Wednesday Comics vs. New 52: Wonder Woman

"When an ancient evil threatens mortals' world, the Amazons prepare their greatest champion, the Princess Diana"...but first, she must seek out The Seven Stars of the Amazons, "the Queen's heavensent arms and aids," while facing human foes like Dr. Poison and The Cheetah and various mythological menaces, by Ben Caldwell.

When two different Olympians seek to fill the vacant throne of Zeus, Wonder Woman finds herself embroiled in a pantheon-wide power struggle, as she defends the one-time human consort of the king of the gods and his unborn child and discovers she's much more closely related to the Olympians than she ever knew, by Brian Azzarello and Cliff Chiang.

Meanwhile, at Robot 6...

This gut wound is rated "T" for Teen.

Okay, honestly I don't care all that much about all the red, sticky stuff on display in Wonder Woman #1, which I discuss at great length over at Robot 6 today, but I think it's worth noting that there's a lot of it (In addition to the above, there's a scene of—spoiler alert!—a horse getting its head chopped off for an admittedly cool monster-summoning scene, and—another spoiler alert!—Wonder Woman Geoff Johns-ing an opponent).

Putting aside questions of whether or not it's too much, or not enough or just right for a Wonder Woman comic (according to the comments thread, Robot 6 readers are a bloodthirsty lot), it's a pretty clear signal from the creators and company regarding the tone and direction of the book.

All that talk about pursuing a new audience with "The New 52" and whatnot? It was seemingly just talk. Unlike, say, George O'Connor's The Olympians comics for First Second, this isn't really an all-ages comic so much as the next issue of Wonder Woman, with the same sort of PG-13-to-R-rated level of violence and gore that is the baseline for DCU comics. It's not egregious or exploitive or anything, but it is there instead of not there, and that's where some of my disappointment came in. Wonder Woman #1 is a great comic, but its a great comic for the same audience as the last five years worth of not-so-great Wonder Woman comics.

And Wonder Woman is still, apparently, in the same violent, Kingdom Come-inspired anti-hero mode that I discussed at length in this previous post (about writer Marc DiPaolo's discussion of her in his book War, Politics and Superheroes), instead of being restored to something more closely resembling the "real" Wonder Woman of the initial half-dozen or so years of her career.

Anyway, go read the post if you'd like to experience a few billion more words of me talking about Wonder Woman. And read Wonder Woman #1 if you want to read a pretty well written, pretty brilliantly drawn fantasy comic (Even if it's not the transcendent one I was hoping against hope to get). But if you want to read the very best Wonder Woman comics, I'm afraid DC's expensive Archives editions are still the best bet.

Two Oracles

(SPOILER ALERT, I guess. Don't read this post if you haven't read last week's Brave and the Bold #33 yet but intend to in the new future, and want to be surprised by its ending)

The other day I talked a bit about The Brave and the Bold #33 by J. Michael Straczynski and Cliff Chiang, featuring a story entitled "Ladies' Night" about Wonder Woman, Zatanna and then-Batgirl Barbara Gordon going out for a night on the town.

In one of those weird juxtapositions one sometimes finds in super-comics, the very last page of the story (which is set in the present, after Barbara Gordon had given up her Batgirl identity to become Oracle), is on a page facing a house ad for the new volume of the series Birds of Prey.

The result is that readers get to see the character drawn in two very different styles by two very different artists at the same time.

Here's a better look at the house ad, featuring Benes' muscular, buxom Oracle, with a face completely identical to that of Black Canary (They even have the exact same little identation between their upper lips and noses, which catch the light in the exact same way!):

And here's Chiang's Barbara Gordon from within the story:
I don't really care for Benes' work much, but it's kind of neat to see his version of the character side by side with Chiang's like this. They look like the same person, so its not like either artist did anything radical in terms of character design, and yet the two artists render the character completely differently.

That is, both Barbara Gordons look like Barbara Gordon, but through very different aesthetic lenses.

(By the way, if you haven't read the issue and have no interest in ever doing so, at least read the dialogue JMS wrote for Oracle in that last panel, and try not to laugh).