I guess Orion is as puzzled by the kiss in Wonder Woman #19 as I am.  I mean, if she wanted to threaten to rip his man parts off, she didn’t really need to kiss him first and distraction.  She’s a superpowered demigod.  She can just quickly reach out and grab.

Anyway, Superman calls Orion a jerk under his breath like it’s some sort of CW teen drama, and then he and Wonder Woman embrace and he says she doesn’t have to explain herself, and probably some indie band is playing a slow song in the background that builds to a crescendo as the scene ends.  It’s riveting stuff.

So Wonder Woman is again bleeding into the rest of the New 52, and yet again it’s kind of the crappy parts of the book.  I wouldn’t mind if Hermes was showing up everywhere; he’s awesome and fun.  But with the raping Amazons and boring Lennox and now the kiss being mentioned, it’s all the lame bits of the series that are getting out.  Thankfully Wonder Woman itself remains self-contained, and I hope it continues to be.  As much as I have various issues with the book, I appreciate that it is its own thing.  I don’t want to see Superman pop up in Wonder Woman, even though Cliff Chiang does draw a fantastic Superman.

I suppose I’m glad they fought BEFORE the whole kiss bit, because a fight after would have been ridiculously tacky.  So hooray, it definitely could have been worse and it wasn’t.  Hopefully Orion stays out of the Super-books for a while and we don’t have to ever deal with a jealousy-fueled brawl.

Nonetheless, this gives me a fun opportunity to share my favourite Wonder Woman GIF!  There’s lots of great ones out there, especially from the TV show.  Like the classic spin change:

But this one is my very favourite, from an episode of Super Friends I’m assuming.  It cracks me up every time:

So yeah, regardless of pronunciation, Wonder Woman hilarity is always a good time.

DC Comics is set to continue what looks to be a strong summer for female creators with their solicits for August 2013.  The numbers aren’t off the charts or anything, and certainly pale in comparison to the hundreds of men in DC’s solicits each month, but these are some relatively solid numbers and we continue to see some slight growth from where we were almost two years ago when we started checking in on the solicits.  Let’s see what’s up for female creators and characters in August:

• For writers on the New 52, Ann Nocenti pens Katana #7 and Catwoman #23, Gail Simone writers Batgirl #23 and The Movement #4, and Christy Marx is on Birds of Prey #23.
• For New 52 art, Nicola Scott pencils Earth 2 #15, Ricken is doing the cover for Birds of Prey #23, and Emanuela Lupacchino is drawing the cover and interior art for World’s Finest #15.
• Outside of the New 52, Karen Traviss writes Batman: Arkham Unhinged #17 and Cat Staggs does the cover for Smallville Season 11 #16.
• At Vertigo, Yuko Shimizu is on cover duty for The Unwritten #52, as always, while Gail Simone is writing and Becky Cloonan is drawing a story in American Vampire Anthology #1.
• There isn’t much new for female characters in August, though Wonder Woman is appearing for the first time in Smallville Season 11 #16.  Jeff Lemire’s new book, Trillium, launches as well, and there seems to be a lady on the cover.  And while we don’t have many details on the American Vampire Anthology yet, I think it’s fairly safe to assume that some female characters will be involved.  The main book is usually quite good that way.

Altogether, there are 10 different female creators on 11 books in August.  This is down from July’s 13 and 13, but we’re still in double digits.  I think double digits is a reasonable benchmark to expect for female creators every month.  DC’s shown that they can meet it several times recently, so that will be our new expectation.  For the first year or so of this project, we were just glad to see more than the 4 or 5 women of the first few months, but the bar has been raised.  DC CAN hit dual double digits each month, so we’ll expect them to do so.

It’s a quiet month across the board at DC, with Trinity War wrapping up and not many new books launching, so things aren’t too exciting on the female character front.  However, the September solicits should be very fascinating.  Rumour has it that DC is doing an all villains month, with 52 #1 issues featuring villains from all over the DC universe, so it’ll be interesting to see how many women are involved in that, both in terms of characters and creators.  In terms of characters, Bleeding Cool reports that the Cheetah, Lady Vic, Nightmare Nurse, and the new female Ventriloquist are likely stars for titles in September, which isn’t a bad start.  Numerically, anyway.  This Nightmare Nurse just seems like a mess.

Overall, August looks to be decent for women at DC.  A fair number of women are working on various books, plus Wonder Woman’s going to be in another comic book, which is always fun.  Things still aren’t great, but they’ve definitely been a lot worse.

First off, when I went to see Star Trek Into Darkness tonight there was a dude waiting in line in FULL Klingon makeup and it was so freaking cool.  I thought I was all hip with my classic Star Trek t-shirt (as did he, by the way… he totally said “Nice shirt” as I walked by!), but this guy really went for it.  He had some sweet Klingon robes and everything, and it looked like his lady friend was in a classic Star Trek uniform dress.  I was impressed.  Well done, random stranger!

Anyway, I’ve been a huge Star Trek fan since I was 8 years old, as perhaps evidence by the fact that I have a Star Trek t-shirt and I thought I was super cool wearing it to the theater tonight.  I love the franchise (except Enterprise, but no one likes that), have SO many action figures, and spent significant portions of my childhood coming up with stories for my own Star Trek series.  I love the first Abrams Star Trek, and I came into Star Trek Into Darkness as a big fan all around.

As a fan, this movie is amazing.  It’s almost wall to wall fan service, but in the best way possible.  There are constant references and jokes and nods to the original continuity, but not in a way that feels forced or pulls you out of the story.  I mean, there’s a tribble!  AND it’s important to the plot!

The many references don’t weigh the film down because it moves at a breakneck pace.  This thing is epic, and hurtles from event to event, with things getting crazier by the minute.  The plot starts off simple enough, with a Starfleet officer gone rogue, trying to take out the Starfleet brass, but it escalates from there and for pretty much the entire second half of the movie, everyone is perpetually almost going to die.  It’s very much an action film, more explodey and chaotic than past Trek adventures, but it’s exciting and fun and just ridiculously entertaining.

Despite this summer action film quality, the characters are also well-served.  Chris Pine is great again as Captain Kirk, totally capturing the spirit of Kirk without copying Shatner in a weird way that just works gangbusters for me.  From tiptoeing around the Prime Directive to save a primitive planet to flagrantly violating it to save Spock, Kirk is full-on being Kirk from the get-go.  And, of course, he learns and grows along the way.  My favourite part of Kirk, though, is how Pine plays him as ALMOST dropping the f-bomb several times throughout the movie when he’s frustrated.  We get a hint “f…” and then he just goes on to the next word.  It cracked me up.

Zachary Quinto’s Spock is great as well, and a lot of the movie revolves around his relationship with Kirk.  They aren’t adversaries anymore, but a hotheaded human and a logical Vulcan tend to butt heads.  Nonetheless, the movie does a really wonderful job showing the love and respect they have for each other, and Quinto is excellent at putting just a touch of emotion into Spock’s near perpetual stoicism.

Spock’s relationship with Uhura gets a lot of attention too, and Uhura is far and away the third most prominent of the Enterprise crew, which I thought was cool.  Though off the top of my head, I don’t think she passes the Bechdel Test.  Still, she has way more to do in this movie and gets to kick a lot of ass, and Zoe Saldana does really well with the emotional and action aspects of the character.

The rest of the crew all get decent screentime.  Simon Pegg is again hilarious as Scotty, John Cho gets to make Sulu a total bad ass, and Karl Urban’s DeForest Kelley impression just KILLS me.  Everyone else is making their character their own, but Urban is doing a straight up DeForest Kelley impersonation as McCoy.  Anton Yelchin’s Chekhov is a bit underserved apart from a lot of frazzled running, I suppose.  He could have got a little bit more to do.

But really, Star Trek Into Darkness is all about Benedict Cumberbatch.  I’m not going to tell you who he’s playing (there’ll be a spoiler section at the end), but he just slays it.  He’s fierce and brilliant and fascinating to watch.  He has a monologue in the brig that almost makes you feel bad for him and want to root for him, but then he turns ruthless and brutal and evil.  And even then, you’re still sort of cheering for him because he’s Cumberbatch!  It’s like evil Sherlock in space, and how can you not get behind that?  He’s also surprisingly good at the fight scenes, like impressively so.  For an English theater dandy, the dude is fantastically precise and violent in the action scenes.  He even runs kind of awesomely!  Everyone in the movie is great, but Cumberbatch steals the show for sure.

All of the usual things you’d expect to be great are great.  The special effects are amazing, the score is killer, there are lots of cool and different outfits, the locations are vibrant and diverse.  If, like me, you saw the trailer and thought: “How are they going to jam that many places and fights into one movie in any coherent way?”, don’t worry, they very much do.  The pacing of the movie is smooth and engaging.  Action scenes are peppered with jokes, emotional scenes often lead into increasingly bigger action scenes; the movie is never just one tone.  It constantly cycles through emotions and characters while serving all of them properly.

I will say that I was outraged they labeled the Klingon homeworld as “Kronos” instead of “Qo’noS”.  I’m still pretty irked about that.  And, frankly, the movie is so much fun that it glosses over some not insubstantial plot holes and logic gaps.  I mean, in the 23rd century, the Earth should have some sort of defense mechanism for falling/out of control starships that might crash into things, right?  This has to have come up.  The entire insane last hour of the movie takes place right beside Earth and no other starship pops by to check out the explosions and make sure their flagship is okay.

Still, the movie is so exciting and fun that you don’t even care.  The constantly in flux fate of the Enterprise is much more interesting.  All in all, I enjoyed myself immensely.  The characters were great, the action was huge, Cumberbatch was amazing, and I absolutely loved it all.

SPOILER SECTION!!

Seriously, one of these is a DOOZY.

Look away if you haven’t seen the movie!!

Here are a few spoiler comments:

• I totally called it with Khan.  And I LOVE that they did Khan.  Cumberbatch’s take on him was so cool and different than Ricardo Montalban, but just as big and evil.  There was a part in the movie where you just KNOW he’s Khan but he hasn’t said it yet, and he’s just monologuing away and I was dying for him to say he’s Khan but he kept skirting around it.  It was frustratingly great.
• Really, the whole inversion of Wrath of Khan was super cool, particularly killing off Kirk instead of Spock.  Well played.
• Though even I knew that they’d use Khan’s blood to bring him back to life, and I am the WORST at movie prediction.
• Killing off Pike seemed a little telegraphed too.  I’ve seen enough J.J. Abrams stuff to know that father figures aren’t going to have a good time of it.
• Leonard Nimoy!!  I had no idea he was going to be in it again.  When new Spock asked old Spock if he’d ever had a run in with someone named Khan, I just roared.
• I didn’t get emotional until the end with “These are the voyages…”, so I was pretty proud of myself.  With the first Star Trek, I was barely keeping it together by the time Thor died five minutes into it!
• So, where do we all think they’re going for the next one?  Based on the accelerated timeline we seem to be seeing here, I think they’re going to go big and do something Borg related.  Maybe something “early days of the Borg”, where the Enterprise wins but a part of it escapes to become the BORG Borg down the road.

TV executives have been unveiling their new fall lineups this week, and absent from The CW’s schedule was Amazon, a Wonder Woman series in the vein of Smallville and Arrow.  However, The CW’s president Mark Pedowitz confirmed that the series is still in development but is being retooled.  He said that:

It is being redeveloped. We’re waiting for a script to come in. We have not seen it yet.

This new script is not being penned by the writer of the original pilot, Allan Heinberg.  Heinberg, a former writer on the Wonder Woman comic and a veteran of several TV show, has been replaced by Aron Eli Coleite, who wrote Ultimate X-Men a few years back and has worked on shows like Heroes.  That Heroes connection is a little bit ominous, but Pedowitz seems keen on the project still.  He even said:

We are preparing to pilot it off-cycle should the script be what we want it to be.

Which is an encouraging sign.  Usually pilots all shoot in the early spring and then the networks decide which shows to run in the fall, but Pedowitz is ready to shoot Amazon as soon as it meets their liking.  He said that Wonder Woman is the “trickiest DC character to get right”, which historically has proven to be the case I suppose, but the concept seems solid and easy enough to me.  I’d be curious to see the Heinberg script and what exactly they thought he didn’t get right, because Heinberg is pretty good.  But regardless, it’s good to see that the network is still behind the show and working to get it up and running as soon as they can.  Hopefully we’ll hear about some progress soon!

I generally liked Wonder Woman #20.  If you read these reviews with any regularity, you’ll know that the series has been in a bit of a rut for me lately and I’ve been frustrated with various elements of the book.  Some of those elements still remain, and I’ll talk about them in a bit, but some improved with this issue, which was very nice to see.  Plus, they improved by means of a kick ass fight scene, which is extra fun.  But before we discuss:

SPOILER ALERT!!

There was a VERY cool fight scene that I am about to RUIN for you if you haven’t read the book yet.

This is your last chance to leave before SPOILERS!!

Carrying on, the fight scene between Wonder Woman and Artemis was great.  On a purely entertainment level, it was well choreographed and exciting.  The night sky over London is a very cool place for a fight, and Chiang broke the panels down into cool angles and perspectives to make the battle dynamic.  I particularly liked this overhead panel of Artemis throwing Wonder Woman into Trafalgar Square:

All told, it was a well-set, well-designed fight that made for some excellent comic book fun.

The fight also addressed a number of concerns I’ve had with the book lately, and with Wonder Woman in particular.  It’s been a while since Wonder Woman’s won a fight on her own; lately, she’ll get into a battle of some kind, it’ll start to go bad, and some boys will show up and sort it all out for her.  Here, Wonder Woman won on her own, hands down, without anyone else’s help.  She, a demigod, defeated a full god, and in impressive fashion.

Wonder Woman was outmatched in brawn, so she won the fight with brains.  For the vast majority of this New 52 run, Wonder Woman’s not been the brightest.  She’s been duped at almost every turn, shown a lot of poor judgment and naïveté, and just generally she’s not come off as much of a smart, capable superhero after the first few issues of the book.  Here, though, she beats Artemis with physics!  Wonder Woman’s strategy is all about momentum, using Artemis’ strength and speed against her with some clever lassoing.  That first Trafalgar Square was cool, but this one is even better, with Wonder Woman whipping Artemis down into the ground:

Wonder Woman turned a disadvantage into an advantage, and fought like a proper superhero for the first time in a long while.

A key part of this battle was restraint.  Instead of flying off the handle and going full tilt against Artemis, Wonder Woman fought carefully and calmly.  First, she kept her bracelets on.  Artemis taunted her, trying to get Wonder Woman to release her divine power and make it a real fight, but Wonder Woman knew that a) that kind of power in the middle of a city would be dangerous, and b) that this wasn’t a fight that would be won by brawn.  Second, when Artemis blew up the hotel room where Zola, Lennox, and the rest were staying and Wonder Woman didn’t know if her friends were dead or alive, she didn’t lash out.  She kept her cool, continued to fight smart, and didn’t let her emotions get the better of her.  Artemis is all angry, unchecked brawn, and Wonder Woman beat her by being the opposite.

So this was a really good issue for Wonder Woman.  She’s still one of the least interesting characters in her own book, but at least she’s behaving like a superhero now.  This smart, reined in but powerful Wonder Woman much more fits my idea of the character than what we’ve been seeing for the last year or so.  It was nice to see her start and finish something well, without anyone’s help.  I hope this continues in future issues.

However, as great as the fight was, yet again Wonder Woman only appeared in 9 of the book’s 20 pages.  It wouldn’t be so bad if this didn’t happen every month OR the rest was jam packed with cool stuff, but that just hasn’t been the case.  Structurally, I have some big problems with how the series is progressing.  It feels like half a book’s worth of story each month, spread out over 20 pages.  In particular, the five pages set on Olympus that we’re getting every issue now are driving me crazy.  They seem to exist only to rehash what we already know, and in an extremely drawn out manner.  This issue took four pages to get to where we were at the very end of the LAST issue.  Even months into this bizarre, spread too thin routine, I still find myself shocked to be disappointed in the storytelling choices of Brian Azzarello.  Of all the writers in comics, I never expected to have problems with how he structured his work.  But Wonder Woman’s become rather formulaic and slow as of late.

The inconsistency of the art is frustrating as well.  Chiang did the breakdowns for this issue, and you can see the flair he brings to the page layouts in Goran Sudzuka’s finished art.  However, Chiang only drew 5 of the pages himself, and they were the most boring ones.  Sudzuka finished the rest, and while they weren’t bad, they weren’t Chiang.  Chiang’s done only two full issues since the zero issue way back in September, and I really miss him on the book.

Finally, while Wonder Woman awesomely won the fight with Artemis, Ares did return Artemis to Apollo, so we’ll have to watch how that plays out.  If Artemis is down for the count and is a non-factor now, then it’s not a big deal, but if she shows up again, spoiling for another fight because Ares let her go, that’s another fast one that’s been pulled on Wonder Woman.

Nonetheless, this is one of the better issues of Wonder Woman in some time.  The fight was great, Wonder Woman got some of her oomph back, and now the tables are set for a big fight with the First Born next month.  Why can’t these kids just get along?  They’re family!

Demon Knights is set in the past, 1043 AD to be exact, so there was no Diana, but it was cool to see Bernard Chang take on the Amazons again.  I’ve been a fan of Chang since he filled in for Aaron Lopresti on a few issues during Gail Simone’s run on Wonder Woman, and I enjoyed his version of the New 52 Amazons.

Demon Knights #20 is set after the battle, with the team consulting the Amazon’s library for information on their quest to find the Holy Grail.  Lately we’ve been seeing a lot of elements from Azzarello and Chiang’s self-contained Wonder Woman run showing up elsewhere in the New 52, with Orion in Superman and the recent reveal in Teen Titans that Lennox is Wonder Girl’s father.  In Demon Knights, we got references to some of the more unsavory aspects of the New 52 Wonder Woman.

The exiled Amazon, and current Demon Knight, Exoristos explained to her team how the Amazons got news of the world:

This is a reference to the Amazons’ thrice a century raping and murdering of male sailors, which we learned about in Wonder Woman #7 and which I wasn’t at all pleased about.  I even wrote two posts about it pointing out the mythological inaccuracy of the new story.  Exoristos confirmed the brutal nature of the Amazons’ interactions with the sailors, stopping her Amazon sister, Khronika, from telling the rest of the Demon Knights what happens to the men:

I quite enjoyed the Amazons’ guest appearance generally, and Robert Venditti and the whole team are putting out a very cool book.  There’s lots of excitement, the characters are interesting, and the art is strong.  It brings me down that the Amazon’s tri-centennial raping and murdering  is bleeding into other books, though.  I was hoping it would sort of fade away and not get mentioned again.

Still, Demon Knights is a fun book.  Or was; DC just announced yesterday that its last issue ships in August, which is sad to hear.  It’s very different from the rest of the DC titles I follow, and it’s nice to have a change from the same cookie cutter superhero stories.  Plus, Hippolyta fighting vampires!  That’s just good stuff.  You’re not geting that anywhere else.

WONDER WOMAN #23
Written by BRIAN AZZARELLO
Art and cover by CLIFF CHIANG
1:25 B&W Variant cover by CLIFF CHIANG
On sale AUGUST 21 • 32 pg, FC, $2.99 US • RATED T
Wonder Woman had no choice but to abandon London to the bloodthirsty First Born—but now it’s time to take the city back! If Diana is truly War’s greatest student, then now is the time to prove it!

So a year after the First Born debuted in Wonder Woman #12, it looks like we’re finally going to get a climactic battle with Wonder Woman.  Mapping out the future issues ahead of us now, we’ve got the first half of the battle in June, a jaunt to New Genesis in July, and then back home to finish the fight in August.  That could be fun.  Maybe she’ll come back with some sweet New Gods weaponry.

Look for Wonder Woman #23 this August!  The last August issue ended with some huge reveals and a big turn for the series, so I’m curious to see if this issue does the same.

Maybe it’s just me, because I’m tired and perhaps a bit grumpy from being sick all weekend, but it feels like this preview took four pages to get to exactly where we were at the end of last issue without adding any new information other than that Apollo isn’t into barbecue.  Now, the fifth page is fun!  Wonder Woman tackling Artemis through a window is great.  But it’s some slow rehashing until then.

Also, it’s another issue with a serious lack of Cliff Chiang.  He did “breakdowns” for the issue, which is like a step lower than pencils; sort of loose sketches for each page.  He finished five of the pages, but Goran Sudzuka is doing the rest.  It feels like a while since we’ve had a full Chiang issue, and I’m really missing him.  These few pages here and there lately only leave me wanting more.

Wonder Woman #20 is out this Wednesday in comic shops everywhere.  I assume more things will happen than simply rehashing last issue.  This Wonder Woman/Artemis fight looks promising!

It’s a big day for Wonder Woman news!  The Smallville Season 11 comic has been going places the show never did (or could, for legal reasons), first introducing Batman into the Smallville universe and now MTV Geek has announced a new addition: They’re bringing in Wonder Woman in Smallville Season 11 #16.

She won’t be called Wonder Woman yet, because she’s just starting out, and from the cover it seems she’s all Smallvilled up with a costume comprised of a shirt and a jacket.  It sounds like fun.  Here are writer Bryan Q. Miller’s thoughts on Diana:

Geek: How will this new character differ from the version we’re used to seeing in the DCU?

Miller: That’s the trick, isn’t it? What version ARE we used to seeing? Consistency and Diana don’t have a very good relationship with one another. There have been a host of different takes, reboots, re-brands, etc. of late. All have their merits and strengths! For “Smallville,” I’ve tried to mine and exploit the characteristics that, to me, embody the best of any interpretation of Wonder Woman. Strength. Intelligence, Nobility. And, most importantly, Love. But when we first meet Diana, she isn’t being called “Wonder Woman” just yet. She’s got a very specific mission. There’s a very big reason that she left the island, which we’ll eventually cover. Does she have the bracelets? Oh, yes. Like you see on the cover. And pants, of course. Regarding the rest of her “traditional” look – something tells me she might find her way to a lasso and some armor by the time all is said and done!

Miller is a very good writer, particularly with female characters (the end of his run on Batgirl with Stephanie Brown is still lamented by fans now almost two years later), and I’m excited to see what he does with Wonder Woman in this new universe.  I haven’t been keeping up with the series, but I’m definitely going to check it out now!