Creative Staff:
Story: Gail Simone
Art: Ethan Van Sciver
What They Say:
Wonder Woman has come to Gotham to help the sidelined members of the Bat-Family, giving Gotham’s criminals the surprise of their lives! “Gothamazon” part 2 of 2.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
The opening installment of Sensation Comics gave me the kind of sense of fun I was hoping for with the book while also touching on some of the issues that comes with the story concept. The swap-out of who takes care of a city or location is one that is pretty old in the comics world and there’s something fun in seeing how different heroes would handle places that aren’t like what they’re used to. It’s hard to imagine Metropolis surviving well under Batman’s style and obviously vice versa. The introduction of Wonder Woman coming in to help out in Gotham is similar in that nature, but what Gail Simone does here is to lightly look at the reasons why it doesn’t work and how the heroes and villains of these areas are rather in tune with each other, allowing a kind of natural balance to occur.
With Wonder Woman having taken a pretty good stab at the villains of the day that have taken Batman out for awhile, she’s certainly feeling confident about it. The villains have fallen quickly, she’s been rough with them and the results have been positive. At least until she discovers that the villains here have little compunction in taking down innocents to gain, well, any sort of edge against their opponent. Thats a shock to Diana as she claims not even Ares would do that. And you can sort of see that since there are rules to war, in a general sense. Fortunately for Diana, the arrival of her Amazon army has given her a lot of people that can go and help the wounded and save as many as possible. But it reminds her that she’s not facing her traditional villains here and that Batman’s approach, as much as she tends to not agree with it at times, is one that does work here in general. And that has her changing her tune a bit.
Amusingly, she makes the call out at Harley and Catwoman as they come to watch what’s going on, opting not to take sides and just enjoy the show. But Diana makes it clear that taking sides is part of life and she essentially makes them temporary Amazons to serve as her guard in the fight that gets underway. There’s a kind of shrugging agreement from them about it, almost a whimsical aspect that they decide to go along with, and that works well since you have Harley apologizing to Ivy as the fight gets underway as the two of them prefer not to fight in this way. There’s a good bit of action to be had and some of the expect moral dilemmas that have populated comics for ages, such as having the Joker threaten an innocent to get Wonder Woman to stop. But we also get a neat moment that will never be referenced again as she lassoes a lot of the villains du jour and gets them to face their fears, which makes a discernible impact on them briefly. It’s an interesting idea, albeit one that would neuter most villains quickly and force the creation of new ones. And that would be awful, wouldn’t it?
In Summary:
The closing chapter of the first two part story for Sensation Comics is light, fun and prods at the right questions but won’t really answer them because, well, it requires a line-wide examination and restructuring of how comics are told. What we do get here is a nice bit of fun as Diana struggles with being who she is or being what she thinks is needed to fix Gotham’s problems by being the true warrior, which we get in a series of potential actions in the imagination. She knows she could do that but she also knows it wouldn’t be right for this setting, for Bruce’s city and those that live there. The banter is fun for the most part and I like the pushback that Diana gets from the others, with Harley and Selena providing some nice quips and even Harvey getting in a couple of good lines towards the end. It’s a fun little run that’s certainly very accessible and, in a lot of ways, geared more towards an all ages audience that’s important to try and acquire.
Grade: B
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: DC Comics
Release Date:August 20th, 2014
MSRP: $0.99
