Review time! with ‘Absolute Wonder Woman volume 2: As My Mothers Made Me’

“I understand time and it isn’t on my side, but to service mankind I have to suffer his pride”

DC has put out the second volume of Absolute Wonder Woman, which I appreciate because it’s quite good. It is, of course, by Kelly Thompson and Hayden Sherman, with Matías Bergara providing the art for the 2-issue story at the end of the collection, Jordie Bellaire coloring the whole magillah, Becca Carey lettering it, and Chris Conroy editing the hell out of it! The bigwigs will charge you $19.99 for it, sure, but it’s 156 pages, which is a nice chunk of comics.

I wonder if Thompson gets credit for being one of the best writers currently working in comics, and I don’t think she does. I wonder if it’s because she hasn’t done a long run on a title yet — I think her longest work is Jem and the Holograms — but I hope her work on Absolute Wonder Woman gets her to that place, because it’s just really good. After a very good first arc to establish the character, in this volume we get her quest to find another Amazon, which takes her into a labyrinth underneath a government-run facility, said facility being run by Veronica Cale, whom we saw in Absolute Evil being, well, evil. She sends Doctor Poison to Gateway City with a frequency that the monster from volume 1 was broadcasting, and when Diana stops her, Poison tells her about the maze. Diane being Diana, she jumps right in! Anything to find another Amazon!

Like the first volume, Thompson writes Diana as a person who will do absolutely anything else before using violence, and while some writers could not make that work, Thompson does. Diana gets into the labyrinth and finds a minotaur (named Ferdinand, of course) who looks hostile initially but isn’t, so Diana teams up with him. He’s protecting a siren from the ruler of the maze, Clea, who wants the girl for unknown reasons. Diana does find the Amazon, Io, but she also needs to help the creatures that are trapped in the maze. She does this by out-thinking them, not out-fighting them, and she shows compassion for everyone, even Clea, who’s as much a prisoner as everyone else. She had to fight the monster from volume 1, of course, but she tried a lot of other things first, and here she has to defend herself and the siren, but once she is able to formulate a plan, she figures out a way to solve things non-violently. Of course, she doesn’t go up against Veronica Cale in this story, and I doubt if that she’ll be able to be non-violent with that villain, but we’ll see. Thompson keeps coming up with ways to make the book exciting and tense but not ridiculously violent. In the second story, for instance, Wonder Woman fights an electrical being that she doesn’t know how to stop. She figures out what it is, which allows her to figure out a way to counteract it. It’s not exactly non-violent, but it is more interesting than if she had simply punched it. In both stories, Diana has interactions with deities, which is a crucial part of the tale Thompson is telling. These aren’t exactly friendly gods, and Diana has to figure out a way to deal with them, too, and how to extract knowledge or help from them without incurring too large a debt. What’s great about the book is how Thompson is always subverting our expectations — perhaps not with regard to this book, as she’s already established how smart and kind Diana is, but with regard to other superhero books, where the hero is often far too brash around beings that are stronger than he is. Diana is very strong, but by being humble — yet not sycophantic — in the presence of gods, she impresses them even more. One of the few problems I have with the book, in fact, is that everyone is always telling Diana how super she is. Circe does it in the past, and Steve, Barbara, Gia, and Etta do it in the present. We get it. The problem with it is that it’s unnecessary — Diana does awesome things all the time, so we, as readers, can see that she’s awesome. We don’t need the characters doing it, especially when they’re much more interesting when they’re not slobbering all over her. In a brief amount of time, Thompson has done a nice job making them three-dimensional, so the fact that they kind of fall into fangirl/boy mode when she’s around is vexing. It’s fine if they tell her how well her plan came together or something, but to have them just tell her how super she is with no prompting is a bit annoying. I’m making it sound more common than it is, honestly, as it doesn’t happen constantly, but it happens enough that I noticed it, and did not like it. Overall, though, I like that Thompson is coming up with interesting problems for Diana to solve and not just going to the Cheetah well (I know Barbara is a character in the comic, and I really, really hope Kelly resists the temptation to turn her into the Cheetah). Unlike a certain Absolute title starring a ‘roided-up rage monster, Thompson is not just doing a retread with a few tweaks, but trying to forge a new path with Diana. We’ll see if that continues now that Amazons are back on the table, but for now, it’s working very well.

Sherman continues to impress, and I can’t help but wonder if Thompson thought, “You know, with the way Sherman designs pages, a labyrinth story would be perfect for them!” and went from there. Probably not, but if you’re going to set a story in a maze, having Sherman as the artist is a big plus, as they seem to delight in designing layouts that feel maze-like even when the story is not set in one, but they’re still always easily followed. I love the little touches — when the frequency of the monster from volume 1 is disrupting things, Sherman uses jagged panel borders to indicate it, which is fairly clever, and the motif comes back around, in a slightly different form to indicate a different sound, later. One panel is designed like an animal with antlers to imply the presence of a god, while in another sequence — also with a deity — the panels seem to be ringed with waves. In one panel, Sherman uses simple forms and heavy hatching to match a design on a Greek urn, and when Diana is drugged, they use lighter, more fluid lines. I don’t remember if I noted their design for Diana in volume 1, but I dig how she is not a classic beauty — she’s dark, she has a larger nose, and she’s almost Kirby-esque in her proportions, but that just makes her look more majestic. It’s another reason why I don’t love the characters commenting on how groovy she is — not only does Thompson make her groovy through her actions, but Sherman just makes her more impressive than everyone else around her, and there’s no need to bring it up. Bergara is a good fit for the second story, as his style is looser and more frenzied than Sherman’s, and so a tale about a frenetic electrical being is right for him. Plus, he draws a wicked-looking Absolute Zatanna (who presumably will have a bigger role to play in this book going forward) and a terrifying Gaia, so that’s all right. I’m really liking the fact that Sherman is able to do the longer arcs and Thompson is able to do shorter stories with guest artists to allow Sherman to stay on schedule. That doesn’t always happen, but I’m crossing my fingers that it will continue here.

Sigh. While a certain AbsBats book get all the (undeserved) accolades, AbsWoW is over here kicking all kinds of ass. Let’s hope it’s doing well enough for Thompson and Sherman to continue spinning this story, because it’s a very cool book. A rising Absolute tide lifts all boats, let’s hope!

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆