It’s never easy when your biggest enemies work together.
Creative Staff:
Story: Lauren Beukes
Art: Mike Maihack
What They Say:
Wonder Woman has been summoned to the Isle of Cats to rescue her Justice League teammates, but can Diana save the day?
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
With some more serious works as of late within the pages of Sensation Comics, this installment goes for something fun and light, but with its own flavor of seriousness that works well. The fun of this series in being able to diverge like this and not being sure of what kind of story you’re going to get until you open the book is a real treat, making me glad that it’s back on track again with its weekly releases. Even better is that this time around we get Lauren Beukes and Mike Maihack giving us a very fun story that, while it has an after school special feeling about it in some ways, does one of the things comics can do so well in providing well done morality tales.
The book is largely given to us in two halves, where the first half is this bright, colorful and appropriately cartoonish piece with Wonder Woman riding her invisible jet to rescue Batman and Superman from the Isle of Cats. She has quite the range of foes to deal with as Cheetah is there being her usual playful self and we get some really fun interpretations of Circe and Medusa as well. To make matters worse though, Superman has been turned into a big, pink pig with a curly hair piece while Batman has been turned to stone, which Diana admits actually fits his usual demeanor. With the coloring job we get here and the general designs and layouts, it’s just a lo tof fun that really makes me smile as the fight plays out and as we get some very playful banter as well that goes the all ages route but doesn’t come across poorly.
The gimmick here, or twist if you prefer, is that everything that was happening came from the imagination of a young child named Zozo, who was playing with her older sister Asonelle’s toys – going so far as to draw on them to bring her story to life. Zozo is totally into the Wonder Woman mold and having fun with it, but since what she did was wrong, she naturally ends up in trouble and misses out on some of the fun events of the day. While Asonelle and others get to go do the fun things, Zozo has to clean it up, but it ends up leading her to again using her imagination to have fun and play rather than work, but also to save the day when a bit of danger arrives. The tales gives us some decent family material, but also works the story angle about how different we are in how we can be positive influences and do the right thing.
In Summary:
Sensation Comics does some very fun stuff here with how it plays out, at first giving us a good all ages Wonder Woman story with some fun enemies and designs before going to the heart of the matter. Telling the tale from the point of view of a young South African girl who idolizes the character and wants to be like her is great, and watching the family dynamic play out in a couple of different ways adds to it all in a very engaging and honest way that most can related to, siblings or not. But what I really liked is that so much of this is all sparked because of a child’s imagination, which has her standing up to do the right thing when needed and without a thought to herself, because it needed to be done. Imagination doesn’t get the kind of push it once did for a variety of reasons, so just seeing such honest, fun and enjoyable playing being portrayed here really stands out in a big and positive way for me here.
Grade: B
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: DC Comics via ComiXology
Release Date: January 29th, 2015
MSRP: $0.99
