WONDER WOMAN #10 & #11

“PARADISE LOST!” | “FIRE AND TORMENT”
Plot & Pencils: George Pérez | Script: Len Wein | Inks: Bruce D. Patterson
Letterer: John Costanza | Colorist: Carl Gafford | Editor: Karen Berger

The Plot: (Issue 10) Following Princess Diana’s defeat of Ares, Zeus has decided to reward the Amazons by making love to them, beginning with Diana. He summons her but she rebuffs him, and Hera pulls Zeus back to Olympus. Soon, Diana is summoned to appear before the gods, where she’s told by Zeus that she must complete a series of tasks beneath Paradise Island. Upon finishing the tasks, she will find Zeus’s “greatest treasure” and return it to him, earning the Amazons’ freedom—but if she fails, Zeus declares the Amazons will be lost.

Soon, Diana enters the vault beneath Paradise Island, which the Amazons have guarded for centuries. Immediately, she battles a demon called Cottus and kills it. But no sooner is Cottus defeated, than Diana finds herself confronted by a hydra.

(Issue 11) As Zeus and the gods watch, Diana battles and defeats the hydra, losing all her weapons, save her lasso, in the process. While Diana lays passed out from the ordeal, on Paradise Island a vulture appears to Hippolyte, sending her racing toward the vault. Meanwhile, Diana wakes up and continues her mission, coming face-to-face with a creature called Echidna, which uses her fear against her.

The Amazon warrior Philippus fights Hippolyte to keep her from interfering in Diana’s mission, but Hippolyte defeats her and proceeds into the vault. Below, Diana beats Echidna as well, and plummets into an illusory ocean which quickly drains. As she finds herself looking at a vintage American fighter jet, Diana is greeted by the a woman dressed in her armor who claims to be her namesake.

Sub-Plots & Continuity Notes: Looking over the items Diana has brought with her from Man’s World, the Amazons muse over the American flag and wonder if their fate is somehow tied to it.

As she descends into the vault, Diana comes across a shell casing from an Earth gun and wonders how it wound up beneath Paradise Island.

Steve Trevor and Etta Candy arrive in Oklahoma to learn that Steve’s father passed away while they were on the plane.

Echidna shows Diana several of her Amazon sisters who died defending the vault in years past, and also offers her an illusion of Julia Kapatelis, begging the question of whether anything Diana sees while fighting the creature is real.

On Olympus, the mischievous Pan plants the idea to “reward” the Amazons in Zeus’s head, then later realizes that Hippolyte may be on to some secret scheme he’s plotted, and makes plans to deal with her.

My Thoughts: I must confess: I find a lot of the Greek god stuff in WONDER WOMAN kind of boring. I like the mythological gods themselves; I read several of their stories in college and generally enjoyed them quite a bit. And Diana battling Ares and his sons was entertaining as well… but whenever we go back to Olympus to check in with Zeus, Hera, and the rest, my eyes sort of glaze over. I guess maybe it has something to do with George Pérez’s handling of the characters in this particular universe that gets me, since — as I just said — I like the “real” stories about them.

(I seem to recall finding the NEW TEEN TITANS story where the Titans battled the Titans of Myth to be kind of boring too, so it certainly seems to be that DC’s/George Pérez’s version of this pantheon just doesn’t appeal to me.)

That said, even if the story bores me, I like the idea of Diana performing a series of labors set forth by the gods, a la Hercules. And with the Amazons’ interest in the American flag and the appearance of the old warplane in the final pages, it appears Pérez may be setting up some revelations about the more recent history of Paradise Island in upcoming issues, so I’ll look forward to that, at least.

Oh, and there was a bit in issue 11 that I found pretty entertaining: when Diana first meets Echidna, the scene cuts away to follow other goings-on. Then, when we jump back to that fight, Echidna is missing all its teeth, which Diana apparently knocked out while we readers weren’t looking!

Next Week: Back to the Man of Steel, as Superman meets Booster Gold in ACTION COMICS 594 and BOOSTER GOLD 23.