“Fear the Dark”
Creative Staff:
Story: Andrew Wheeler
Art: Paul Pelletier, Norm Rapmund
Colors: Adriano Lucas
Letterer: Travis Lanham
What They Say:
A teenage boy summoned a dark witch out of a book of spells to cover his town in the same darkness that consumes him. Wonder Woman arrives to drive the dark witch back to where she came from.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
Our Agent of Peace returns for another tale that goes for the magical mystical side of things under the guiding hand of Andrew Wheeler. It’s a solid little self-contained piece that’s a good bit of fun as it plays out and leans on the drama stick pretty hard. While the story is fairly average in a lot of ways the artwork is beautiful. Paul Pelletier has long been a great artist with some strong design sensibilities that stand out well and they’re additionally enhanced thanks to the talented Norm Rapmund’s inking on it. And Adriano Lucas really delivers on the color design for a very cold and snow heavy storyline. The result is a very polished and top of the line looking book for what many would just call a filler issue. But it’s one that highlights Wonder Woman and who she is.
The premise here brings Wonder Woman to Stockholm for an event but she finds herself drawn away from it pretty quickly when a vision of a young woman asks her to come save her village. The village, on the outskirts of a deep and dark forest, has fallen to darkness itself with large wolves keeping them separate now and a darkness at the middle of the day where it’s just as black as midnight. Diana’s able to talk well about how different regions of the world have different fears and the darkness of snow and the night is definitely one of them. With everyone huddling indoors as even candles don’t seem to work, it sets up for an interesting area and situation for Diana to deal with.
What it comes down to, however, is a young man who wants to be beautiful (and is as illustrated here) but has been beaten for it repeatedly in the real world. But he was taken in here by the Queen of Fables and she’s using him to draw power to bring out the darkness of the world through him. This gives Diana something physical to focus on and fight as helping the kid would be more psychological and we have Queen of Fables drawing in on some giant creature to help secure her position and control over the kid as well. It’s a pretty good piece in what it’s trying to say in the larger picture and how it’s handled but it also delivers well with the action, giving us a winter Wonder Woman going up against a lot of interesting creatures and opponents in order to save the town.
In Summary:
There’s a lot to like with the storytelling in this issue with what the young man goes through and how his pain is used by others. Wheeler works a couple of levels to things here but at the forefront, we get Diana doing her best to protect everyone and help them on the path that they’re on so they can see the good things out there. What really won me over with this story was the artwork as the team just overdelivers here with some great visuals, from the detailed character designs to the color work and more. It’s really beautiful, especially on the digital setup, and worth the price of admission with ease.
Grade: B
Age Rating: 12+
Released By: DC Comics via ComiXology and Kindle
Release Date: November 11th, 2020
MSRP: $0.99
