DC Comics
Wonder Woman #1
By Zak Edwards
September 21, 2011 - 18:21

DC Comics
Writer(s): Brian Azzarello
Penciller(s): Cliff Chiang
Colourist(s): Matthew Wilson
Letterer(s): Jared K. Fletcher
Cover Artist(s): Cliff Chiang
$2.99 US



     I was considering not getting a DC comic book this week, there really wasn’t anything I was interested in, until I realized it was Brian Azzarello writing Wonder Woman.  Then I was interested.  I’m not overly familiar with Azzarello’s work, I have all of 100 Bullets and Joker and Luthor, all of which are brilliant, but his style seems so far removed from a Wonder Woman story, I was more curious on why he took the job over anything else.  I must profess, however, that I don’t know very much about Wonder Woman, so I came into this book with little knowledge other than what I feel a lot of people know of the character.  How she is treated in the contemporary comic book world was something I’m mostly in the dark about.  What I do know is this: this book is good for a number of reasons.

WonderWoman1.jpg
First off, Azzarello’s ability to create a deeply literary story, obvious from his other works, is already at play here.  Moments and characters are working on multiple symbolic levels.  Second, the most prominent of these levels is a thinly-veiled story utilizing the tropes of Greek mythology and the characters of these stories as breathing characters.  In Wonder Woman, Hermes isn’t a distant ideological concept, he is a god with an agenda, a purpose, and a body that can be damaged.  But within these tropes, Azzarello is playing around with some fairly intricate concepts already.  A prophecy given by three girls turned into oracles speaks of the Greek tropes of sibling rivalry, distant father figures, and murder, but with it Azzarello begins to discuss legacy and the anxieties of the past with the present.  This tension of time is evident even in the girls’ speech, which transfers from symbolic language like “It wears a crown of thorns and a cape of blood” to “Seriously, this is mental” from caption to caption.  The effect is strange and jarring, but emphasizes Azzarello’s modernization of these mythological moments with the gods brought along in tact, as well as the relationship between the past and the contemporary.  So while the book does read like a convoluted superhero story at points, multiple readings fleshes out Azzarello’s concepts.  The reboot aspect I can’t really speak to, but the obvious ambition and experimentation present in the story, taking older concepts and forcing them into a different, modern interpretation that was the most important aspect of his 100 Bullets, is here to full effect.  I sincerely hope Azzarello’s unique approach lasts for a while, he seems to have a grand epic at his fingertips and I would love to come along for the ride.  Out of the few books I have read of the DC reboot, there are only a few I am excited about.  This is one of them.

Artist Cliff Chiang is beyond capable, even if I like his interior art more than the cover.  For a book that literally seems to throw everything at the artist, from horror to comedy to action, Chiang handles all with care with his loose pencils and strong support by colourist Matthew Wilson.  In particular, his somewhat gory sequences are truly unsettling and justify themselves as more than mere shock tactics.  The scene with the decapitated horse, out of which a gruesome black entity arises, is actually horrific, disgusting, and mesmerizing.  I couldn’t turn the page, instead staring at the page for a good few moments.  He has an attention to detail that never distracts and, as I said, seems to be up for anything.

Grade: A-    Ambitious and intriguing.

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