Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 7/10
If you look at so called Big Two of American comic publishing, then Marvel for some reason has infinitely more heroines in which to glorify than those that live in the D.C. Universe. Even away from Marvel, which seems to have embraced with a lot more heart the reality of women who can hold their own against any of their male counterparts and in many ways are actually far superior to them, after all who would you rather have alongside you in a fight to the death, Susan Storm/Richards or Benjamin Grimm?
Many of the independent publications have placed their trust in showcasing strong, individual and well drawn female leads. Not least amongst these are Buffy Summers, any of the women who inhabit the world of The Watchmen or the excellently captured Kinsey Locke in the Locke and Key series of Graphic Novels by Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez. For D.C., they may have interesting female characters within the world they inhabit, Barbara Gordon, Transgendered Alysia Yeoh, the insanity that Harley Quinn brings and honesty of Felicity Smoak but aside from Aquaman’s stable mate Mera, the one true heroine of D.C. Comics is and always has been Wonder Woman.
The New 52 has been a boon to D.C. and that is no different when it comes to this woman of Amazon, even with her origin changed slightly and perhaps less agreeable in the way that she is now the daughter of Zeus rather than being a perfect female and having been born out of clay with no hint of masculine tainting in her, what lays beneath the outer cover of Volume 1: Blood is enough to get the fan and the new reader readily excited about.
Written by Brian Azzarello and with art by Cliff Chiang and Tony Atkins, Wonder Woman gets under the skin of the reader, not quite in the same way that Aquaman’s Geoff Johns manages, but with the same dynamism you would expect from an accomplished set of artists. With its allusion to Greek mythology well set out from the start and with Gods of Olympus and the far from the ideal that Paradise Island proposes to be as it struggles with the lies that have been laid down by the Queen, there is not much more that a reader would expect from this new collection of stories.
For some though, even a new branding won’t be good enough to get past the truly feminist ideal that the original story envisioned by American psychologist and writer William Moulton Marston and inspired by his wife’s choice of words to make this latest hero a woman rather than a man pertains to be. By removing the one piece of Wonder Woman’s story that could truly grip a reader to begin with, and a scientific phenomenon that has been attained by grafting cells from another woman rather than relying on a man’s sperm, the graphic novel does lose something of its originality. In all of the Golden Age and Silver age of comics and the graphic novels that followed, this one piece of creative comic licence is squandered and the result slightly diminishes what is otherwise a great revival.
Wonder Woman Volume 1: Blood is available from Worlds Apart on Lime Street, Liverpool.
Ian D. Hall