By: Charles Soule (story), Tony S. Daniel (pencils), Batt (inks), Tomev Morey (colors)
The Story: When her boyfriend’s in trouble, Diana goes for her family hook-ups.
The Review: I’ve never been all that fond of the grab-bag style of comic book storytelling—you know, a plot in which all of a character’s biggest villains get thrown in at once for some dubious reason and ultimately get disposed en masse. This seems like it would increase the scale of a story, but the effect is often overinflated. As with most things, quantity has little relation to quality, and the more villains we deal with, the less consequential the story feels.
This is especially true once you get to a certain caliber of villain, the ones who can ordinarily support an entire arc or more by themselves. Crowd them together and you may give the hero a bigger challenge, but you’ll diminish their viability. So from the moment Doomsday revealed itself at the end of last issue, I’ve been hoping Soule would do what almost no writer has done and focus on finding any layers that may have been lying in secret within the monster. Soule disappoints by instead eroding Doomsday’s importance with the appearance of a more defined Superman foe, which feels suspiciously like the start of a grab-bag story.
Wary as I am at this development, I can give Soule a limited benefit of doubt. Since his premise is the wavering of boundaries between the Phantom Zone and the material world, anyone within the Zone is fair game. And Soule does do a few interesting things with the plot. The prospect of facing some of his most undefeatable enemies forces Clark to seriously consider Diana’s earlier offer to teach him how to mete justice, the warrior’s way. It’ll be pretty fun to see Superman attempting to take a more Amazonian approach to his work, though you seriously doubt Soule will have him do anything too irreversible.
The advantage of having a younger, more aggressive Superman, though, is that at least he’ll be open to a little more violence if the opponent calls for it. He does seem pretty eager to get in Apollo’s face upon realizing this is a god he can go all-out upon (“I could bring this whole mountain down on this guy’s head. I could do it with one finger.”). In the end, however, his better instincts win out (“Easy. He might deserve it, but he’s still her brother.”), as I imagine they will once push comes to shove, even he does come in Hephaestus gear.
While I like the idea of Diana’s divine family members showing up out of curiosity over her new beau, there’s a bit of clunkiness in the execution. Soule gets the Olympians’ general attitude correct, but for those used to Brian Azzarello’s minimalistic, wordplay-driven portrayals of the characters, Soule’s versions are a little too direct and broad. Still, the entertainment value of their guest shots is pretty good; Strife practically squeeing (“[O]h. [M]y. God.”) after seeing Clark punch Apollo straight through the top of Hephaestus’ mountain forge is nearly worth the price of admission alone.
Slight weirdness with the Pantheon aside, Soule still has a solid grasp of his leads. Diana practically jumps on the chance to push Clark towards her warrior’s ideal (one which even Apollo acknowledges Steve Trevor fulfilled better than Clark does), though she does so in the framework of being a supportive girlfriend. Meanwhile, Clark is starting to become much more sensitive to Diana’s independence, preemptively apologizing for taking care of Apollo before she can. She, however, expresses approval of his actions, since they were more about preserving his own dignity than her own.
The trademark of a good mainstream artist on a major superhero book is a larger-than-life, big-screen look, and Daniel has that in spades. There’s no denying the sheer attractiveness of the characters; even monstrous figures like Doomsday or Hephaestus are perfectly formed and appealing. Daniel’s sense of action and expression are striking and bold as well, made more so by Morey’s brash color palette, strong qualities for a title of this sort.
Conclusion: Mostly entertaining and well done, but the story itself is proving to be nothing special or important.
Grade: B
– Minhquan Nguyen
Some Musings: – Was Hephaestus always taller than Diana? I do kind of wish that Daniel would play up more of her athletic, hefty build as Cliff Chiang does in her ongoing series.
– “He’s not even human! He comes from the stars. He’s just some sort of thing.” A weirdly xenophobic sentiment, but perhaps not unsurprising, given who it comes from.