By Sam Christopher
Stand by for a lot of comics headlined by chicks…
We’ll start with The Brave and the Bold #33, where J. Michael Straczynski and artist Cliff Chiang team up Wonder Woman, Zatanna, and the original Batgirl for our reading entertainment. Z calls Diana and asks her if she has time for a night out on the town, adding that they should invite Barbra Gordon to go with them. This is the typical “Girl’s Night Out” scene, with the three super heroines going to a dance club and… well, dancing. Toward the end of the night WW gets all wistful and starts talking about ancient Greece, certain people there, actually, and with Joe you just know there’s a reason for the conversation. And there is. This story seems vapid and rather Marvel Fanfare-ish until the end, which is very good. Straczynski’s run on this title has reminded me how great a writer he can be, something I’d nearly forgotten with his near-awful run on Amazing Spiderman and his not-all-that-great run on Thor. I hope he can keep up this momentum as he moves on to Superman and Wonder Woman.
Then we get to Power Girl #10 and #11. In #10 we see PG and Terra doing battle with Ultra-Humanite’s girlfriend Satanna and winning—or so they think. Kara Zor-L realizes pretty early on that her friend Atlee is acting a little strange, she just has no idea what the cause is until the end of the ish. Also, we have her young blackmailer finally show and give her his list of dema—er, requests—and that list is pretty typical of what you might think he’d ask for. As we move into #11 we find PG and Terra—whose body is possessed by Ultra—battling it out with Manhattan as the prize. Again. What is it with UH and NY? He really hates New York almost as much as I do (although I never really thought of trying to destroy the city by raising Manhattan into… well, you really should read the early issues of this series for all that). Have to say these two issues have nearly saved this series for me. I really was just kind of running out the string, thinking that it would be cancelled shortly. After a good start, the stories just weren’t that great in recent months and I just thought it wouldn’t go on much longer. Now, things seem to be getting better and there’s another creative team for this title on the horizon. So we’ll see.
Next, we visit the She-Devil with a Sword for a couple issues each of her two current titles. We begin with Queen Sonja #5, which ends the story of Sonja’s ascension to the throne. Here we find Sonja as good field general in a time where generals not only marshaled troops and fought beside them in battle but were also generally the best fighters they had—at least if those generals were title characters created by Robert E. Howard. There’s also royal intrigue, mostly on the other side of the battlefield, along with the prerequisite magic that makes this a sword-and-sorcery title. Then we get to QS #6, in which we find that writer Arvid Nelson is apparently not ready for his turn on the book so Joshua Ortega pinch hits, which is fine. This is a good story, thankfully skipping over the two years of quiet they tell us open the reign of Sonja I, Queen of Sogaria and plunging us into the uprising that apparently shaped the third year. More intrigue and hard decisions by someone more accustomed to being a warrior than a monarch. Kull-like, in fact. And we end this section with Red Sonja: Wrath of the Gods #3 and 4. This reworking of the Norse mythos is running along just fine so far, with the series ender in #5 coming next month.
Marvel favors us with the Sif One-Shot, and its story “I am the Lady Sif” written especially for us by Kelly Sue DeConnick and drawn by Ryan Stegman. This is definitely a Marvel Fanfare tale, with the Lady Sif hanging out in Broxton trying to drink her blues away—I guess any woman who’d had her body co-opted by the God of Evil would probably have issues—until her old friend Beta Ray Bill and his new… whatever… shows up and asks for help. Seems Skuttlebutt has been taken over by… well, let’s just say that Sif is enlisted to take down a “race” that’s kind of a cross between the Borg and the Rage (from 28 Days Later). An all right story for what it is. I was hoping for something a little stronger, though.
And, since we’re already in the Marvel Universe, let’s talk for a moment about The Spectacular Spider-Girl #1. Fresh from the pages of Web of Spiderman #7, we have the return of The Punisher to the MC2U. Frank Castle has apparently been hanging out in another country after doing what he thought of as his duty—rather Rambo-like, actually. But he’s read that Don Silvio’s back in action in NY so Castle’s decided to come back, too. And there’s the subplot with “April” and the one with Wes to keep us interested. There’s also an American Dream backup and a reprint of an old-time Spider-Girl tale from the last century—hard to believe this character’s that old now. Only problem with the entire book, really, is that I thought they should have done a riff on Amazing #129 for the cover—and maybe they did as a variant; I don’t see everything. Cool, cool stuff.
Finally, as we visit Princess Diana again, this time in her own title for Wonder Woman # 42 and 43, we first find an alien race that moves from world to world unleashing snakes that murder everyone on the planet and apparently grow large enough for this alien race to feed on the snakes that are left. But they do try and spare a hundred women from the planet to be exterminated from time to time. Oh, and they’re led by Wonder Woman’s aunt. Who was stolen away millennia ago only to have the memory of her erased from the minds of the Amazons. And to save Earth WW has to battle… well, you’ll see. I think this is Gail Simone’s last storyline before Straczynski takes the title over after #600, which I think is next ish. More fine, fine work by Ms. Simone, a true mistress of the comics genre. Her run on Wonder Woman has been nothing but fantastic, and I’m sure more magnificence await in the new Birds of Prey series she’s soon to be heading up.
