorist Matt Ryan to the long list of things that don't help this arc succeed; for the most part he makes everything really dull. Diana's costume, which of course usually draws a lot of focus from their bright primary colors (amongst other things), occasially feels desaturated and unimpressive throughout these issues...especially her star-spangled shorts which, usually a rich blue, has been incredibly flat and almost
purple.
But none of those art issues are as much an issue for me as Lopresti's tendency to just...leave things undrawn. He has a..."style," I guess you would call it...where he puts a whole bunch of white, undrawn panels in the background. So we basically just get a character or two doing things on...nowhere, with nothing. All over these issues. Doesn't seem to matter if it's a action scene or a "park and bark" scene, he seems to do this in equal measure. I don't know if people actually like that he does this, or if they just don't care, but for me? Major no-no. It looks bad. It looks unfinished, undynamic, uneffective, no scale, no emotion. I mean it's just empty space, and it keeps popping up. It especially hurts the earlier fight scenes. Especially! When you combine it with Simone's aforementioned tell-not-show technique, but now not only are we not being narratively shown anything, but we're also not really being
visually shown anything either! So we're just...basically, we get nothing. With flat colors.
And it also really doesn't help matters that Genocide's only powers (aside from punching people really hard) is to teleport and to manipulate their emotions. Two
completely invisible processes. Oh yeah,
that'll help this story be exciting.
Okay, so that...allll...that...was what didn't work. So what works?
The Olympians work. Or Gargareans or Thalarions or whichever. If you only read their portion of the story here, along with what's happening to the Amazons, the story ends up being a pretty interesting story. There's a grand mytharc brewing here, the pieces are being set, the cards are being dealt, the goats are being milked, the yards are being nined, whatever, it's going down. And it involves literally every single cast member that Wonder Woman has. (Hmm, wait no, I forgot about the Kapetelises, which isn't hard to do...but then, I'm pretty sure Simone plans to have include them at some point as well) It's too bad that, y'know, we haven't had all that much reaction from the damn protagonist of this book concerning these developments but, as we know, she was busy doing other very important things. Yup, Genocide is totally
so much more important than Zeus' self-righteous madness or the army of Zombie Argonauts that's ransacking the nations of the...okay, no, I can't keep that up. You'll notice that I mentioned I liked #31 as well and, no surprise there, Genocide doesn't even appear in person at all in the issue. Why the **** Simone managed to brew interest in an arc called "Rise of the Olympian" and then devote 75% of the story to Genocide, I'll never know.
On that note, I have to say that although I'm fond of the Thalympareans or whatever, I'm not too sure what I think of..."Achilles"...just yet. His power set doesn't seem so interesting either, and so far his character has done nothing to set himself apart other than to think and talk like an ignorant anachronism. On the other hand, he's being introduced in the same arc that gave us
Genocide, so he pretty much just automatically seems like a pretty darn good character.
Oh ****, I just discovered Simone's secret plan.
Speaking of which...Nemesis. And the development this issue. Didn't see that coming. Makes Diana look like a massive ass. And I never once thought Simone would have the guts to go through with it. I mean, I understood logically that it was a possibility, and all the hints were there, but...still, I'm impressed.
On the other hand, who here actually thinks this is the end of the Tom/Diana romance? I don't, not by a long shot. Especially considering that, for all appearances, there's a good chance that the Gargareans and Amazons are going to end up as one tribe when all is said and done, which probably means that Achilles is going to try to woo Diana...and you think Tresser is not going to be a factor anymore? I'd say "Not on your life," but then, I'm not really sure
what to expect from this series anymore.
So, what to expect from this series? I dunno. I'm quite hopeful for more mythological dramarama and less Genocide, and it looks like the upcoming arcs will fulfill that desire...so, I'm still very onboard. Still, these past seven issues have left a very unpleasant scar across the Simone run, a cruel reminder that Simone, for all that she is deservedly respected in many ways, is
still prone to many faults. Reoccuring faults, at that, which is something I've known about her since before she took over this book. They were absent for a good while. They are absent no longer. This arc has lit up all her bad qualities in bright flashing neon, and showcased very few of her good ones. I wouldn't be surprised if it has left many jumping ship. I remain. For the time being. Hey why the **** am I talking like this.
(8.7 out of 10)
(3.9 out of 10 for the entire arc)
(Although she has terrible taste in men.) I wonder where Typhoid Mary is off to. Daredevil, probably. Ah well, I lost interest in her after she was revealed to be Mutant Zero. I'm actually looking forward to Taskmaster's Initiative school now. I hope he's front and center for it and not stuck in the background, "overseeing" things. More Taskmaster is always better.
