WONDER WOMAN #3 & #4

“DEADLY ARRIVAL!” | “A LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO FIGHT!”
Pencils/Plotter: George Pérez | Scripter: Len Wein | Inker: Bruce D. Patterson
Letterer: John Costanza | Colorist: Tatjana Wood | Editor: Karen Berger

The Plot: (Issue 3) Hermes and Diana arrive in Boston, where they drop Steve Trevor at Hanscom Air Force Base Hospital, then head for Harvard. There, Hermes leaves Diana on her own. At the hospital, the base’s commanding officer, General Hillary, is prohibited from seeing Steve until the matter of General Kohler’s death is sorted out. At Harvard, Diana meets Professor Julia Kapatelis, who, upon touching Harmonia’s amulet, forms a rapport with Diana.

Later, Steve escapes an assassination attempt by General Tolliver, the man holding him prisoner, and flees the hospital. Meanwhile, a strange statuette is delivered to Julia’s home and is opened by her daughter, Vanessa. That night, Steve makes contact with Etta Candy while Julia brings Diana home with her. Around midnight, the statuette comes to life, transforming into a creature called Decay, the daughter of the Medusa, and robbing Vanessa of her youth.

(Issue 4) The Kapatelis house collapses as Decay attacks, then escapes. Diana gives chase. Meanwhile, Etta finds files on something called the Ares Project at the Air Force Base. Elsewhere, Diana uses her magical lasso to defeat Decay, making the TV news in the process. She is quickly named Wonder Woman by reported Carole Bennett of the Boston Globe-Leader newspaper. When Steve, hiding out in an isolated cabin, sees Diana on television, he leaves with Etta to go find her.

As Vanessa recovers from Decay’s magic, Diana speaks with Julia, who vows to aid her in her mission against Ares. Later, as Julia and Diana attempt to learn about Harmonia’s charm inside Julia’s winter home, Steve shows up — but before he and Diana can speak, they respond to a nearby shout to find Steve’s best friend, Colonel Michaelis, standing over Etta’s body.

Sub-Plots & Continuity Notes: Ares’ sons, Phobos and Deimos, make plans against Diana. Phobos sends Decay to kill her, while Deimos works to corrupt mankind, in particular bringing General Tolliver into his cult (thus leading to the general’s attempt on Steve’s life).

On Mount Olympus, the gods have a conversation about Diana and Ares, then depart to take “the ark” to “oblivion.”

My Thoughts: Okay, this is more like it. I had hoped that Len Wein’s arrival (or, perhaps more accurately, Greg Potter’s departure) would give this series a boost on the entertain-o-meter, and that’s exactly what’s happened. I doubt Wein has any special influence on the plot here, serving, per the credits, as scripter, but whatever the cause of this change, I approve. Suddenly the story feels faster paced, the supporting cast is getting fleshed out, and we have an abundance of that classic comic staple, sub-plots!

(Plus, Wein is just a much better scripter than Potter, so that helps a lot too. All his characters seem to have their own voices.)

It occurs to me that for a very long time, and I’ll again credit this to SUPER FRIENDS and Lynda Carter — not to mention even Bruce Timm’s JUSTICE LEAGUE — I never considered that Wonder Woman would probably have an accent. She grew up on a hidden island speaking ancient Greek, after all. Here, when she arrives in man’s world, she’s still speaking Greek and Julia is forced to dust off her long dormant grasp of the language to communicate with Diana.

By the end of issue 4, our heroine has begun to speak in broken English, but in any case, she would probably retain some semblance of an accent going forward, having grown to adulthood speaking another language. This is something the WONDER WOMAN movie got right — casting a non-native English-speaking actress in the role certainly helped with that, but it should be the case regardless — and it’s something I don’t believe any other incarnation of the character has ever tackled.

(It kind of reminds me of John Byrne describing Doctor Doom as sounding like Arnold Schwarzenegger in one of his FANTASTIC FOUR issues, which — of course he would! Not to mention the generic Eastern European accent employed by Elizabeth Olson as the Scarlet Witch in the AVENGERS films. And when you think about it, shouldn’t Ian McKellan and Michael Fassbender have been portraying Magneto with a German accent for all these years? Hopefully the inevitable Marvel Studios reboot of the X-Men franchise will correct that, too!)

Anyway, I’ve gotten off track. Following from a lackluster first two issues, WONDER WOMAN #3 and 4 have really righted the ship and made this series a real page-turner. After being indifferent last week, now I’m excited to see what happens next.

Next Week: More Wonder Woman, as we continue with this series to get it to sync up with start of the upcoming LEGENDS mini-series (which had already finished publication at this point but had yet to occur in-continuity for Wonder Woman), and therefore with our ongoing Superman reviews, too.