WONDER WOMAN ANNUAL #1

“AMAZONS”
Written by: George Pérez
Lettered by: Todd Klein | Colored by: Carl Gafford
Assistant Editor: Ken Young | Editor: Karen Berger

Artists: Brian Bolland & Mark Farmer, Chris Marrinan & Will Blyberg, Arthur Adams,
John Bolton, José Luis Garcia-Lopéz, Curt Swan & Bob McLeod, Ross Andru & George Pérez

The Plot: Princess Diana brings Julia and Vanessa Kapatellis to Paradise Island, where they meet the Amazons and learn of their history. Eventually, a few days later, Diana and her guests return to Man’s World.

Sub-Plots & Continuity Notes: This story is composed of a series of vignettes, each illustrated by a different art team as outlined above. First up, with the help of Arthur Adams, the Amazons demonstrate their sacred diving ceremony to the Kapatellises, and we learn of how Diana, as a young girl, got over her fear of diving.

Next, John Bolton draws Hippolyte’s tale of her younger days, explaining how the Amazons’ prior leader, Antiope, met and adopted a girl named Pythia, who eventually left with her to seek revenge on the men who had enslaved the Amazons under Heracles. (This feels like setup for an upcoming storyline, but as we only have two more issues of WONDER WOMAN to look at, I doubt we’ll see a payoff before we’re done.)

José Luis Garcia Lopéz draws Phillipus’s story of the Amazons’ first captain of the guards, Egeria, and her heroic sacrifice to seal the doorway to the realm beneath Paradise Island.

Courtesy of Curt Swan and Bob McLeod, we get Julia Kaptellis’s story of how she met her husband, archaeology student David Kapatellis. They married and had their child, Vanessa — named after the Loch Ness Monster! — before David died on a dig in Egypt.

We also learn that Julia fell off her parents’ boat as a toddler, and was brought to Paradise Island by the Amazons before she was returned to her family. This is one of those developments I’d normally deride as a ridiculous coincidence on the part of the writer, but Pérez frames it here as something preordained by the gods — and since Greek myths are filled with deities performing just such machinations, it seems like a perfect fit in this case.

Lastly, Ross Andru and George Pérez present Diana describing to her Amazon sisters a recent event in which Steve Trevor and Etta Candy teamed up with Wonder Woman to bring some Russian-aligned American jet saboteurs to justice. During the story, we learn that since leaving the military, Steve has become a safety inspector and engineering advisor to the U.S. aerospace industry.

“PRIVATE LIVES: TESTAMENT”
Story & Art by: George Pérez
Lettering by: Todd Klein | Coloring by: Carl Gafford
Assistant Editing by: Ken Young | Editing by: Karen Berger

The Plot: Diana attends the screening of Myndi Mayer’s video will.

Sub-Plots & Continuity Notes: We learn far more about Myndi in death than we ever knew of her in life, thanks to her messages to those in her will. Her mother died young, her father always liked her sister more than he liked Myndi, he practically disowned Myndi’s brother for being gay, and in her heart, Myndi was far more of a caring and generous person than she let on.

Among her final wishes is for Diana to take Myndi’s ashes and disperse them in the water around Paradise Island, a request Diana is glad to carry out.

My Thoughts: While not bad, this is pretty much exactly the sort of thing Marvel annuals trained me to expect in the late eighties and early nineties—an oversized issue filled mostly with material inconsequential to the main series’ ongoing narrative. And that’s not necessarily a bad function for an annual to fulfill. It is, after all, a “bonus” issue of an ongoing series. While it’s always nice to see every issue, regular and otherwise, tied into the main storylines, if there’s going to be a place to dump inconsequential (yet not necessarily uninteresting) filler, better it’s outside the scope of the ongoing series.

So we get some history of the Amazons, fortunately not as dry as the material in the earliest issues of Pérez’s run, thanks to the fact that these are all stories told by characters rather than a textbook-style omniscient narrator. None of the vignettes in the main story excite me all that much, but they do fill in some background for Diana and her sisters, so they’re fine.

The backup story, on the other hand, is far more enjoyable and even feels more integrated into the ongoing storyline thanks to its content. Myndi, as I noted in my look at issue 20, had a bit of (what felt like) an abrupt send-off. Pérez hadn’t really done all that much with her since he introduced her only thirteen months earlier. She was probably the most one-dimensional of all the supporting cast, and she didn’t factor into as many stories as the others, either. So, while it’s not exactly surprising that Pérez might kill off the least developed character, it’s a little bittersweet to learn so much more about her after she’s gone. Posthumously, Myndi has become a compelling character and I’m sorry to see her gone.

Next Week: John Byrne's time with Superman (and ours as well) comes to an end in SUPERMAN #22.