“The Queen’s Hive, Part 2”
Creative Staff:
Story: Sina Grace
Art: Paul Pelletier, Norm Rapmund
Colors: Adriano Lucas
Letterer: Becca Carey
What They Say:
In order to take down Queen Bee, Wonder Woman must go through Silver Banshee, The Blue Snowman, and Giganta!
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
Sina Grace put together a solid bit of fun with the opening installment to The Queen’s Hive storyline and bringing it together on Themyscira at the end definitely paid off well as we got a host of villains working under her. Grace’s story moved quickly enough while playing loose with some legal issues early on but that just makes me laugh as an adult compared to my reaction as a kid. This issue retains the same art team with Paul Pelletier and Norm Rapmund handling things with Adriano Lucas and it’s just as fun as before with good color design and a lot of solid character and settings laid out before us. The action is fun and just watching Diana going up against familiar villains on her own turf makes me enjoy it a whole lot.
With Diana being thrown up against the group that Queen Bee has assembled, it turns quickly to a good fight that has her largely putting them down quickly, within a page or two since there are several of them. They may be short fights but they’re fun as Diana gets some choice words for each of them and gets in just enough back and forth on the fighting side that you get something with a little bit of impact out of it. I’m not too keen on this iteration of Blue Snowman, especially after getting a different version just a couple of issues ago, but that’s a minor quibble overall. The group that Queen Bee assembled is solid and her plans for remaking the world and keeping men out of the picture is something that she presents well enough, even as Diana makes clear that the world is rapidly changing with all of its dialogue and pushes toward equality.
The big problem that the battle has is that as Diana goes up against Giganta, Giganta ends up in the water as Diana tries to avoid destroying any buildings on the island. And it’s there that the megalodons that protect the island get involved and start latching onto Giganta. It’s definitely amusing seeing her having all of them latch onto her and her panic, and seeing how Queen Bee has to give up control of the Amazons in order for them to stop the creatures from tearing Gigant apart as they need to essentially commune with them. It doesn’t take much for everything to turn bad from there for Queen Bee in all the expected ways and even the wrap-up about how to deal with what kicked off this storyline is dealt with in just a panel or two. It’s not a surprise that it operates like that but it moves in just such a light and almost hand-wavy way that I have to laugh.
In Summary:
This two-part storyline was pretty fun overall with what it wanted to do in putting Diana up against an array of opponents and getting it all done on Paradise Island. The setting worked nicely and they managed to keep most of the Amazons out of the picture for a lot of it so that it was up to Diana to save everything. The fight sequences are mostly montage style when you get down to it but the artwork looked great, the flow of it all was fun, and seeing how Queen Bee basically has to give up any chance of winning in order to save one of her own is a nice little nod.
Grade: B
Age Rating: 12+
Released By: DC Comics via ComiXology
Release Date: March 24th, 2021
MSRP: $0.99
