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24 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
eh, not so wonderful, December 23, 2007
Collecting Wonder Woman #6-10, Pens: Jodi Picoult, Pencils: Drew Johnson, Terry Dodson, Paco Diaz
I'll be honest, I was pretty displeased with this collection. It started out fine; Picoult was light enough, putting Wonder Woman in "Man's World" with funny consequences, but a severe plot twist ends up committing one of the comic book conventions that irk me so much: the Resurrection. Sure enough, if you're willin to believe it, the plot works fine and smoothly. The writing itself was fine. What was written - not necessarily.
Cameos by Black Canary and Catwoman were iffy and held no substance. I mean, it might as well be a stranger making those cameos; the characters are there without much of a purpose.
Wonder Woman's sidekick is pretty childish for a secret agent, and I find it hard to believe that Diana tolerates him.
Terry Dodson is the artist for Wonder Woman, but he required two fill-in artists. He pencils issues 8 and 9, while Drew Johnson has 6 and 7 and Paco Diaz rounds it off with number 10. Of them all, Terry Dodson is fantastic with Paco being tolerable. Johnson is there in the middle.
I really wish there was a single artist for this book. The book does feel disjunct. Don't get it if you want to check out the Dodsons' art, because it's barely there.
Overall, you get five issues for 20 dollars, with a foreword by Jodi on how she transitioned from novels to sequential art. Even at 14 bucks here at Amazon, it's not really worth it, because this is just a tie-in to another event: Amazons Attack. THERE IS NO RESOLUTION. The book feels empty. I expect some kind of resolution in a graphic novel.
Don't you?
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14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
A complete misfire., January 20, 2008
After hiring Allan Heinberg to do the first five issues of the "Wonder Woman" reboot, DC turned to novelist Jodi Picoult to do another five-issue story arc. The result is a complete misfire on a number of levels, some of which are Picoult's fault, and some of which are DC's. Finally, there is the art (by, successively, Drew Johnson, Terry Dodson, and Paco Diaz), which is very good.
Beginning with the things that are DC's fault: "Wonder Woman v.3" has, from the start, been a disastrous revision to Diana's status quo, saddling her with her civilian identity of Diana Prince, as a US government agent, giving her a "human" form (which she is not compelled to use, but chooses to for some reason), stripping away the distinctive innovations made by George Perez in the 1987 reboot. Diana, a Themysciran diplomat, has now more or less decided that what she really needs to do is start chanting "U-S-A!" and be more 'human' (a major thesis propagated by the normally-talented Geoff Johns in "Infinite Crisis" being that Diana is not human already, which he seems to equate with being born and raised in America), and in order to observe humanity, she gets a job as a secret agent (certainly something most people can relate to), doing the same things she would do as Wonder Woman, except without her powers, and endangering other people in the process. Picoult, a big-name writer, doesn't even get to write her own story here, because the thrust is a tie-in to the abominable "Amazons Attack" crossover, which you will have to buy if you want the end of the story, since this trade ends on a cliffhanger.
And now there are the things that are Picoult's fault: while the plot was dictated to her, the characterization is all her own, and Picoult completely fails at capturing Diana's character. She acts like she just arrived from Themyscira (really, not even Perez had her act as naive as she does here), despite having been in Patriach's World for years (in fact, the IC reboot extends her time considerably, rendering this characterization choice even more nonsensical). Then there is her 'relationship' with Nemesis, the her partner at her spy agency; Heinberg introduced the character poorly, but Picoult takes the character and his interaction with Wonder Woman to new lows, depicting them as particularly stupid teenagers with juvenile banter.
The art, by Johnson (who I will forever associate with Greg Rucka's excellent run on the title in Volume 2), Dodson (who had rough going with Heinberg and Picoult, but is now working on Gail Simone's much-improved run), and Diaz is excellent; Diana has seldom looked better than she does here, even when the writing as seldom been as poor.
This is, overall, a terrible depiction of the character, a major part of why 2007 was Diana's worst year since her creation.
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Not Jodi's fault, March 15, 2008
Ms Picoult should not be blamed for the faults of this book. On its own merits it is a story that has humorous characterization done quite well. However, it does not really develope well as a story since the writer prior, Heinberg couldn't finish his five issues within even a years time leaving Ms Picoult to figure out how he was going to finish his work (which DC was allowing him to do and that would be published after the completion of Ms Picoult's work as a Wonder Woman annual)
Her story is further curtailed by having to fit her work to work with the atrocious Amazons Attack miniseries which was written by the writer of Catwoman, Will Pfeiffer. Ms Picoult is left not being able to write Wonder Woman achieving anything within the story as Mr Pfeifer wrote his series more as a Batman feature with the Amazons cast as villains.
It is a shame that the skills of Ms Picoult were so wasted as the glimmerings of her writing only show the poverty of situation in which DC Comics placed her. The cover of the book is sadly misleading in that it is using the desigh used on the cover of many of her books. Unfortunately, though her name is prominent on the cover, DC Comics did not allow her to use her capacities as a storyteller inside.
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