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.
The new Wonder Woman is Percy Jackson for an older audience. I like it, but it seriously is just grown up Percy Jackson.
ReplyDeleteOh, so true.
ReplyDeleteI also do miss the way WW was portrayed during George Perez' own reboot... She was classier back then..
A lot of people seemed to disagree with you in the comments section.
ReplyDeleteHowever, they seem to disagree with you because they LOVE the new Wonder Woman, so that is great. They all sound somewhat similar, that THIS was the comic version that they were waiting for, which is also great.
Also also, the comments are readable. The comic book website I read the most, Comics Alliance, the comments there are mostly unreadable, as it has become too popular with too much poor grammar and unthought out arguements.
The new Wonder Woman is Percy Jackson for an older audience.
ReplyDeleteThat's a pretty good way to go with the franchise, really. Given the hype ahead of the relaunch, I think Percy Jackson for the Percy jackson audience would have been preferable (and was what I was expecting), but since DC seemed to be aiming at their own readers, their own lapsed readers and Marvel readers more so than, say, "civilians," then this is probably the way to go. If they can turn WW into a Green Lantern Corps level of success, I"m sure they'll be happy.
However, they seem to disagree with you because they LOVE the new Wonder Woman, so that is great. They all sound somewhat similar, that THIS was the comic version that they were waiting for, which is also great.
I'm glad for the creative team that it's doing well, and that will be great if Wonder Woman becomes popular again (which will likely lead to more and better comics).
Like I said over there, I really liked it, it just wasn't my Platonic ideal really.
Also also, the comments are readable. The comic book website I read the most, Comics Alliance, the comments there are mostly unreadable, as it has become too popular with too much poor grammar and unthought out arguements
Yeah, I try not to respond in comment threads (er, other than at EDILW), and while Robot 6 has way too many people with fake names and who comment without reading, it could certainly be worse.
I haven't even attempted to read a Comics Alliance thread in months—they have a great site packed with great writers, but they're cursed with an awful following of commenters.
It's really hard--impossible, really--for a comics news site to regulate the class or quality of their commenters (without assigning someone to full-time monitoring duty, and having a heavy hand regarding dumb comments, which requires paying a full-time thread monitor, really). Blog@ Newsarama has/had that problem too.
The potentially great thing about sites like that is that they allow for the build-up of community and back-and-forth communication among readers. And the downside is that sometimes it seems like "the community" is basically people you don't want to talk to.