Wonder Woman: Agent of Peace #1
Written by Jimmy Palmiotti and Amanda Conner
Art by Inaki Miranda and Hi-Fi
Lettering by Travis Lanham
Published by DC
‘Rama Rating: 3 out of 10
I’m not sure if it’s a degree of cynicism, a clash of priorities, or just a lack of new ideas that resulted in the creation of Wonder Woman: Agent of Peace #1, but DC’s batting average for their updated DC Giants-turned-digital offerings is looking starker by the day.
Writers Jimmy Palmiotti and Amanda Conner go back to an already overtapped well by making the Amazing Amazon a straightwoman second banana to Harley Quinn – while there’s a certain corporate synergy to having two of DC’s most cinematic leading ladies in one book, the creative team throws out the baby with the bathwater with this talky and unfocused read that never quite feels as funny as the writing team thinks it is.
Given Palmiotti and Conner’s history with Harley, you can’t help but feel like they took this assignment for Wonder Woman to essentially ‘Trojan Horse’ in another character that they feel is an easier one to write. Unfortunately, they’re not quite subtle about it, and as a result, Wonder Woman doesn’t get much in the way of exploration as a character beyond perpetually rolling her eyes at whatever antics Harley gets herself into. Even the issue’s best parts – where Diana forces her way into a building on the hunt for a murderous real estate investor, then uses her sword to stop a falling elevator – feel like they were unfinished in the scripting process, particularly a cliffhanger of Wonder Woman falling unconscious that’s never followed up again in the issue.
Indeed, after the opening sequence, Wonder Woman winds up feeling like an afterthought only a few pages into her own book – perhaps understandable, given that she’s hunting down a killer tycoon who’s also angling for Harley’s Coney Island apartment building. Upon Harley’s arrival into the script, Diana spends most of the issue cleaning up after the Clown Princess of Crime, whose sense of humor feels all the more grating thanks to the sheer number of captions Palmiotti and Conner throw at us. There’s a plottiness to the whole story that I think reflects the one-dimensionality of the characters – Harley is impulsive, Wonder Woman stops her, so Palmiotti and Conner just pile on assassin after assassin to give the duo something to do. But because the characters feel so flat and interchangeable, it all feels like a chore.
Artist Inaki Miranda’s page layouts feel similarly unfocused, as she’s trying to juggle not just two main characters, but a mountain of panels and balloons on top of whatever random action Palmiotti and Conner throw into the mix. (And it is random – at one point, two monstrous aliens just show up in a police station with almost no buildup, only to have them hit by a car in a teeny-tiny panel at the end of a page.) Miranda portrays almost everything at a distance, and that makes the characters feel sketchy and remote, to say nothing of inexpressive – even the last page of the issue is just five letterbox panels of thumbnail-sized characters walking away from an airplane.
One hopes that DC didn’t peak early with its these DC Digital First titles, but if Wonder Woman: Agent of Peace #1 is any indication, they seem to be banking that readers will be so starved for content that they’ll pick up anything with a superhero on it. On paper, there’s a certain type of sense of putting DC’s two most popular superheroines in one book, but given that Superman and Batman didn’t need to have team-ups to justify their digital comics this week, it feels like a weird double standard – and given the execution of the final script, a patently unearned twist. If you’re a diehard fan of Palmiotti and Conner’s run on Harley Quinn, you might enjoy this book, but fans of Wonder Woman herself will likely see this series as a massive disservice to the character.