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Wonder Woman (2016-) #37 by Alex Sinclair, Carlo Pagulayan, Jason Paz, James Robinson, Bryan Hitch
themyskira's review
1.0
This is one of the single worst comics I have read in recent times. Viewed as a whole with the rest of James Robinson's run, is hard to overstate how staggeringly, bewilderingly bad this story is.
Robinson is an industry veteran with twenty-five years' experience writing for DC and Marvel. He has produced critically acclaimed comics. He received an Eisner Award for his work on Starman, which is still beloved by fans. More recently, he had a run on Scarlet Witch that was quite enjoyable and generally pretty well-received by critics.
But the quality of craft on display in his Wonder Woman run? I’m not exaggerating when I say that it's on par with Meredith Finch’s rightly derided run – that is, the work of a writer who had never solo-scripted a single comic book issue, let alone a multi-issue arc. It is embarrassingly amateurish, from the hacky exposition and wooden dialogue, through the nonsensical characterisation, plot holes, continuity errors, and filler issues that fail to advance the plot.
Wonder Woman is rendered almost completely useless in her own book, and that's when she shows up at all – she's entirely absent from a couple of issues, and a bit player in others. In #37, the final issue of this first arc, she's more or less reduced to wailing 'daddeeeeeeee I will save you daddeeeeee' from the sidelines, while a male character handles all the action.
This issue is also notable for what appears to be a complete lack of proofreading or editing. The prose is clumsier than ever. There are lines that make no grammatical or logical sense. There are two places where it's clear Robinson went back and inserted or deleted a line from the script, and then nobody bothered to check whether it still made sense. In one such instance, this results in an exchange where a character who is clearly intended to be berating himself for not acting soon enough instead berates Diana for not apologising to him soon enough.
To be fair to Robinson and his editors, though, the ultimate blame for this garbage fire of a story belongs to Geoff Johns, who originally devised the execrable Secret Twin Brother retcon and the Baby Darkseid/Grail story, and whose influence is presumably what led DC to walk back all of the positive world building and developments of Rebirth Wonder Woman in favour of a year-old, outdated story thread that nobody had particularly cared for in the first place.
Robinson is an industry veteran with twenty-five years' experience writing for DC and Marvel. He has produced critically acclaimed comics. He received an Eisner Award for his work on Starman, which is still beloved by fans. More recently, he had a run on Scarlet Witch that was quite enjoyable and generally pretty well-received by critics.
But the quality of craft on display in his Wonder Woman run? I’m not exaggerating when I say that it's on par with Meredith Finch’s rightly derided run – that is, the work of a writer who had never solo-scripted a single comic book issue, let alone a multi-issue arc. It is embarrassingly amateurish, from the hacky exposition and wooden dialogue, through the nonsensical characterisation, plot holes, continuity errors, and filler issues that fail to advance the plot.
Wonder Woman is rendered almost completely useless in her own book, and that's when she shows up at all – she's entirely absent from a couple of issues, and a bit player in others. In #37, the final issue of this first arc, she's more or less reduced to wailing 'daddeeeeeeee I will save you daddeeeeee' from the sidelines, while a male character handles all the action.
This issue is also notable for what appears to be a complete lack of proofreading or editing. The prose is clumsier than ever. There are lines that make no grammatical or logical sense. There are two places where it's clear Robinson went back and inserted or deleted a line from the script, and then nobody bothered to check whether it still made sense. In one such instance, this results in an exchange where a character who is clearly intended to be berating himself for not acting soon enough instead berates Diana for not apologising to him soon enough.
To be fair to Robinson and his editors, though, the ultimate blame for this garbage fire of a story belongs to Geoff Johns, who originally devised the execrable Secret Twin Brother retcon and the Baby Darkseid/Grail story, and whose influence is presumably what led DC to walk back all of the positive world building and developments of Rebirth Wonder Woman in favour of a year-old, outdated story thread that nobody had particularly cared for in the first place.
livsliterarynook's review
3.0
HOT DAMN. Not what I was expecting to happen...
Now all the Justice League have turned up and this has left me undecided about continuing with WW or starting the JL series to see if there is crossover. That is the one annoying point about comics there always a tonne of sub-plots that cut between different characters which makes it difficult to follow.
Now all the Justice League have turned up and this has left me undecided about continuing with WW or starting the JL series to see if there is crossover. That is the one annoying point about comics there always a tonne of sub-plots that cut between different characters which makes it difficult to follow.
talysalankil's review
3.0
Well…that's over. Wonder if Jason will stick around. Next up is apparently the silver swan, which…I guess we'll see where that goes?
samhain's review
4.0
Hum... Darkseid and I clearly haven't read the same myths. I guess that's how we know for certain that he's one of the most dangerous villains ever: he's unstable and insane enough to build his evilest plan around Zeus' capacity to handle his responsibilities, and his ability to care for anything but his penis. Only a man with nothing to loose would risk everything on that. A part of me can't help but think Diana should just praise Darkseid because having Zeus do what he's supposed to is a once-in-a-lifetime kind of events.
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