Wonder Woman #23 // Review
There was a vote. The Justice League Governing Council had a meeting on the matter of the island. In the end, they unanimously sided wit the law that had been firmly established with the U.N. It’s an isolated island, but the people there are isolated of their own free will. Bruce says there have to be limits to what they can do. Clark is largely silent on the matter. Diana? She’s going to have to decide whether or not to accept it in Wonder Woman #23. Writer Tom King opens a whole new story arc for Wonder Woman with artist Daniel Sampere and colorist Tomeu Morey.
Mice have ears. Mouse Man knows. They’re the only words that are spoken on the island. That would be...weird in and of itself. It would raise all kinds of questions on its own. There IS, however, the small matter of the fact that it’s essentially a fascistic police state in which very little of any substantial complexity could truly be communicated. Diana had gotten word from Etta Candy that there’s someone on the island. A friend of hers. She wants to be able find her. That’s all. That alone is going to be very, very difficult for any outsider.
Mice have ears. Mouse Man knows. The challenge for King was to deliver an entire contemporary culture complete with classrooms and police and emotional nuance filled with people who could only ever speaking using those two phrases. It’s a bit like that old film Rhubarb where the title was the only word that was spoken the entire movie. There’s a lot of different inflection and a lot of different context that those two sentences can be thrown into the provides greater depth. In addition to that a compelling drama that separates Diana from the rest of the Justice League. King’s develops another intriguingly weird drama with heavy gravity.
Mouse Man knows. Mice have ears. Sampere takes a fundamentally absurd concept and turns it into something horrifying, sinister and impossibly dark. The dichotomy between absurdity and horror is difficult to finesse, but Sampere frames some remarkably sophisticated moments in spite of the weirdness of a culture that seems to worship the abstract entity of Mouse Man with all of the standard iconography of...a mouse. It’s chillingly sinister in spite of it being totally silly. There aren’ many artists who could manage that. Morey’s colors add considerable dark mood an heavy weight to the visuals on the page as well.
Having rendered a sark political drama for the foundation of Wonder Woman’s conflict with The Sovereign, King develops some grounding for a very sophisticated dark satire with an island of people who worship a marginal villain from the Silver Age. There is a history of silly Silver Age stuff being given a hard edge, but rarely has it been attempted in this sort of fashion with deep drama that attempts something quite unlike anything that had been tried in comic book format on any serious level in recent memory. Pages and pages and pages of this issue pay out with only two sentences and they’re some of the heaviest, most haunting pages on the comic book rack this month. Quite an accomplishment.
