Wonder Woman #25 // Review
Mice have ears. Mouseman knows. But there’s a woman who is dying and there’s now way to get her help without some basic form of communication. Diana isn’t going to be able to help the dying woman or her daughter if she doesn’t get some help herself in Wonder Woman #25. Writer Tom King and artist David Sampere continue their journey into a dark fascism with colorist Tomeu Morey. The combination of different narrative elements on the page continues to develop in a compelling direction as the the current storyline continues. An appealing blending of different elements illuminates the darkness.
As luck would have it, there Are a few people willing to help-out. They’re carrying AR-15 assault rifles and wearing military fatigues featuring cat-based iconography. Diana has discovered the resistance. (Or perhaps it’s discovered her.) It might be enough to save the woman in question, but it just might also endanger those living in the dictatorship. The cat resistance is looking for its champion. Diana may have made a mistake in coming to a nation ruled-over by Mouseman, but she’s going to have to do something beyond the sorrow of knowing that she’s endangered so many.
King has been working rather a lot on a narrative that shifted from future narratives the present narratives. This has been a storytelling technique that he’s been using since he began writing the current series just over a couple of years ago. The storytelling format hits particularly hard in the latest issue as nightmare scenes of the future feature some awful things happening to some very familiar faces. It’s kind of a heavy counterpoint to what’s going on in the present. It might feel like kind of a cheap storytelling style this far-in to the series, but King has enough elements folded-into the narrative to keep it all feeling fresh even when he IS repeating some narrative elements over and over again.
Sampere’s clean-line approach to the visuals continues to find its own sense of charm. Morey’s colors land quite a bit of depth to the page. They're actually a really good team together in delivering a whole bunch of different moods to the page. And it feels really refreshing to see tiny visual elements which bring the complexity of a narrative to the page. It’s a rather breathtaking rendering of the full reality of a tiny island animation that is ruled over by a dictator with a mouse fixation.
King’s larger Wonder Woman saga begins to become clear as he introduces her new arch-villain: The Matriarch. It's an interesting progression. The first couple of years of this series were about Wonder Woman gaining control in a conflict with the villain known as The Matriarch seems to be a story of Wonder Woman losing control, which is an interesting contrast. There’s a tremendous amount of patience in King’s narrative when one also considers the long-run narrative that’s playing out with Wonder Woman’s daughter...both in this title and her own. It’s really just the two titles, but it feels like a big, sweeping narrative that touches on nearly every aspect of the DC Universe.
