Wonder Woman #1: One Woman’s Paradise is Another Woman’s Hell…

After that emotionally fulfilling ending to the Becky Cloonan and Michael W. Conrad run, followed by the equally-spooky two issues tie in mini to the recent Knight Terrors event, Diana’s finally back in her own ongoing, and a bold new direction. Tom King and Daniel Sampere officially kick things off with a mystery. A mysterious Amazon walks into a bar and kills nineteen men, leaving the two women as lone survivors. This act sends the country in a tizzy, where we get legislation pushed through Congress outlawing all of the Amazons from American soil. What’s Diana’s response? What’s Sarge Steel’s game plan? Who’s pulling the strings to this obvious hit piece? 

Tom King came in with a bang as promised, and he’s flipped Diana’s role in man’s world. The murders have enacted swift legislation to outlaw the Amazons from American soil, and formed an organization A.X.E. (Amazon eXtradition Entity), as a fictional organization akin to America’s own I.C.E. Leading up this new organization is Sarge Steel. Steel’s a ’60s Charlton character, that’s a Silver Age throwback to the pulp comics that predate the superhero genre. Steel’s one of those morally gray characters, who depending on the story and writer, can be used in any sort of role, and it doesn’t matter the outcome, won’t really contradict his past experiences, because he rides both sides. 

Daniel Sampere’s on art duties, and he certainly put the work in on this issue. His Diana is majestic, and otherworldly beautiful. She is the epitome of what one would expect from a being of pure perfection. She just exudes Amazon, and I’ll be hard pressed to find anything wrong with his Diana. But it’s not just Diana that’s important to this story. Sampere’s use of mooring and emotional reactions to some of the more horrific elements that really stood out. Like the bar massacre. You don’t see this unnamed Amazon physically destroying these men in the bar, but you see the shadows and massacre from outside the building, and it’s this scene that stood out. Sampere leaves this to the reader’s imagination, giving the violence an almost Hitchcockian atmosphere that grabs you, and doesn’t let go.

This issue is a great place to begin giving us a new, and interesting status quo, with a villain that on paper could pose some really thought provoking questions, but the issue is not without its fumbles. First the AXE organization, and it’s basically America’s ICE response unit. Of course we’ll always get some direct parallels from the real world, and the world of these fictional characters, but it’s the lack of nuance that seems to be the biggest obstacle for making this strike force interesting. Sarge Steel’s a nice alternative to Amanda Waller, but he doesn’t have that je ne sais quoi that Waller has. It’s the first issue, so I’m willing to give him the time to reach that level.