Review: WONDER WOMAN #11

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WONDER WOMAN #11
Written by Greg Rucka
Art by Liam Sharp and Laura Martin
Published by DC Comics
Release Date: November 23, 2016

Diana and Steve finally have arrived on Paradise Island — but is it everything they remember? Meanwhile, Etta Candy and Sasha Bordeaux are in for a shock as their enemy makes herself known in a fierce way.

I think there’s something to be said for fiction reflecting life at its worst possible moments. There’s no formula for that, I don’t think. Not with deadlines and lead time being what they are in comic books, among other forms of media. It’s mostly dumb luck, if you can call it that, disguised as prescience to have a book start to reflect reality in such an emotional way.

Diana has returned to her home. It’s a home she recognizes, but it’s not right. It’s diseased. It’s dark. It’s turned sour by a sickness that probably infected her perceptions so slowly she never really noticed — until she couldn’t help but notice just how far things had fallen. Laura Martin’s color palette of dried blood and the ominous violet of a polluted sunset even suffocates the lights of celebration and ethereal glow of Diana’s lasso. We’re left with almost-darkness that feels cold and stifling at the same time.

In some sense, it’s a comfort to see Diana looking at her homeland with confusion and delirium and knowing that there’s something or someone behind it all. Something she will ultimately defeat. It’s a comfort that I fear may not extend off the page into the diseased environment a lot of Americans are finding themselves surrounded by in the last few weeks. And hard as it is to admit, like Paradise Island, a wartorn island led by a warrior queen, America didn’t just snap to being this dark and dangerous overnight either. The signs were there. We didn’t want to see them any more than Diana did.

And so with that perspective, I mourn with our characters over the loss of something maybe we never had. Diana is just beginning to realize that she may not really have seen her mother or sisters since leaving that one fateful day with Steve, months ago our time in Nicola Scott’s “Year One” story.

And yet, in this final chapter of “The Lies,” Liam Sharp is quickly accelerating this breakdown, delivering a vision of Diana that is crushed by the weight of this realization. Her oldest wounds are reopened, dripping down her arm. The flash of that first pain hits her like a bombshell on Sharp’s double page spread, and all the while, writer Greg Rucka is slowly unraveling Diana’s understanding of her own security and sense of home. She questions only reluctantly. She stumbles on words. She collapses in realization.

I know exactly how she feels.

And that power that Rucka and Sharp feed into Diana’s rendering doesn’t make me feel better or worse — it simply raises the hairs on the back of my neck in recognition of a collapse under the weight of revelation, resurfaced pain, and worst fears realized. Her fall has been happening over the course of six issues. We just didn’t know it until the wasteland truly revealed itself.

A dark, sinister end to the first story arc of a rejuvenated Wonder Woman title, issue #11 has reached deeply into Diana’s core and ripped out something she didn’t know she was already missing. Rucka, Sharp, and Martin have given us the complete inverse of her golden moment in issue #9, and with that upending, I can feel exactly what Diana feels, measure her loss in precise calculation, and yearn for her return to hope, as we start feeling our way back to ours.

The Verdict: 9.0/10

 

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