Wonder Woman #21 // Review
Hephaestus is busy when Diana comes around to ask him a few questions. He doesn’t have time to answer them...or so he says. Of course...he can work AND answer questions, but he IS a god and isn’t exactly in the mood to speak to anyone else about anything other than his work in Wonder Woman #21. Writer Tom King concludes an Olympian murder mystery with artist Guillem March. The Wonder Woman/Batman detective crossover is light on Batman and heavy on the distinct wit and cleverness of Diana as brought to page and panel by a somewhat clever King.
The god that Diana is looking to question forged her lasso. So he’s kind of a powerful guy with great power and not exactly one to be terribly cooperative to anyone at all. She’s there to talk to the god because he was the one who forged the dagger that killed the war god Ares. So he might know something about who might have plunged the thing into the war god’s back. Diana then plunges that dagger’s blade into the hand of a particularly unhelpful Hephaestus. Later-on Aphrodite will ask why the god had let her live. She will tell Aphrodite that she didn’t need his permission to do so.
Truthfully there isn’t a whole lot at the center of the plot that is really all that interesting. It’s a standard sort of a murder mystery story that only happens to involve gods. The distinctive personalities of Diana, Bruce and a host of gods keep the story interesting from beginning to end. King’s great strength in this particular story lies in his ability to find the distinctive charm in each of the characters in the ensemble that he’s working with. Gods and heroes all seem so very, very interesting in King’s hands.
Once again, March constructs the mystery with the hand of an architect. Every page is exactly nine panels long. Once again: there’s no reason at ALL that this layout should hit the page in a way that was anything other than boring. The reason why March makes it work has everything to do with the deft way he brings passion, motion and emotion to the page. It’s all so very, very sharp on so very, very many levels. There’s a beautiful range of subtlety in March’s characterization throughout the mystery that serves the drama quite well.
King and March have a beautiful way of framing some very interesting moments. Diana has a chance to drink ambrosia with Aphrodite. There’s another point at which she has a rather clever use of her tiara in an encounter with Dionysus. The thoughts running through Bruce Wayne’s head while still suffering from one of Zeus’ lightning bolts is particularly clever work that finds some novel charm in a character who has pretty much been analyzed to death from every angle. And then there’s that second scene with Hephaestus. She’s teaming-up with Batman in a really interesting way. It’s all such charming and clever work on so many different levels.
