Category: Wonder Woman
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Wonder Woman has one set of official, awkward bookends and one set of unofficial ones. The former does lead Gal Gadot no favors–after spending a moving building a character, it goes all tabula rosa and turns Gadot into little more than a licensing image. The latter does the film no favors. The latter is lousy…
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There are a number of things to talk about with The New Original Wonder Woman. It’s a TV pilot movie. It’s a self-contained narrative about Wonder Woman, amiably but not quite enthusiastically played by Lynda Carter, coming to the United States in the middle of World War II. It’s this weird, campy, ill-advised serious “silly…
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Wonder Woman doesn’t work out, but it should. And lead Cathy Lee Crosby is so serious about her performance and the role, even when it’s underwritten, it’s hard not to be sympathetic. John D.F. Black’s simultaneously awful and inventive teleplay recasts Wonder Woman as a spy, only one who works as a secretary. Her boss…
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Trina Robbins does a rather good job hiding The Once and Future Story’s PSA status. It’s a perfectly good one too–Wonder Woman is translating some tablets and there’s spousal abuse in it and then Diana also discovers something similar going on with the archeologists she’s working with. There are multiple interventions and the situation generically…
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And here Busiek and Robbins run into a big problem. They’re doing a last pre-Crisis story and so there needs to be some transition. Well, needs is a strong word. They put in some transition, which the bookend system they’re using requires. And it’s a nice enough transition, it’s just not the right one for…
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Someone–Busiek or Robbins or both of them–came up with the structure of this series and all of a sudden it becomes clear this issue and it’s fantastic. Legend goes from being a nice homage series to something wholly original. Unless the old Wonder Woman comics are as well-plotted, in which case they don’t get enough…
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Right after I say Robbins doesn’t spend a lot of time on backgrounds… she spends a lot of time on backgrounds this issue. The difference is the setting. It’s a fantastical hidden city, not Washington D.C.–and, during the action sequence, the backgrounds do still fade away. So my observation seems about half right. There are…
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How far can unbridled enthusiasm take something? Well, if The Legend of Wonder Woman is any indication, unbridled enthusiasm can go a very long way. Kurt Busiek and Trina Robbins have the task of saying farewell to the pre-Crisis Wonder Woman. It opens in the present, so having Robbins’s Golden Age-inspired art showing modern events…
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Here’s a weird one. A short pilot for a “Wonder Woman” sitcom. Ellie Wood Walker’s Diana Prince lives at home with her mother (Maudie Prickett), who wishes her daughter would just find a man. The pilot consists mostly of their bickering, which isn’t unfunny–thoroughly modern Walker versus nagging Prickett. But once Walker changes into Wonder…
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Does Wonder Woman really need a secret origin? If she does, she needs someone better than Azzarello writing it. His dialogue this issue, as Diana’s secret is revealed to her, is awful. I couldn’t read it fast enough and there was always more. This issue also marks me giving up on Chiang. I love his…
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I would love to read Azzarello’s pitch for Wonder Woman. “Let’s see, I’m going to empower women through promiscuity. Oh, and I’m going to have giants!” This issue manages to burn through all the goodwill I had toward Chiang on the title in a few pages. Wonder Woman, her slutty (sorry, empowered) female charge and…
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Part of me wants to be positive and say Brian Azzarello is trying. He is, right? There’s a lot of mythology being updated here and a whole thing with Zeus getting busy with a human girl again… I mean, it’s a Terminator knock-off, but there’s foundation for it. But does trying make up for Azzarello’s…
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I was unsure of Messner-Loebs’s return to Wonder Woman during the opening scene, featuring a bunch of boys in their “we hate girls” club getting lost in a cave. It seems too antiquated, maybe it’s just Lee Moder’s pencils–he can’t draw the boys to look young enough. They’re visually teenagers, too old for that sort…
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For three pages, Wonder Woman has good art. In their all-knowing wisdom, DC only had Carlos Rodriguez do three pages. The first part is by Rich Buckler, who’s not terrible, just not even mediocre. But the last part, by Tim Smith III, is absolutely hideous. I wonder if they were willy-nilly hiring artists, trying to…
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I’ve never read Denny O’Neil’s seventies Wonder Woman, so I can’t compare this flashback to it. I know the seventies didn’t have J. Bone—imagine Darwyn Cooke if he was incompetent—so the art must have been better. As for O’Neil’s plot, it seems like something out of “Xena: Warrior Princess” after a while… only with Diana…
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When it gets to the conclusion, Wonder Woman finally distinguishes itself. Until this point, it has major problems—mostly acting, which I’ll get to in a second—and some great ideas. But there’s no balance between writer David E. Kelley’s thoughtful “reality” with a superhero and the day to day of Adrianne Palicki’s Wonder Woman. Until the…
The Stop Button 