Wonder Girl 1

I can see the point of getting a star artist to do the cover (left), but you ought to make sure that a) they don’t simply more or less repeat the pose of the splash page right inside (right), and b) that they have a vaguely similar idea of what the character’s face and hair look like. Also, I am not convinced that the cover team of Nicola Scott, Doug Hazlewood and Jason Wright bring so much star power anyway.

And not that I want to get overly focussed on superheroines’ bodies, especially in a rare instance where they haven’t felt the need to grotesquely inflate her boobs, but giving her a completely ordinary (well, ideal-ordinary, if you see what I mean) teenage girl body and then having someone say she’s “built like a linebacker” is very strange. Her biceps appear to be about half the size of mine, and no one imagines I was ever a linebacker.

My god there is some terrible drawing in this, several really dreadful faces. It’s very offputting, even painful, though I should add that there is one extremely good face too. The storytelling is poor too, competent enough on quiet moments (though the body language is exaggerated), but really hopeless on action, with several shockingly ineffective, badly composed fight panels, where the action is limp, clumsy or hard to interpret. There’s one sequence where Wonder Girl seems to be falling into something (I really can’t tell what) and the other superheroine is standing nearby, then in the next panel they have gripped hands, and Wonder Girl is the one saying “I’ve got you.”

The story is simply totally pointless. WG travels to London to meet her mother, who is cold and distant. She has a fight with some villain, and coincidentally (as far as we can tell) there is another superheroine, Solstice, there to team up with. They beat up some rock-men, then the villain gets away. I believe this is a one-off, and I am mystified how it got sold to DC. Perhaps they just wanted to put out a Wonder Girl one-shot (has she been hugely popular in the Titans or something?), and the fact that no one had any ideas didn’t deter them. I just can’t see any reason for this comic to exist – it would be throwaway enough as a late fill-in issue #452348 in a continuing series, but as a special it’s absurdly inane.

It also makes little sense – the fact that the only three people, besides the two superheroines, left in the Museum of Natural History after the fight has ended are the parents looks hopelessly implausible, and the final sequence shows her mother glaring at WG and walking away from her, then when WG approaches her she smiles and hugs her warmly – this is creating emotional suspense and tension, albeit of a totally trivial kind, by cheating. I don’t believe anyone has ever behaved like this.

Quite simply, a terrible comic that should not exist.