Crosseyed and Timeless
Antiquities from the Old World, and, also, Wonder Woman
And lo, on a Wednesday unlike any other, Marvel Comics made its NYCC announcements announcements, and shook the world with excitement and possibility. Think: there could be one good Spider-Man comic, besides the Miles Morales one that everyone, including Marvel's own marketing, have seemingly forgotten about. Now, Spider-Man fans have been burned before, obviously (I'll maintain that the Zeb Wells run started good), but this one has Johnathan Hickman and Marco Checchetto, each of them with track records you could put up against anyone. So everything is good, right?
Well, I'd like to say so, but it hadn't even been one day after that when Marvel dropped its solicitations for December of 2023, and good golly, they are dire through and through. Rarely has there been a less inspiring line of comics, featuring this many attempts at recapturing old glories of so little glory. Who asked for Daredevil: Black Armor? What new idea could be found in Marvel Super Heroes Secret Wars: Battleworld? For fuck's sake, they're making new Rom the Spaceknight comics. We are below the bottom of the barrel and digging. Is it any wonder that the biggest book of that month is Timeless, a comic about promising that there will in fact be new things to look forward to?
I didn't expect to be this upset about it, but then again, I didn't expect a new Greg Land comic, and boy does it have one of those. Please, let's move on.
This is a review of Wonder Woman #1, and so I feel compelled to start with the truth: I am French, I am 31, my pronouns are he/him, and, one time, a machine called me "100% White". Which is all to say: I don't think there is any value in my opinion on the matter of whether or not this is a good comic book. I have noticed things about it, which I will tell you about for the sake of advancing the discussion, but we are going to take the scenic route to get there, and on the way I will show my contrition through the penance of bad comic books.
So let's talk about Frank Miller's Holy Terror. Now, Holy Terror is a bad comic book, for a variety of reasons. It is an extremely racist book, obviously. But, also: it is shockingly unfocused. In-between the barely logical leaps from one life-or-death situation to the next, it tries to capture through caricature ten years of the War on Terror, from the moment when the towers fell to the death of Bin Laden, which feels like an attempt to justify the fact it took five years and one refusal from DC comics between the project's announcement and its release, but which also muddles the timeline and creates confusion in a work that sets out to be a tense one-night thriller with immediate and easy-to-grasp stakes.
And then, on top of all of that, there is Frank Miller's inescapable cynicism. The man can be angry, devise violent fantasies of retribution, and be as furiously racist as he'll allow himself to be, but he can't bring himself to believe that it's going to solve anything. The final page of Holy Terror basically admits as such: all the anger of the pages previous cannot make the terror go away, and thus the book must, in the end, absolutely fail at its stated goal.
Because, as you know if you remember your comics history, Holy Terror was supposed to be propaganda. It started its life as "Holy Terror, Batman!", and it was supposed to harken back to the Golden Age of comics, where colorful Americans punched nazis and shockingly racist caricatures of the Japanese in the name of freedom, justice, and the all-American way. It was supposed to be about exemplary heroes, defeating the evils of our day manifested as a wide-reaching supervillain conspiracy, an ever-present underground threat, coming out to the surface in the shape of many colorful characters, with strange and outlandish traits. And if you felt a pang of recognition while reading the previous sentence, it means that we have read the same book.
It is not enough, then, to say that Wonder Woman #1 is political, with its absolutely upsetting by design ripped-from-the-headlines depictions of all-American state-sanctioned violence against women, immigrants, and all their fellow threats to white male supremacy; you have to see the gambit at play here, which involves using the contemporary trappings of the military-industrial complex adjacent superhero thriller to tell a story which is as old-school ludicrous as it gets. A secret King of America? A Lasso of Lies? A henchman with guns for hands? These things have the same primordial quality to them as the wacky ham-based subterfuges of old. They're at once powerfully dumb and powerfully earnest.
Which means that, to talk about the comic on a deeper level, we must talk about that key device of propaganda: the Enemy, and its shape, which I think is more interesting than it's getting credit for. Yes, it invokes the American state and its capacity for violence against the marginalized, and yes, it invokes the patriarchy, and its very casual violence against women, delivered one hammy bit of microaggression at a time, served with the dumb grin of the self-satisfied. But, through the ever-present narration, the circumstances of the intrigue, and the sheer insistence of them both, I think it makes the salient point that all those things are linked. I think it's trying to say that these are all facets of the same thing, of Power itself, and that it is all lies. This is not new, unusual, or particularly radical. It's no bell hooks, so very few things are, but I think it is of some merit, considering how rarely those things get said in superhero comics.
And speaking of: yeah, it's also just A Good Superhero Comic. Daniel Sampere has always been an exceptional artist, and here he's given an occasion to focus his craft into a single direction. This is a comic that feels realistic and grounded, but which can at a moment's notice veer into pop art, especially when it recalls the imagery of the opening of the 1970s television show and its stars flying brightly, paired with Tomeu Morey's even bolder colors, and Clayton Cowles' occasional big lettering flex. It is very cleverly devised, using its first two thirds to build anticipation for Diana's grand entrance, and pulling all the tricks in the book (including the 9-panel grid as a tool of Enforcement) to make its points land.
As I said up top, I don't think it's up to me to tell you whether or not you should like, or even read, this book. I will tell you what I think, which is that Wonder Woman succeeds in doing something that other recent books have tried and failed to do. It is a throwback masquerading itself as something bold and new. It is opinionated about current events in a clear-headed fashion, that is at least bold enough to consider facts in something that is closest to their totality than what had been attempted so far. It pulls off the genre thrills. Is that good enough? Is that interesting enough? Is it worthwhile? I can't make that judgement.
So, turns out there wasn't much of anything else going on this week! But the review's good, right? I think it is. I worked hard on it. Tell me more about it wherever I am available, which is Cohost, or Bluesky, or Tumblr, maybe. Next week is going to be a wild one, so I guess you'll see me then! In the mean time, brush your teeth, brush your hair, make yourself nice, and HUMBLE YOURSELF BEFORE COMICS!