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Wonder Woman, Bd. 3: Krieg (2000)

by Brian Azzarello(Favorite Author)

3.97 of 5 Votes: 1

languge

English

genre

Fantasy

publisher

Panini Comics

series

Wonder Woman Vol. IV

review 1: I'm going to review these back to back, because I went on a binge reading yesterday, so I wound up blurring the lines of where one volume ended and the next began.Well, I loved it. I sincerely loved all of it. It was grandiose, awesome, and plotty, with a heavy dosis of intrigue on the side.It treated Wonder Woman with respect, showing her to be both the merciful and the strong figure she should be and writers often forget she is. The cast of secondary characters was just as much, if not more, fun than her (although Orion seemed to have been shoved into the mix and never felt really as if he belonged).I sincerely loved the heavy mythological approach to the series (I am a huge Greek mythos fan), and the plot was both epic (prevent heaven from falling) and personal (protect... more a baby and his mother).I loved the representation of the gods (especially Eris, Eros and Dyonisius!)Okay, that was the good.Now the bad, which fortunately, there wasn't a lot of.My chief annoyances were that a) I reeaaaaaally hate "prophecy" based stories and b)Zola had TSTL moments (Too Stupid To Live) that felt that were imposed for the single reason of driving plot ("I have gods gunning for me, but I'm a prideful git, so I am abandoning the only people who can possibly more or less keep me safe") or raising the stakes. They did try to justify it some, but I still was unconvinced, and sometimes, she'd end up feeling more like the MacGuffin, than a full character.There were some minors hang ups ("if I remove my bracers I become super powerful" seems to be pulled out of nowhere, the god's powers to, say, turn people into crystal, seems to come and go as it is convenient to the plot, the villain engages in the end in monologuing, etc.) but I can let those slip.And something that should be bad, but actually, I didn't care that much because of, hey, if you're going to rip-off something for your very mythos-heavy book, might as well go rip-off the best of the best:Enter Sandman.At every turn, I saw the Sandman inspirations in this series: the "child in the center of all" plot, the Lyta-Zola and the Daniel-Zeke parallels were obvious (except, well, Lyta started as also the "hoodwinked" mother defending\looking for her child, but turned out to be actual agent of change -- the greatest one, actually -- and how tragic that turned out to be, while Zola, while she did have her moments of awesomeness, was always stuck in the damsel in distress role), the fact that each god wound up getting the name that defined their role (Moon, Sun, Desire, Harvest, Hell, etc.) although they really couldn't match the much more "defined" roles of the Eternals, and so on.Still, I really REALLY wish they keep this writer writing for Wonder Woman (I heard what they did to her in the "JSA" books and in her relationship with Superman, and I am trying SO VERY HARD to ignore it and pretend it never happened.).
review 2: As the quest around Zola's baby gets more and more complicated, the series seems to have trouble maintaining momentum -- it doesn't help that Azzarello now introduces a bigger threat than the bickering gods and the now depowered Hera (who is quickly developing a frenemyship with Zola that's a hoot) in the form of the First Born, who seems to be the predicted godslayer even though everyone seems to be harping on Zola's kid as that.It'll be interesting to see if Azzarello can weave the increasing numbers of threads into a coherent whole again.Also not helping is the are inconsistency -- main arist Cliff Chiang seems less and less able to keep pace, so fill-in artist Tony Akins and others are subbing in more and more, often with individual episodes having several artists. less

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