Creative Staff:
Story: Stephanie Phillips
Art: Meghan Hetrick
Colors: Marissa Louise
Letterer: Pat Brosseau
What They Say:
As Wonder Woman remembers who she is, she and Hawkgirl must work together to stop Doctor Psycho.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
The opening installment to this two-part storyline was a decent bit of fun even if you knew some of the basics to expect from the get-go. Stephanie Phillips played well with Diana in a 1950s-style existence where she knew it wasn’t right but was compelled to keep playing along. It helped that Meghan Hetrick delivered a really great round of costume design for her so that it was stylish and somewhat thematically from the loosely-defined period. Which Marissa Louise made even more vibrant against the chaotic or empty backgrounds that we ended up getting so that it all stood it even more.
With Diana clearly under the control of Doctor Psycho, this issue gives us time on the other side of Diana where she’s laid out on the table and Hawkgirl is trying to get her to wake up without any real success here initially. It plays pretty well as you have Psycho walking down the hall toward the room and all I can think of is the time between the two from the Harley Quinn show, which I’m going to believe happens across every single continuity to explain why everyone absolutely hates Psycho. He’s got the upper hand here, however, and is able to push back on Hawkgirl from getting anywhere with Diana on waking her up.
The book does spend most of its time with Diana inside her mind where Psycho has constrained her a bit to that visual design. But she is able to break free of it and to start figuring out how to get past it as she can hear Hawkgirl on the other side. Story wise, it’s pretty simple and kind of just there, but the visual design for it is great as her “husband” is this chaotic black ink spot or somesuch that’s chasing after her while she uses her sword to break the pages apart and look for a way to bring herself back to the real world. It’s nightmare material to be sure but she’s handling it really well and the execution of it thanks to the designs from Hetrick makes it work.
In Summary:
The story we get here is pretty simple but it works nicely enough. Normally, it’d be one that I think would work best as a single-issue tale but then we wouldn’t have had the black-inky thing or whatever it was that Diana got to fight here while set against the white pages. That sequence looked great and definitely just managed to click far better than it should thanks to what Hetrick did. Overall, it’s a decent start to the run and I hope to see a lot of creativity from the book without it being constrained to continuity and the like. We saw a lengthy good run with Sensation Comics last decade, let’s hope this one goes for just as long if not more.
Grade: B
Age Rating: 12+
Released By: DC Comics via ComiXology
Release Date: January 13th, 2021
MSRP: $0.99