What Lex Luthor won’t do…
Creative Staff:
Story: Heather Nuhfer
Art: Ryan Benjamin
What They Say:
Wonder Woman’s latest mission is to help India’s space program, making it safe for them to launch their new SpaceCrops platform. But when Diana discovers LexCorp caused the problem, she takes matters into her own hands! “Sabotage Is in the Stars,” part 1 of 1.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
Sensation Comics runs with a single story this time around, a nice change after some of the multi-part adventures recently, and it also goes back to a more traditional bit of storytelling. A lot of what we’ve seen in the last few issues, and the run in general, are more creative standalone pieces that explore other aspects of Diana than just her traditional Wonder Woman role. This installment goes back to that though, which can work well, as we get a tale from Heather Nuhfer with artist Ryan Benjamin. Unfortunately, the story doesn’t really seem to know how to pace itself well to reveal itself, leaving it feeling rather choppy and almost uncertain about what it is that it’s trying to do in the end, other than show that Wonder Woman is always ahead of Lex Luthor.
The premise is straightforward enough at the start as we get Diana stopping a meteorite from hitting an advanced research lab in India where they’re close to launching their shuttle into space to explore new ways to deal with hydroponics in an effort to ease the food problems of Earth. It’s an ambitious plan and one that has the scientists in India very excited to show their big contributions to space and the world, as well as having their first female captain to handle a mission of this magnitude. Diana’s saving of the facility has her getting plenty of praise, but she’s also keeping an eye on a Luthor man in the crowd that’s also cheering things on, which has her quite suspicious.
And rightly so, as Luthor was the one that orchestrated the entire meteorite incident in an effort to destroy the lab and set them back so that his company can remain the most competitive. Why let yourself be undercut when you can just blow up the competition from orbit? Diana’s suspicions have her figuring out parts of this in a kind of random and less than clear way, and that shifts to her dealing with protecting the shuttle during its launch and in space while Luthor’s creations do their best to stop it all from happening. It’s not paced well in the slightest and the overall feeling is one where the story is just choppy and haphazard without enough exposition or narration to help draw the pieces together, resulting in something that doesn’t flow well at all.
In Summary:
While we get some great artwork in general here in a more traditional style than Sensation Comics usually does, the story itself is one that just falls apart as it goes along and feels nonsensical. The pieces are here, but the bridging aspects to bind it are minimal at best and often missing, leaving you uncertain of what the story is until you reread it once or twice. While the story left me cool to say the least, I definitely liked Ryan Benjamin’s art to see his take on Diana, which is complemented very well by the color design for it all. While I’ve been thoroughly enjoying Sensation Comics overall, there haven’t been too many misses for me. But this one is definitely a swing and a miss unfortunately.
Grade: C
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: DC Comics via ComiXology
Release Date: February 19th, 2015
MSRP: $0.99
