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A review by cleheny
Wonder Woman: Love and Murder by Jodi Picoult
1.0
Wow, this is terrible.
In the introduction to her own arc, Picoult says that she wanted to make Diana more "human" and more "relatable" by showing Diana as having doubts about who she wants to be. I'm tired of writers saying the reason Diana isn't as popular as Batman and Superman is because she's not human/relatable. It's because comics were historically written for, and consumed by, men, and gender prejudices, stereotypes, and norms forced female characters into certain roles/formulas (yes, I know Marston's Diana challenged those norms/stereotypes, but Diana's portrayal changed after he stopped writing her). Perez's post-Crisis Diana reinvigorated her character, but she had a lot of ground to make up for, along with a character history and rogue's gallery that was never as developed as Batman's and Superman's. Readers found Perez's and Rucka's Diana relatable. She didn't need to be portrayed as totally lacking any understanding of personal finance in the worlds in which she's lived for many years (e.g., only carrying $10 and not knowing what a credit card is--seriously, are you kidding me?) in order for readers to care for her.
So Diana comes off as a clueless fish out of water in her civilian disguise. The narration in her voice is also quite repetitive and uninteresting. After Sarge Steel tasks her with bringing in WW, Diana repeatedly asks herself how she can capture herself. Yeah, we get it because we already know they are one and the same; we don't need to have Diana keep asking herself how she's going to pull it off (without any actual effort to come up with a plan to accomplish this assignment).
And then Picoult starts the Amazons Attack! storyline, which has a reputation for being terrible. I haven't read it (that's next on the reading list), but, based on what Picoult did, I expect I'm going to suffer through it. It doesn't surprise me that Circe does her best to betray everyone in pursuit of her ultimate goal, but it is stunning that the Amazons just blindly accept everything she does. She shows up on Themiscyra, uninvited, resurrects Hippolyta, shows one image of Diana in a cell and tells the Amazons that the humans are trying to destroy her, and everyone goes along with it. Don't these Amazons remember anything about Circe? And why are they so eager to follow the resurrected-one-minute-ago Hippolyta, who surrendered her throne to end a civil war caused by her own neglect, and has purple energy shooting out from her eyes? Shouldn't that be a dead give-away that something's off about her?
Finally, I'm annoyed that Picoult did what Heinberg (strongly) hinted at--that Diana now thinks she was wrong to kill Maxwell Lord. Sure, Diana can come to believe that (though it would have been a more interesting choice if Diana didn't), but it should come after she's been given good reasons (other than she's no longer popular) to get there. Instead, she tells her mother that, "Once before, I took a single life to save millions. I convinced myself it was the right thing to do. But even one life is too many." So does she regret killing Medusa? How about Deimos? How about Decay? She killed all of them, too, in order to save billions. Why didn't anyone condemn her for those killings? Those were lives--just not human ones.
In the introduction to her own arc, Picoult says that she wanted to make Diana more "human" and more "relatable" by showing Diana as having doubts about who she wants to be. I'm tired of writers saying the reason Diana isn't as popular as Batman and Superman is because she's not human/relatable. It's because comics were historically written for, and consumed by, men, and gender prejudices, stereotypes, and norms forced female characters into certain roles/formulas (yes, I know Marston's Diana challenged those norms/stereotypes, but Diana's portrayal changed after he stopped writing her). Perez's post-Crisis Diana reinvigorated her character, but she had a lot of ground to make up for, along with a character history and rogue's gallery that was never as developed as Batman's and Superman's. Readers found Perez's and Rucka's Diana relatable. She didn't need to be portrayed as totally lacking any understanding of personal finance in the worlds in which she's lived for many years (e.g., only carrying $10 and not knowing what a credit card is--seriously, are you kidding me?) in order for readers to care for her.
So Diana comes off as a clueless fish out of water in her civilian disguise. The narration in her voice is also quite repetitive and uninteresting. After Sarge Steel tasks her with bringing in WW, Diana repeatedly asks herself how she can capture herself. Yeah, we get it because we already know they are one and the same; we don't need to have Diana keep asking herself how she's going to pull it off (without any actual effort to come up with a plan to accomplish this assignment).
And then Picoult starts the Amazons Attack! storyline, which has a reputation for being terrible. I haven't read it (that's next on the reading list), but, based on what Picoult did, I expect I'm going to suffer through it. It doesn't surprise me that Circe does her best to betray everyone in pursuit of her ultimate goal, but it is stunning that the Amazons just blindly accept everything she does. She shows up on Themiscyra, uninvited, resurrects Hippolyta, shows one image of Diana in a cell and tells the Amazons that the humans are trying to destroy her, and everyone goes along with it. Don't these Amazons remember anything about Circe? And why are they so eager to follow the resurrected-one-minute-ago Hippolyta, who surrendered her throne to end a civil war caused by her own neglect, and has purple energy shooting out from her eyes? Shouldn't that be a dead give-away that something's off about her?
Finally, I'm annoyed that Picoult did what Heinberg (strongly) hinted at--that Diana now thinks she was wrong to kill Maxwell Lord. Sure, Diana can come to believe that (though it would have been a more interesting choice if Diana didn't), but it should come after she's been given good reasons (other than she's no longer popular) to get there. Instead, she tells her mother that, "Once before, I took a single life to save millions. I convinced myself it was the right thing to do. But even one life is too many." So does she regret killing Medusa? How about Deimos? How about Decay? She killed all of them, too, in order to save billions. Why didn't anyone condemn her for those killings? Those were lives--just not human ones.