Warkiller II: This Time It’s Personal

WONDER WEDNESDAY

On Wednesdays I look at various chapters in Wonder Woman’s history. Click here for previous installments.

Before I really get into this week’s entry, let me just say that we got some amazingly good Wonder Woman news this week. One of the few DC Comics that I enjoy enough to actually pick up in single issues is Batman ’66. Based on and written in the style of the Adam West TV show, it’s a rare bit of fun that DC is somehow publishing while its main line of comics is relentlessly dark and gritty and ’90s Image-style xxxtreme. Well, one thing I’ve been saying is, “But what I’d really like to see is Wonder Woman ’77!” And darned if that’s not just what DC is giving us—yet another WW series, this one based on the 1970s Lynda Carter TV show! I complain a lot about how I feel DC has misused and continues to misuse the world’s most prominent female superhero, but this news fills me with delight. And that will mean four ongoing Wonder Woman series, at least if you count Superman/Wonder Woman, which I guess we have to. And two of them (WW ’77 and Sensation Comics) I’m even interested in!

Oh, hell yeah!

But anyway, back to the flagship Wonder Woman series. It’s time for part two of the trade collection Wonder Woman vol. 4: War, to clear the decks for volume 5, which I received in the mail this week. Part one is here, and my past writeups of the Brian Azzarello/Cliff Chiang series are here.

I can’t help but pronounce fake Cyrillic phonetically. “Foya the Gloyaee..”

Wonder Woman #22, DC Comics, September 2013.

When we left Wonder Woman and her rag-tag team of gods, demigods and other fellow travelers, they were off to see the wizard…by which I mean Highfather, the grand poobah of the New Gods. Not that it was exactly intentional. They were trying to protect a newborn baby, the last-born son of Zeus, from being abducted by the nameless, long-lost and pissed-off First Born of Zeus, and New God Orion whipped up a Boom Tube to get them out of there…and home to New Genesis, where his father’s been wanting to get his hands on that same kid for a while.

Burn!

Or maybe I should say “father,” because Orion was always the son of Darkseid in pre-New 52 continuity, although he was raised by Highfather. It has yet to be seen whether that’s changed or not after the reboot. It probably is, because Orion’s whole face still changes to an uglier mug with bushy eyebrows when he’s angry. This is a much younger and harsher Highfather than we’ve ever seen before, so all bets are off, really. He’s actually a complete jerk, putting Orion down at every opportunity. Orion’s kind of a jerk too, of course, but now we see where he gets it, and it’s not from his evil, absent maybe-daddy.

Actually that’s not the worst look for her.

Wonder Woman wakes up from a three-day induced medical coma to treat her internal injuries from the battle with the First Born, and she’s pretty cross about it. Highfather makes nice with her and Hera in a gruff sort of way while continuing to put Orion down, but when it’s time for them to leave he decides, of course, that he’ll be keeping the baby. Orion acts all subservient, making Diana berate him for it, but it’s apparently all a ruse and he zips off after them with baby Zeke. But oho, what’s this? Highfather seems to secretly approve of him! He just can’t admit it because, well, the New Gods are dicks.

Aww. Kinda.

Once back on earth, Wondy and company go looking for Lennox, which is cute because him going back after the First Born in the last issue was pretty clearly a suicide mission. And indeed, the FB casually tosses Lennox’s stone skull at their feet. Oh, and now he has an army of hyena men all of a sudden. You know, like you do. So it looks like they’re going to have another one of them there grand battles, and War shows up just in time to fight at Wondy’s side. And true to Azzarello’s penchant for humorless, meaningless puns in this series, he comes in saying, “There’s no time like the prescient.” What is that even supposed to mean?

Chiang really knocked it out of the park with this cover.

Wonder Woman #23, DC Comics, October 2013.

So Wonder Woman and company are fighting the First Born’s army of hyena people while he just lounges in some throne he found. (Actually, now that I look at it, I’m pretty sure it’s the Throne of Scone in Westminster Abbey, where kings of Britain are crowned.) And seriously, where did he even get an army of hyena people? Well, I scoured back through this book for clues, and indeed, way back in issue 18, Poseidon mentions, “As Hell’s part of the bargain, he’s agreed to release your armies.” I guess that must be what we’re seeing here. So they must be hyena people that have been dead for seven thousand years.

And speaking of armies risen from the dead, War has one incredibly badass moment in this issue, when he says he has an army too, and the First Born scoffs, “Bah! What armies would follow you, old man?” War’s reply: “All of them.”

Okay, that’s pretty freaking awesome.

For whatever reason, War says that none of his risen army of warriors from all ages actually died in battle, but grew old. I don’t really get what the significance of that is supposed to be.

The FB and Orion have a pretty short battle, in which Orion gets trounced fairly easily. Then Wonder Woman takes off her bracelets, which in this New 52 reality doesn’t drive her berserk like it did in the pre-Crisis world, but now for some reason it unleashes her Zeus-power. Anyway, it doesn’t work and the FB clobbers her anyway.

This might be way more poignant if we knew what it meant.

Then it’s War’s turn. He holds his own for a while, because he’s War and all, but only for a while, because he’s also chosen to be a frail old man in his current incarnation whereas the First Born incarnates as a giant hunk of beefcake.

That leads to the most important, and most spoilery, moment in the whole book, which I’m going to go ahead and spoil here because it sets up everything that follows. The First Born is about to kill War, gloating about the fact that this will make him the god of war. And Diana realizes she can’t let this happen, so she does the only thing she can do. Save War? Of course not. No, she kills him first, becoming the new god of war herself.

A Wonder Woman’s gotta do what a Wonder Woman’s gotta do.

Mind you, that’s not how it worked the last time she killed Ares, just four years earlier, but that was a different Wonder Woman and a different Ares in a different world. The point is, that’s how it works now. And this time it’s a sad thing, at least in theory, because this particular War was this particular Wonder Woman’s mentor. This time it’s personal!

Finish him!

The wounded First Born is knocked out by Wondy’s human pal Zola, of all people, and when Hades comes to collect War’s soul, Wonder Woman declines to finish off the FB to make it a package deal. I get that she’s all honorable and stuff, and Azzarello doesn’t want his 23 issues of buildup about his new Big Bad to have been for nothing, but still, it seems like a mistake.

I’ve been thinking recently about Wonder Woman villains and how she’s never really amassed much of a steady and memorable rogues gallery. One of the reasons for that is that she’s had a lot of adversaries that didn’t outlast the tenure of the writers who created them. Doctor Cyber was the big bad of Mike Sekowsky’s mod years but wasn’t used much afterward. Nobody gave a crap about the White Magician after William Messner-Loebs left, Veronica Cale disappeared when Greg Rucka left, and nobody really had a chance to reuse Gail Simone’s Alkyone or J. Michael Straczynski’s the Morrigan before DC decided to blow up the whole universe and start over.

There were a lot of these short-lived baddies over the years, and one of the reason I have so little patience for the big buildup of the First Born is that he feels like just another one whom we’ll probably never hear of again once Azzarello leaves, and that’s going to be awfully soon.