Wonder Woman #16: This is a Job for a Detective!

Wonder Woman #16 continues the Fury arc which is slowly building towards the end of the Sovereign story that begin in Wonder Woman #1. Much like the last issue, instead of solely focusing on Wonder Woman, the story shifts focus over to a side character who acts against the Sovereign while Diana continues to bond with her new born baby. While the last issue focused on the sidekicks, Wonder Woman #16 uses Detective Chimp as the lead, a character that has grown to be a supporting character for Wonder Woman in recent years, and was also used in one of the Wonder Woman tie-in issues that Tom King wrote for the Absolute Power event.

King has always had a strong reverence towards characters that are often relegated to team books or only used in the background. With his many DC Black Label series such as Danger Street, Mister Miracle, Strange Adventures, and Jenny Sparks, these characters have been the sole focus. So seeing King focus on Detective Chimp here just makes a lot of sense. King does a great job showcasing the detective skills of the character, as the goal of this issue is to discredit the Sovereign after his wealth was taken from him in the last issue. It is a lot of fun seeing the Sovereign get so frustrated with the events going on, positioning himself in a circle that leads to a great reveal about who gets to break the story to the press.

Daniel Sampere does the main cover art; however, Bruno Redondo takes over the main pencils for the issue. Redondo does an excellent job as always, really highlighting the frustration that the Sovereign feels as Detective Chimp continues to show up at the least opportune times. The issue is light on action; however, the whimsical nature of the story itself is an excellent showcase of Redondo’s skills.

Khary Randolph draws the backup story here which features Jimmy Olsen showing an expose on his social media channel about the Sovereign. This backup is fun; however, it doesn’t really reveal too much new information that has not already been discussed in this issue or prior issues. If anything, it just recaps the Sovereign’s story.

That being said, after rereading the first two trade paperbacks for the Wonder Woman series that both took place before Absolute Power, what ever happened to Emelie? While this issue is a lot of fun, the entire first arc of this series revolved around Wonder Woman trying to find Emelie after her fight in the bar caused the United States to ban Amazons. The series even explained that Emelie was one of the people Diana fought when she snuck into the trial on Themyscira, and that she was pregnant. Now, on issue #16, what happened to that Emelie plot? It appears that her pregnancy was just a red herring for how Trinity comes into being; however, Diana’s quest for revenge on the Sovereign seems like it has made that plot disappear. Tom King is no novice writer so he definitely has something up his sleeve. Hopefully that story, as well as the overall world conflict between the United States and Themyscira get some sort of resolution as the Sovereign’s story comes to an end.