Never trust crazy old doctors with secret island research labs.
Creative Staff:
Story: Trina Robbins
Art: Christopher Gugliotti
What They Say:
Dr. Minerva has turned to Wonder Woman for assistance, but when the Amazon princess/superhero and the scientist/super-villain make their way to the last remaining source of the Cheetah’s serum, they find more is at stake than expected! “Island of Lost Souls” part 2 of 3.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
After a pretty strong and fun start with this three part arc, Sensation Comics suffers from mid-story blues here with the second installment. The appeal of the book is certainly still here though as we get to see Wonder Woman and Cheetah trying to solve a problem and it’s all presented with some great artwork and color design from Gugliotti, who definitely caught my attention with the first installment and just reinforces my interest here. The more “experimental” nature of Sensation Comics is something that’s definitely been its strong suit and I keep hoping we’ll get something with other characters to do the same down the line. Here, the style and look of the book definitely makes it stand out in a great way.
Unfortunately, the story kind of drops off here with what it does as the two have made their way to the island and are dealing with a diverse group of animals that have seemingly human sentience and understanding. There’s not a lot of depth to it as one would expect, but it’s made clear that they all live under the fear of the Doc that runs the place. And even more fearful of his lieutenant, a dog named Bonzo that’s definitely a pretty intense enforcer. It doesn’t take long for the situation to go from bad to worse when Bonzo shows up and brings our human pair to see the Doc. And that’s just plain bad all in its own as we get to meet George Herbert, your stereotypical old white crazy scientist doing all the wrong things in order to help people out. The whole concept is that he’s experimenting on animals in order to help people with illnesses.
There’s some basic ideas here that are old school science, though there are a lot of researches that unfortunately still go this route today so it’s not a surprise, but the idea of essentially organ harvesting animals for people is pretty cringe inducing – yet you can see why some would be for it (and others horrified by it for very different reasons). With all of this being backed by Luthor, it’s even worse. The problem at hand though is that Cheetah is essentially falling apart because of her withdrawal and now Luthor intends to sell off the remaining source of the medicine and eliminate the lab due to poor/no results. Enter the men in black and a mess of a sequence that results in a few deaths, some forced emotional beats with Bonzo and a sense that as strong as the story began the middle is undercutting it significantly.
In Summary:
With an interesting start to the arc, I’m really not sure what to make the turns here. It all feels so simple and formulaic after providing some interesting ideas to work with and a pairing of characters that could be examined in new ways. The story kind of just takes bad turns here with the animals, the doc and with Bonzo while adding weak men in black elements along the way tied to luthor. The saving grace really is the artwork as there’s a lot to like here as I find Gugliotti’s style and color palette to work really well and is exactly the kind of “non-standard” artwork I wanted and often got from this series that breathed new life into the characters. While I’m not hopeful for an ending that can rescue the storyline, because it really isn’t served well here, I’m at least looking forward to more artwork that I can enjoy.
Grade: C-
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: DC Comics via ComiXology
Release Date: October 22nd, 2015
MSRP: $0.99