#when shamazons attack

[fuck-customers]

It's been a long time since I've submitted here. But I needed to share this bless my coworkers. So I have PTSD from being SA'd when I was 14, and unfortunately, one of my triggers is a popular rapper. I've tried to work through it, but ya know, therapy is expensive. I've worked through panic attacks when his music played at previous jobs, but obviously, employers don't like their workers having panic attacks. I've rarely had people give enough of a shit to skip the songs. But I've been working in a pharmaceutical manufacturing job (if you consider medical marijuana to be pharmaceutical products) for a year and a half now, and today a song came on that said rapper is featured in, but I didn't recognize it. Three different coworkers yelled from across the room to skip the song on the Shamazon Alexis. And I realized that I'm finally working with people who give a shit and care about me and respect me enough to just skip a song. I hate that it's a situation that happens, like I want them to be able to listen to this one rapper if they want to and I don't want his voice to trigger flashbacks and panic attacks, but I'm grateful that I have these coworkers that are willing to look out for me in spite of it. I love these fucking people.

Posted by admin Rodney.

[themyskira]

Amazons Attack! - part 10

PREVIOUSLY! Supergirl and Wonder Girl smashed up an internment camp for women associated with Amazons (where ‘associated’ can mean anything from ‘known acquaintance of Wonder Woman’ to ‘looks a bit feminist’), succeeding only in getting Cassie’s mother injured and the rest of the Teen Titans arrested for the crime of collaboration with subversives (where ‘collaboration’ means ‘trying to stop’).

For their next trick, the Girls Super and Wonder successfully helped to crash Air Force One, get a bunch of people killed and almost murder the damn President of the United States, before Superman came and gave them a stern talking-to.

This time: the Teen Titans teach us that the right way to resist oppression is to look quietly disapproving until the system gets embarrassed and sorts itself out, and Supergirl is an actual monster.

Part 10: Teen Titans #49 — Adam Beechen (writer) and Al Barrionuevo (artist), and Supergirl #20 — Tony Bedard (writer) and Renato Guedes (artist)

The Teen Titans’ “arrest” is immediately revealed to be a fakeout — the colonel in command of the camp swiftly marches over, orders her men to stand down  and asks the team to help relocate the detainees from the half-destroyed camp.

(Colonel Wallace, who is cast as a good soldier in a bad situation, is a white woman. Major Hanratty — the aggressive, over-zealous, sexist soldier who tried to arrest the Titans — is a black man. The implications of this become increasingly Unfortunate as the issue unfolds.)

Ravager is outraged, comparing the situation to the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII, but Robin insists that “going against the government won’t help this situation. We just have to make sure things don’t get any worse”.  So that’s what they do, because according to Beechen the only two options in this situation are to violently attack the soldiers like Cassie did or to reluctantly aid the government’s wrongful detention of innocent women and trust the system to work itself out.

Am I reading too much into this to think that this sends kind of a dodgy message to the reader? I mean, bearing in mind that this crossover is a (clumsy) analogy for the War on Terror and was written in the context of ongoing US atrocities — the fact that Beechen appears to dismiss all forms of protest and resistance as irresponsible and detrimental… really sucks?

The women are loaded onto a train and the Titans fly alongside as escorts, until they’re waylaid by a squadron of Amazons led by oh fuck me please don’t drag Artemis into this craphole

“CHILDREN, HOLD! ARTEMIS COMMANDS YOU!”

Artemis explains that she is looking for Cassie, who undertook a mission for Hippolyta to down Air Force One and take the President captive, only to abandon her mission and flee.

Let me list all the things that are wrong with this.

Cassie and Kara were not sent to bring down Air Force One (they managed that through their own incompetence)

Artemis couldn’t possibly know that Cassie and Kara “abandoned” their mission, because none of the Amazons sent to attack Air Force One returned

All Artemis knows is that the Amazons’ mounts returned riderless and bloody, implying that the mission went horribly wrong

Artemis cannot physically be here right now because there’s a big fuck-off forcefield trapping her in DC

The Titans politely explain that they have not seen Cassie or Kara, and Artemis is like, ‘I trust you guys, but unfortunately that doesn’t help me, so I’mma take you all hostage to lure your friends to me, k?’

The Amazons attack, the Titans land heavily on top of the train, which barely avoids derailing. We get of shot of Helena Sandsmark inside the train exclaiming, “Cassie—?”, which cracks me the hell up. ‘Violence? Property damage? Endangerment of bystanders? It must be my daughter!’

Outside, everybody yells at Artemis to mind the innocent civilians. And Artemis, who thus far has been one of the few voices of reason among the Amazons, and a consistent opponent of attacking bystanders, is suddenly flippant about the idea of mass civilian casualties. “Such is war … they are our enemies”.

Then she glimpses the train’s passengers and gasps theatrically.

“—Eh? Women? Under armed guard? WHAT MANNER OF TRAIN IS THIS?!”

So, what, you’re allowed to commit despicable crimes against innocents but nobody else is? Because you were perfectly at peace with murdering everybody on the train a second ago.

Pegging Colonel Wallace as the leader, Artemis yells at her that she’s a traitor to all women.

“Much in this war puzzles me, but these things I know: Women should not shackle their own kind and this will not stand! AMAZONS… ATTACK!”

Yes, let’s attack the fast-moving train full of innocent hostages, that’s sure to go well for all involved.

One rando Amazon is taking Cassie and Kara’s potential betrayal super hard.

“I can’t believe Supergirl would abandon our cause for these… these cowards, hiding behind their guns! She’s our friend! Friends don’t take different sides in a war!”

So, I take it you’re new to comics crossovers, then.

Rando Amazon continues to obsess over Supergirl until Kid Devil pushes her into a lake a few pages later.

It goes on like this for a few pages. More fighting, more poorly-written trading of insults. Ravager declares, “I don’t know who’s worse… the Army for bringing back internment, one of America’s worst memories… or you Amazons, for making ‘em feel like it was necessary!”, which… eeeeeeeeeeeeeeno.

Leaving aside the tortured dialogue, of all the crimes that can be laid at the Amazons feet in this story, internment is not one of them. They didn’t “make” the US government feel that wrongfully detaining innocent people was necessary, any more than the Japanese military “made” the real US government wrongfully segregate, arrest and incarcerate over a hundred thousand innocent Japanese Americans. The Amazons committed an act of war, and pre-existing American bigotry and hatred and ignorance led the government to punish their own citizens despite a lack of evidence of any national security threat.

By implication, here, Adam Beechen is absolving the US government of responsibility for the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans.

Meanwhile, Colonel Wallace isn’t jumping to indiscriminate slaughter fast enough for Major Hanratty, who threatens mutiny.

“Listen, I know that witch with the sword got to you. But you are a soldier first. And if you can’t do what needs to be done, I will.”

The fight causes the train to jump the tracks. M’gann is able to stop it and prevent a crash, just as Superman arrives with Wonder Girl and Supergirl.

Artemis calls on Cassie and Kara to stand with the Amazons; they, of course, refuse.

Artemis: And you, Cassandra? Have you forgotten where your loyalties lie? Cassie: The gods gave me my powers, Artemis, but I’m not a god. And I’m not an Amazon. I’m a woman. And I’m a daughter. My loyalties lie with my family… and with doing what’s right. Tim: What about us, Cassie, are we still— Cassie: Not now, Robin, just… not now.

Way to step on somebody else’s moment, Timbo. And yeah, middle of a live battlefield, maybe not the best time to work out where your friendship stands.

As for Cassie, she is a god (well, demigod, by way of an admittedly crappy retcon), she is an Amazon (not by birth, sure, but she’s earned the right to call herself one), and when she says ‘I’m not an Amazon, I’m a woman’, I can’t help but hear, ‘I’m not a feminist, I’m a humanist’.

Superman pressures Colonel Wallace to let the women go, because it’s the right thing to do. This, again, goes exactly as you’d expect: Colonel Wallace agrees that the orders she’s following are unjust and decides to release everyone; Major Hanratty responds by declaring that he’s assuming command and absolutely nobody will be released.

A few of women decide to make a break for it while they have the chance, leading to this piece of white feminist nonsense:

Woman: Now’s our chance, while they’re sorting all this out… Helena: What—? No, don’t! Let them talk it over, this will all resolve itself peacefully...! Woman: We’re getting out of here. We’ll never have a better chance…

White woman telling a black woman not to make any waves and trust the authorities to sort things out. Cool feminism you got there.

The soldiers see a group of women fleeing. Hanratty mistakes Helena for the ringleader and orders everyone to shoot her. Of course, the Titans save her, and Superman destroys all the soldiers’ equipment. The Amazons hug and make up with Cassie and Kara, then return to DC (you know, the city they’re supposed to be trapped in with no means of getting out) to continuing raining death on America.

Cassie apologies to the Titans, smooches Robin, and good lord this art is appalling.

So that’s it for the Teen Titans in this crossover. Supergirl #20 picks up where this issue leaves off, and it’s so unbelievably dull that I’m not even going to give it a separate post.

The issue opens with a flashback to the attack on Air Force One. With the plane rapidly losing altitude, a terrified flight attendant called Ranay phones her husband — Greg, a DC accountant — to say what might be her final goodbye. She’s talking to him when the plane crashes and the phone is flung out of her hand, leaving Greg believing that his wife is dead and Supergirl is to blame.

That’s page one. If y’all think you know where the rest of this issue is going, you’re probably right.

Still in the flashback, we see Kara and Cassie rushing to help the injured crew and passengers as if they’re not the villains in this story.

Kara: Is everyone okay? I tried to soften the impact… Man: You shot us down in the first place! Kara [VO]: Actually, it was the Amazons, but why argue? It sure felt like my fault.

THAT’S BECAUSE IT IS YOUR FAULT, YOU INSUFFERABLE TWIT. You agreed to kidnap the president. You threatened to bring the plane down. You punched through the GODDAMN FUSELAGE. And all of that happened before the Amazons even arrived on the scene.

In the present, Superman has left Supergirl and Wonder Girl with the Teen Titans. Kara tells Cassie says that she’s going to be in huge trouble when all of this has wrapped up:

“Trust me, this war with the Amazons is nothing compared to the verbal beat-down I’ll get once things die down.”

Oh, I’m sure. Thousands of Americans are dead and the entire state of Kansas is a smoking ruin, but that’s nothing compared to the stern words that Kara’s going to cop.

To ease her hurt feelings, Kara decides to help the rescue efforts in DC (which, again, is supposed to be SEALED OFF FROM THE WORLD).

Meanwhile, Greg’s office is being evacuated, with four heavily armed military personnel guarding the civilians’ escape. It takes two Amazons in a primitive horse-drawn chariot all of five seconds to cut them down, which even for this crossover is ridiculous. Fortunately, grieving-husband-with-a-vendetta Greg is also an ex-Marine! He scoops up a rocket launcher and incinerates the charioteers, then grabs a gun and begins firing.

More Amazons descend on the civilians, which is when Supergirl joins the fight. She defeats them, but only after they’ve shot her in the side with an enchanted arrow.

Greg pulls the arrow out of her with more violence than is strictly necessary and, after an oblivious Kara explains that she’s vulnerable to magic, surreptitiously pockets the arrow in case he needs to indulge in some light revenge murder later on.

Kara’s just happy to have people fawning over her again.

Civilian 1: Can you stand? Civilian 2: If you hadn’t shown up when you did… Kara [VO] The relief in their faces, the gratitude in their voices — this is why I needed to come here. Just to know I’m doing some good, to know that I’m wanted…

That’s why she needed to come here. Not to use her abilities to help people in imminent danger — to get a quick ego boost.

Greg confronts Kara about the Air Force One attack and demands to know if Kara killed his wife. And that’s when the giant Cyclops attacks.

Battling the monster, Kara engages in some more historical revisionism.

“Just this morning, I’d hoped the Amazons could accept me as one of their own. Then they unleashed these monstrosities on innocent people. I guess you never really know somebody until you meet their pets.”

Bull. Fucking. Shit. The Cyclopes were in the very first wave of attacks. Right before the Amazons got to mass-slaughtering civilians and setting literally all of Kansas on fire — all of which you knew about when you agreed to kidnap the president.

Greg grabs his gun and begins firing at the Cyclops while the others run for cover.

“And then there’s this guy, who has every reason to hate me. No way am I letting him die without getting a chance to tell him I’m sorry.”

So what I’m hearing is, you’re not protecting him because you care about humanity and believe passionately in using your extraordinary gifts to help others, you’re protecting him so you can feel better about yourself.

Kara saves Greg and catches the brunt of the Cyclops’ attack. She’s flung through the air, crashing through the wall of a childcare centre.

Kara [VO]: Oh, boy. They must’ve hidden here since the invasion started. Kara: Hey, is everybody okay? I didn’t mean to crash in like that, but I promise I’ll keep you safe. [pause] Hello? [pause] Doesn’t anybody have anything to say? Everyone: AHHHHHHHHH!!!!

The self-absorbed jerk is so busy fishing for some validation that she completely forgets about the huge fuck-off Cyclops advancing on the building.

Resolving that she won’t let innocents get hurt again, Kara tries to draw the Cyclops away, but the fight’s not going well. Greg mutters that it would “serve her right” if she got smashed to bits, then sighs and decides to help. He hands her the enchanted arrow and tells her to go for the eye, which works.

Kara thanks Greg, and he admits he was holding onto the arrow to kill her.

Greg: I… I was on the phone with her… You should’ve heard the fear in her voice… and Ranay, she’s not scared of anything… and then the plane crashes… and the line goes dead… Kara: I’m sooo sorry.

I know it’s intended to be for emphasis, but that elongated ‘so’ just reads as sarcastic.

They talk it out — blah blah wanted to fix things, blah blah the world is more complicated, blah blah that reminds me of my tour of duty in Somalia — and then Greg gets a phone call from his wife and she’s fine. All the while, Superman watches Kara paternalistically from above.

Next time: Catwoman infiltrates Lady ISIS!

[themyskira]

Amazons Attack! - part 1

Once upon a time, in the lead-up to the 2005-2006 cesspool of a crossover event that was “Infinite Crisis”, DC had plans for a miniseries called “Amazons Attack!”. The story was to be helmed by then-Wonder Woman writer Greg Rucka and artist Ethan Van Sciver, and it would deal with a conflict between the Amazons and the United States following Diana’s killing of Max Lord (and, presumably, building off the simmering background tensions between the two nations since the floating islands of Themyscira had crashed into the ocean off the coast of the US in early 2004).

The idea was nixed, but it never entirely went away. Over the next few years, it passed through the hands of numerous people at DC before finally landing in the lap of Will Pfeiffer in late 2006. By this stage, the original proposal was no longer feasible. The Max Lord story had been resolved, Themyscira had retreated entirely from the mortal plane, and there was no longer any interaction between the Amazon and American peoples.

But that wasn’t gonna stop DC from achieving their glorious vision of man-hating harpies attacking the US capital with swords and pointy sticks.

Around this same time, somebody else in the company had a genius idea. Jodi Picoult, a bestselling author with a strong following among women readers, had just released a new novel about family relationships and trauma, and one of the main characters happened to be a comic book artist. Why didn't they find out if Picoult was interested in writing an actual comic and, you know, lending DC some of that New York Times Bestseller cred?

Picoult wasn’t sure. She didn’t know if she had the time, let alone the interest, in the project. She’d never been much of a Wonder Woman fan. But her kids talked her into accepting, and so, with no previous comic writing experience and far too little editorial guidance, Jodi Picoult set out to make her mark on Wonder Woman.

Together, Picoult and Pfeiffer would craft one of the most widely-derided stories in Wonder Woman’s history. There would be crimes against the written word. There would be character assassination on a mass scale. There would be bees.

Part 1: Wonder Woman volume 3 #6 -- Jodi Picoult (writer) and Drew Johnson (artist)

Some context: For reasons too stupid to go into, Diana has decided to assume a secret identity. She hopes to can gain a better understanding of those she protects by living a normal human life… as an elite Department of Metahuman Affairs field operative charged with neutralising metahuman threats.

Agent Diana Prince is standing in a scungy restroom trying to remind herself that she’s not Wonder Woman. She’s doing that thing where the hero looks in the mirror and sees their alter ego reflected back at them, but due to some poor art decisions, it instead looks like she’s staring at a Wonder Woman poster that somebody has hung over a grotty sink.

More bad art choices occur in the next panel, where the mirror glowers at her behind her back.

Diana continues to puzzle over how having a secret identity is really hard since she doesn’t know the first thing about how to be a human being. Because it’s not as though a large part of Wonder Woman’s career as a public figure in Man’s World has been working as an ambassador and engaging with people across the world at all levels of society or anything.

Also, Jodi Picoult misspells “Themysciran” twice and both typos are left uncorrected, setting the standard for the number of editorial fucks given in this crossover.

Then she steps out of the restroom and into a superhero-themed amusement park, where we meet Diana Prince’s charmer of a partner, Tom Tresser.

“I can’t believe this is my job!” Tom exposition/whines. “I can’t believe we have to baby-sit some sore loser who won a reality TV show to become the new Maxi-Man! I can’t believe you are my partner! I can’t believe cotton candy costs four dollars now…!”

I can’t believe I’m reading this fucking crossover.

Diana diplomatically replies that she’s not used to working with a partner either, and Tom sneers that, based on what he’s read in her record, she’s “not used to working, period”. Because Batman was skilled enough to build an entirely new identity for Diana, but not smart enough to give her an employment history…? How the frig did she get hired by the DEO, then?

Also, great to see that Diana and Tom are both taking their assignment to prevent a human person from dying so seriously. While Maxi-Man is signing autographs out in the open, a sitting duck for any would-be attacker, Tom is gorging himself on fairy floss and Diana is trying to order a Wonder Woman-branded milkshake.

Diana: One Wonder Woman milkshake, please. Server: It’s been discontinued. It’s now called the Black Canary shake. Tom: Wonder Woman!! Now there’s a partner I wouldn’t mind having…

In case you hadn’t figured it out, Tom Tresser is the love interest. Whatta catch.

Also, no, Jodi. No. Either the Wonder Woman milkshake has been discontinued, or it’s been renamed the Black Canary milkshake. You can’t have it both ways.

This, by the way, is the first of several “hilarious” gags about how Wonder Woman is unpopular and regarded as kind of uncool. Picoult’s going for cheeky meta, but she comes off as ignorant, tone deaf and kind of mean-spirited.

In the real world, Wonder Woman doesn’t share the same level of popularity as Superman and Batman. But in the DC Universe, and particularly in the Wonder Woman comic, she’s consistently portrayed as a hero with a strong public presence and an ability to inspire, to the point where literally the issue preceding this one was a oneshot revolving around Wonder Woman’s influence as an empowering and inspiring hero.

If Picoult was playing, as Rucka did, with the idea that once Wonder Woman started using her public status to express her opinions, a large swathe of the public turned against her, that’d be one thing. But, no, she’s just decided, as a basis for her punchline, that Wonder Woman is a nonentity in the DCU, which is out of step with canon and does a huge disservice to the character.

As a meta joke, this also misses the point, because the fact that Wonder Woman doesn’t sell as many comics as Batman and Superman cannot be divorced from the the historical (and persistent) sexism in what remains a very blokey, male-dominated industry, not to mention the fact that DC put significantly more resources into producing and promoting Batman and Superman comics and merch. Those aren’t the only reason for the discrepancy in popularity, but they’re not things you can just brush off.

It gets even more unfortunate in the context of this particular comic’s publication. See, about ten months prior to this, DC had relaunched Wonder Woman with a new #1 issue penned by Allan Heinberg, who had recently earned much acclaim as the writer and co-creator of Young Avengers at Marvel. Between them, Heinberg and DC then proceeded to royally fuck up the relaunch. Heinberg wasn’t able to balance scripting duties with his TV writing job, causing issues to be delayed for months at a stretch, until it became clear there was no way he’d be able to finish his first arc before Jodi Picoult started her run and DC had to move on without him (he would eventually finish his story in the 2007 annual — over a year after he started the five-issue arc). Picoult’s first issue was only the third Wonder Woman comic to hit the stands in more than six months.

So basically, she’s making her funny-funny “boo, nobody buys Wonder Woman” against a backdrop of DC failing to produce Wonder Woman comics for months on end.

Anyway. Diana and Tom finally get around to doing their job and return to Maxi-Man’s signing table. Maxi-Man asks them to get him a chilli dog (“and a drink! I hear the Black Canary shakes are awesome!” GROANS FOREVER), and Tom has the nerve to be offended. “I don’t remember seeing this in my job description.” Well, gee, Tom, I don’t remember seeing ‘leaving your principal unprotected so you can slack off and stuff your gob with fairy floss’ in the job description either, and yet here we are.

Tom continues to grizzle about how unfair it is that his incredible talents are being wasted on this boring assignment, and this time Diana’s starting to get fed up. Meanwhile, the reality-show superhero they’ve been looking down their noses at is the only one who’s noticed that the rollercoaster behind them is spontaneously falling apart.

Of course, the moment Maxi-Man springs into action, he’s immediately knocked out cold by a piece of flying rubble, leaving Diana to take charge. Tom does what he does best, by which I mean he complains.

Diana: Tom! You get Maxi-Man to safety! I’ll get that crowd away from the roller coaster! Tom: But… I… we… Diana: There’s no time! Now! Tom: Who the heck’s she to order me around?!?

A quick costume change, and Wonder Woman saves the day, but not without internally griping about how stupidly confusing humans are.

Maybe this is what I was born for. To protect them… not understand them. But how can I…? They don’t even understand themselves.

urrrgghghhhhhh haaaaaate.

We never learn why the roller coaster spontaneously fell apart.

Later, as Diana and Tom make their way back to DOMA, Tom is still complaining. This time it’s about the fact that he missed Wonder Woman’s appearance at the theme park, because “I bet she looked hot”.

They stop at a store selling superhero merch so that Tom can get his niece a Wonder Woman action figure for her birthday. Diana comments that she thought Tom was an only child and Tom conspicuously doesn’t answer. And sure, it’s possible that the “niece” is a real human person who’s the daughter of a close friend or non-sibling relative, but given everything we’ve learned about Tom in the last eight pages, I think it’s far more plausible to assume that there is no niece and he’s planning on jerking off to a Wonder Woman action figure.

Diana continues to be terrible at having a secret identity.

“The Batman one’s better. Look — it’s got a detachable Batarang… But my — er, Wonder Woman’s lasso doesn’t even come off.”

All the Wonder Woman merch is 75% off because lol Wondy is uncool, and for some reason Diana is super offended and tries to lecture the poor store clerk about how obviously Wonder Woman is cool because saving the world is cool so there.

Clerk: Wonder Woman’s not cool, I guess. Diana: Doesn’t saving the world all the time make you cool? Clerk: All I know is she’s never sold as well as Superman or Batman… Tom: 75% off! Sweet!

Next, it’s time for a stop off at the gas station for some hilarious comedy hijinks around Diana’s total lack of familiarity with modern society!

Ha ha! Champagne comedy! All of this is just so new to her, don’t you know! It’s not like she’s ever lived among ordinary mortals

or held down a job

or, you know, interacted with any human being at length.

Now, I don’t blame Jodi Picoult for not knowing any of this. I’d be surprised if she’d even read a Wonder Woman comic before DC approached her, and though she would have done some background reading in preparation for this gig, she couldn’t be expected to be across every element of Wondy’s post-Crisis continuity, which at that point already stretched back two decades.

Her editors, however? Were not new to comics. They should have picked this shit up.

So, they go to get gas. Tom asks Diana to pay and she pulls out a ten dollar note. Tom points out this is insufficient in the most patronising way possible.

“Uh, gas is $3 a gallon, sweetheart. That might get us down the block…”

He asks he if she has a credit card, and she blinks in incomprehension. Yeah, because it’s not like Batman would have arranged cards and a credit history when he manufactured Diana’s false identity. Not like he’s known for being detail-oriented or anything. (And by the way, this is a thing that happened four fucking issues ago, so nobody has any excuses.)

Aaaaand Diana continues to suck at the secret identity thing.

Tom: Geez, how do you normally get around? Fly or something? Diana: Ha, ha. Funny. Fly places. Imagine…! Tom: Ten bucks? No credit card? Where are you from? Mars? New Hampshire?

Oh yeah, and this whole scene she’s been internally complaining about how humans are relentlessly acquisitive and materialistic and confusing and booooooo being an ordinary person is haaaaaaard.

Finally, they arrive back at HQ, where Sarge Steel chews them out for allowing a known fugitive like Wonder Woman to slip through their fingers at the amusement park, even though they weren’t at the park for Wonder Woman and this is literally the first they’re learning that Wonder Woman is a fugitive.

He also blames them for the rollercoaster getting destroyed, even though they had nothing to do with the damage and their only contribution was to get people to safety. Although, given how much they were slacking off on the job, it’s entirely possible that some metahuman terrorist snuck in and sabotaged the rollercoaster on their watch. Since Picoult still hasn’t told us how the rollercoaster was damaged, I’m just going to assume that this was the case.

It turns out that Wondy is wanted for questioning over her killing of Max Lord, even though she’s already been cleared of charges, so Tom and Diana’s new orders are to find her and haul her in. Awkwaaaaaard.

So obviously they get straight to work this important government assignment. I’m just kidding, they head straight for the DCU version of Starbucks. In fact, so far I haven’t come across any evidence that either of them do any work at all.

Things we’ve seen Tom and Diana do this issue:

Leave their principal unprotected so they can gorge themselves on junk food

Bicker and complain while a rollercoaster explodes behind them

Shop for superhero action figures

Fill up on petrol

Drink coffee

Things we have not seen Tom and Diana do this issue:

Their fucking job.

We get the usual obnoxious joke about Starbucks coffee sizes being weird and Diana being confused by them, which I’m pretty sure was hack material even in 2007.

Tom: Iced double Vente soy latte with Turbinado sugar, please. Diana: Um… Small cup of coffee? Server: Venti, Duovent, Grande, or Uber? Diana: Um… Small cup of coffee. [Everyone stares at her.] Diana: [whispers to Tom] I don’t think she speaks English…

They sit in the park, drinking their coffee, and Diana cries because humanity is confusing and everybody is mean to Wonder Woman.

No, really, that’s exactly what happens.

Diana: Why don’t you people just leave her alone? Who cares what she’s done? Tom: You talk about people like you’re not one of them, you know that? Diana: [CRIES]

Picoult’s Diana is so outrageously bad at maintaining a secret identity on even the most basic level, even a self-absorbed wanker like Tom Tresser ought to have cottoned onto her by now. Then again, he also failed to notice a rollercoaster collapsing a few metres away from him, so…

In an out-of-character display of ordinary decency, Tom gives Diana a pep talk, then heads off home. As he walks away, Diana hears a scream for help and jumps into action—

—aaaaaaand it’s an attractive young white college girl being mugged by a thuggish, armed black man. Definitely no ugly connotations lurking there.

Diana subdues him with a single punch, and is rewarded with proof that some people do still find Wonder Woman cool because, yes, we’re still on that tired gag.

College girl: I did a paper on you in my feminist theory class! I said you were an icon of womanhood we could all divine strength from… but I didn’t realise you were so… cool! Diana: I hope you got an A.

Tom, driving home, gets a call that Wonder Woman has been sighted in a seedy part of town. In addition to illegally talking on his phone — not hands-free — while driving, he does that thing people do when they’re pretending to talk on the phone, you know, helpfully repeating all the relevant information for the audience.

“Tresser. Wonder Woman? Seen at the Villains and Vixens Bar? I’m there, out.”

If we could hear both sides of the call, I can only imagine that it’d go something like—

Tom: Tresser.

Agent: Hey Tom, it’s Fred; hear you’re on the Wonder Woman case. I know it’s late, but we got a couple reports of sightings at the Villains and Vixens Bar. You happen to be anywhere near there?

Tom: Wonder Woman? Seen at the Villains and Vixens Bar?

Agent: Yeah, that’s what I just sa—

Tom: I’m there, out. [hangs up]

Agent: Jesus, I fucking hate that guy.

Basically what I’m saying is, he absolutely deserves it when he stumbles, ill-equipped, into a suspiciously flirtatious Wonder Woman who is wearing an earlier iteration of Diana’s costume and striking all kinds of ridiculous sexy poses, and instantly gets himself captured by what is obviously Circe in disguise.

Diana gets called back to headquarters, and she’s still wrestling with the question of how she can possibly do her job when her job is to arrest Wonder Woman. (WELL GEE, DIANA, I GUESS YOU SHOULD HAVE THOUGHT OF THAT BEFORE YOU TOOK A JOB UNDER AN ASSUMED IDENTITY AT THE DEPARTMENT DEVOTED TO POLICING METAHUMANS LIKE YOU.)

Also turnstiles. She is deeply perplexed by turnstiles.

comedyyyyyyyyyy

Sarge tells Diana that Tom has been abducted and a pair of Amazon bracelets were found at the scene. This is all the evidence Sarge needs to conclude that Wonder Woman has gone back to her old neck-snapping ways and must be stopped. He gives Diana the bracelets in an evidence bag and tells her to take them to the lab and see what she can find out.

I have questions.

Why weren’t the bracelets already being analysed at the lab? Did Sarge Steel wrestle the evidence bag off a hapless crime scene investigator and smuggle them up to his office just so he could play show-and-tell with Diana? How do they know the bracelets are Wonder Woman’s? In this superhero-merch-flooded world, wouldn’t Amazon bracelets be a dime a dozen? Or is Wonder Woman so ~uncool~ that every Amazon bracelet manufacturer immediately went out of business and buried the shameful evidence of their failed ventures in a New Mexico landfill alongside all those Atari cartridges? And why would Wonder Woman leave her bracelets behind? They’re not the kind of thing she’s likely to forget. Yes, we know Circe’s planted the bracelets deliberately, but the DOMA agents don’t.

And most importantly, why does Sarge Steel’s reflection look like Diana?

Diana doesn’t need to take the bracelets to the bag, because she knows they’re replicas and, what’s more, she knows where they come from.

“They were designed to complete a uniform I donated to the Wonder Woman Museum… which closed down over a year ago.”

Okay, now hang on.

I realise we’re back on the hilarious ‘Wonder Woman isn’t popular’ gag, which absolutely has not outstayed its welcome, but a museum is not the same thing as a theme park concessions stand or a pop culture store.  A museum does not just go, ‘buhhhhh, I know we’ve amassed this huge collection of great historical, social and aesthetic significance. Indeed, it is almost certainly the largest collection of Wonder Woman and Amazon-related items in the world, and much of it was donated by Diana herself, making it immensely valuable. But — and this is awkward — it turns out people don’t want to visit us because Wonder Woman isn’t cool. Guess we have no other choice but to pack it in and open a Black Canary Museum down the road.” That is not how museums work, Jodi.

I’m also confused as to why Circe needed to steal a Wonder Woman costume from a museum when it would have been far easier to glamour her clothing to look like Diana’s, the same way she glamoured her features. This seems needlessly complicated.

Diana whips off her glasses and does the spinny-transformy thing from the TV show. This is technically a power that Wondy has at this point in continuity — at the end of Allan Heinberg’s first arc, it’s revealed that Circe has given Diana the supremely useless “gift” of being able to turn her powers off, allowing her to switch between Amazon and mortal with a spin and a flourish.

Except, when this issue was published… Heinberg’s last issue hadn’t been. Remember, he flaked on his scripting duties, so the final instalment of his story and the introduction of the dumbass spinny-power-up wouldn’t come out until November 2007 — six months after this issue was released.

The issue ends on Wondy flying to the rescue while Circe lies in wait in the defunct Wonder Woman Museum, predatorily clutching a chained and shirtless Tom Tresser.

[themyskira]

Amazons Attack! - part 3

The story so far: Wonder Woman got a day job doing more or less the same thing she does in her regular job, except in disguise. Circe kidnapped “Diana Prince’s” sexual harasser partner, Tom Tresser, for reasons. Wonder Woman saved him, but was then arrested by the Department of Metahuman Affairs, who located her via a tracking device in a uniform that Tom was blatantly not wearing at any point in the story.

Now Wondy is being held to ransom in a secret bunker, her release contingent on her handing over the schematics to the Amazons’ Purple Death Ray -- a secret she has no access to nor any way of acquiring, as Themyscira is out of reach to all -- and Circe is preparing to resurrect Hippolyta, who doesn’t deserve this shit.

Part 3: Wonder Woman #8 -- Jodi Picoult (writer) and Terry Dodson (artist)

Diana’s still imprisoned in a high-tech cell in some DOMA sub-basement, while her two assigned guards gossip about her.

“Check her out — the chick’s freakin’ nuts!” says Guard #1. Diana is not doing anything particularly nutty. In fact, she’s not doing anything. She’s just sitting in the cell and looking depressed, as one might be after being wrongfully imprisoned, tortured and held to ransom for a WMD. To Guard #1, this is apparently evidence that she thinks she’s better than everyone else.

“She just wants to be free, man,” says Guard #2, and is it just me or do they sound like they’re talking about an agitated whale in a too-small enclosure?

Guard #1 responds with an incoherent ramble about how nobody in society is free, and we’ve all gotta work to pay the damn bills and go home to our wives every damn night, so “that crazy broad” had just better come to terms with the fact that she’s no better than the rest of us. Guard #1 clearly has some issues of his own to work through.

In Themyscira, Circe has exhumed Hippolyta’s corpse and resurrected her. All the Amazons are shocked and confused, despite the fact that they all saw Circe arrive at Hippolyta’s grave last issue and obliquely announce that she was going to restore Polly to life. So basically the rest of that last issue’s encounter went like…

Circe tells the Amazons that Diana has been imprisoned by the US government.

The audience is informed that, for this performance of “Amazons Attack!”, the role of Hippolyta will be played by a bloodthirsty, irrational man-hating harpy.

“It is always the same with the world of Man. What they don’t understand, they fear. And what they fear, the try to tame. To them, my daughter is the enemy… and enemies must be crushed. If it is war that they want… it’s war they will get.”

More clumsy wording here: When Polly says “enemies must be crushed”, she’s clearly referring to the Americans. But the previous sentence identifies Diana as “the [Americans’] enemy”, making it… kinda sound like she’s saying Diana must be crushed.

Tom, for some reason, has decided to return to the wannabe villains bar from last issue — this time to have a drink and complain to the bartender about how shit his partner is. Diana isn’t answering his phone calls, and Tom complains that “she probably can’t figure out how”.

How did they even pitch this guy as Diana’s new love interest? ‘He’s a complainy misogynist, she’s Wonder Woman in disguise! Together, they fight crime!’

Tom is called back into work. Even though the Department of Metahuman Affairs has plenty of perfectly serviceable offices and meeting rooms, he meets Steel in a deserted parking lot under the cover of darkness, as though he’s bloody Deep Throat or something. He’s even wearing sunglasses. In the middle of the night.

Steel tells him that the Wonder Woman case is closed, it’s out of DOMA’s hands, and the reason Tom hasn’t been able to contact his partner is that she’s been reassigned. Which, btw, so has Tom. He’s expected in Maine tomorrow.

Despite Tom’s well-evidenced lack of basic deductive skills, he manages to peg that something a little weird is going on here. Some particularly overwrought dialogue ensues.

Tom: I feel something yanking on my puppet strings, that’s all. Steel: Puppet strings? Ha— what does that feel like? Tom: Hard to say… Like an angel having its wings torn off. Steel: You’re no angel, Tom. Tom: People change.

Throughout this two-page scene, Tom delivers a voiceover in narration boxes. There’s no good reason that this should be here. It’s an abrupt and slightly jarring inclusion — the only narration boxes up till this point have been Diana’s — and the only narrative function it serves is to cover for the shortcomings of Picoult’s scripting by outright stating Tom’s motivations and feelings towards Diana.

They call me Nemesis. As I’ve recently been reminded, my name means ‘enemy’… […] but in naming Wonder Woman the ‘enemy’, they’ve crossed the line. To me, Wonder Woman’s synonymous with everything good about this cruddy world. She saved me, and I’m just one of many. And as for my own name… I’m about to live up to it.

Basically, Tom believes Wondy is synonymous with all that is good, and this is the driving factor that leads him to turn on his boss and colleagues and side with a supposed enemy of the state.

This seems like a good time for a quick review of Tom’s complete history of interactions with and conversations about Wonder Woman up to this point.

Complained about missing a chance to see Wonder Woman in the flesh because “I bet she looked hot”

Bought a Wonder Woman action figure to masturbate to give to his possibly-fictional “niece”

Acknowledged that Wonder Woman was a hero, but that it didn’t matter whether she’d done anything wrong because “it’s our job” to arrest her

Upon meeting Wonder Woman, peppered her with wildly inappropriate, objectifying remarks, including describing his sex dreams about her, speculating on what it would be like to fuck her in mid-air and asking her about her sex life

Told Wonder Woman he wished he could work with her instead of his shitty partner, who is secretly Wonder Woman

Throughout the first two issues, Tom treats Wondy primarily as an object of lust. There’s a recognition of the good she does, but he’s more interested in her banging body than anything else. The one compliment he does pay her is an unwitting insult, because it’s tied to his largely irrational hatred of her alter ego. He loves the sexual fantasy of Wonder Woman, but can’t stand the bespectacled, pant-suit-wearing Diana Prince (especially when she dares bark out orders).

So this deep admiration for Wondy as a force for good in an ugly world — this belief that will drive all of his actions in this story going forward — has come completely out of the blue. It’s introduced only in the precise moment when Tom first decides to act on it. That is shitty, shitty writing.

Circe drops into Diana’s cell for a quick ‘you’re not so different, you and I’.

“You just don’t see how similar we are. Humans are afraid of us. We’re outsiders — we’re powerful women — and what we fight for is hidden beneath the blood on our hands.”

So, you fight for… your… hands? Your skin? Your… fingernails…? What—

Okay, no, I think what she’s trying to say is that people don’t see the lives Diana’s saved, only the bodies she’s left in her wake. Which, dude. Come on. You’re an evil sorceress who’s razed entire kingdoms and turns people into animals for funsies, but Diana snaps one measly neck and suddenly you’re calling her Lady Macbeth?

(yes, really.)

Circe says they’re both fighting for what they love. Then she immediately contradicts herself and says that only she is fighting for what she loves -- no matter what it takes -- whereas Diana is only fighting for good out of a sense of general obligation to be good.

Diana says that there is such thing as Right and Wrong, and that these things are distinct and immovable concepts, and that on its own makes me want to set this whole damn comic on fire, but then Circe takes it upon herself to give Diana a primer in moral relativism. Circe. Fucking Circe has a more thoughtful and nuanced understanding of ethics and morality in this book than Wonder Woman, what the flipping friggity fuck.

Circe says that it was once considered moral to own slaves, and “what’s considered right today could be wrong tomorrow”; Diana is skeptical.

Circe ends, as incomprehensibly as she began, by declaring that “love and murder are the only things that matter. They’re what it means to be human”, and therefore she will always be more human than Diana.

Tom uses his vaguely-defined master-of-disguise technology to impersonate Sarge Steel and break Diana out of her cell. She doesn’t trust him, since the last time the last time she saw him he was being congratulated for helping to apprehend Wonder Woman. Despite the fact that these congratulations were accompanied by a look of shock on Tom’s face and the revelation that he’d been tracked without his knowledge through a locator chip in a uniform he was not currently wearing -- something Diana also witnessed.

But, see, she has to be mad at him, because otherwise we couldn’t get that good old stock standard ‘here’s your lasso - ask me anything’/‘nah, I guess I’ll just trust you instead’ scene.

Armed DOMA agents arrive on the scene, and Diana does what we’ve all been wanting to do since Tom Tresser first stepped into this comic.

Diana: Tom, listen… Tom: You don’t have to say it… I know you must really love me right now. [Diana decks him]

It’s a fakeout, of course, so that when she escapes with him in tow, he looks like a hostage rather than a willing accomplice.

Speaking of escape — Diana’s free of her cell, but she’s still a good hundred feet beneath the earth in a secure bunker, with hundreds of DOMA agents between her and the exit. Fighting her way out of this one’s going to be a real—

—oh.

Or she could just punch her way through a hundred feet of solid rock, I guess.

Meanwhile:

The Amazons throw spears and shoot flaming arrows at things, and the biggest military force in the world pisses its pants at this terrifying display of Bronze Age weaponry. Nothing in the extensive training and experience of these elite fighting men and women has ever equipped them to deal with the horrors of women with pointy sticks!

“We’re no match for their firepower! We need help down here!”

Steel calls in the JLA and Circe swans around gloating because, gasp, the two of them are working together.

Diana’s reached the sewers. Tom has come to and, naturally, he’s found something to complain about — namely, the fact that she punched him.

Diana’s costume is pretty ripped up, so she asks Tom if he has a sewing kit. Because even though she’s just been illegally imprisoned, tortured and held to ransom by somebody claiming to answer to the President of the United States — somebody who, even now, is sending dozens of agents out after her — modesty is her first priority. Really.

All Tom has is some epoxy adhesive. Diana, evidently deciding that the risk of severely burning herself is preferable to the risk of exposing some skin, decides to use the epoxy to mend her costume while she’s still wearing it. But first, she asks Tom to close his eyes.

We’ve all seen some version of this scene before. You know what happens next.

Diana: Your eyes are closed, right? Tom: Uh… right. Clearly you Amazons have a lot to be insecure about aesthetically. Diana: It’s not a matter of insecurity… It’s a matter of… decency. Tom: [ogling her] I’ll tell you what’s decent. That birthmark on your— Diana: You’re a pig, you know that?! Tom: Well, you, coincidentally, are a pain in the same place you’ve got that birthmark!

Gee, I’m glad Tom Tresser thinks Wonder Woman is the lone bastion of goodness in the world. I’d hate to see how he’d treat a woman he didn’t respect so highly.

The argument is interrupted by an explosion, which of course results in Diana throwing Tom out of the way and…

A second ago they were having an argument sparked by Tom yet again disrespecting her personal boundaries and treating her like a sex object, and now suddenly she’s super turned on. Wonderful.

They decide to investigate the explosion. Flying out of the sewers, they find the city on fire and the Lincoln Memorial in ruins. And standing at the centre of the rubble is, of course, Hippolyta.

[themyskira]

Amazons Attack! - part 14

PREVIOUSLY!

…hoooooboy.

This entire shemozzle has been ostensibly orchestrated by Circe as part of a grand plan to hurt Diana and the Amazons. So as we head into the final issue of the Amazons Attack! miniseries proper, it’s worth revisiting the details of that plan.

Step 1: Have a shapeshifting henchman infiltrate the Department of Metahuman Affairs, illegally imprison Wonder Woman and torture her in an effort to force her to hand over the Amazons’ highly advanced death ray technology.

Step 2: Resurrect Hippolyta and tell her that the Americans are trying to torture the Amazon’s high-tech military secrets out of Diana. Offer to help the Amazons in mounting a full-scale invasion. Note: mind control will not be necessary. Once the Amazons’ latent misandry has been awoken, they will be braying for blood.

Step 3: Kick back and enjoy the carnage as Wonder Woman is killed in the crossfire between the humans she protects and the Amazons she loves. Hahaha, suck it, Wonder Woman!

Step 3b: If Diana fails to die, force her to confront the (highly dubious, will-not-hold-up-to-scrutiny) truth that the only way to end the conflict is to kill her mother and take the throne. Hahaha, suck it, Wonder Woman!

Step 4: Teleport nukes onto Themyscira while it’s undefended. Hahaha, suck it, Amazons!

That was the original plan, as revealed in Jodi Picoult’s Wonder Woman run.

But remember, none of the writers or editors on this crossover were even on remotely the same page. They accidentally destroyed the Washington Monument twice due to lack of coordination. So aside from the carnage and the nukes, most of this plan went out the window the moment Picoult submitted her final script.

So somewhere along the way, we got this weird secondary plan:

Step 1: Convince an evil sect of technologically advanced Bana, who have long hated Hippolyta and her people, to pretend to set aside their differences and ally with the Themyscirans (who are now equipped with Bronze Age weaponry, because the writers have forgotten that they’re a technologically advanced civilisation who were provoked into war by an apparent US attempt to steal their futuristic death ray).

Step 2: Conjure a magical forcefield around DC, impenetrable to all except the Bana, trapping the Themyscirans inside. Tell Hippolyta it’s all part of the plan.

Step 3: Watch and laugh as the Bana claim their sweet, sweet revenge and begin slaughtering the Themyscirans. Hahaha, suck it, Amazons! uhhhh I guess they all just bonded over their hatred of men instead? ok never mind then.

…which, by this issue, has also been forgotten. Because now, a dozen-odd issues in, we’re about to find out Circe’s actual, serious, honest-to-god-this-time-I-really-mean-it grand plan.

And yes, it is stupider than you’re imagining.

Part 14: Amazons Attack! #6 -- Will Pfeifer (writer) and Pete Woods (artist)

This issue opens with Hipposterical flouncing melodramatically around the White House, stomping over corpses, smashing the building to bits and shrieking so loudly that she can apparently be heard several blocks away.

“WHERE IS SHE?! WHERE IS SHE?! WHERE IS SHE?!? WHERE IS MY DAUGHTER?!”

Just a reminder: last issue, Queen Wackadoodle was rallying the combined Themysciran and Bana armies in preparation for their final assault on the surviving American forces. Her mind was on the crucial battle ahead. Her speech was interrupted as the handful of superheroes who bothered showing up to this bullshit crossover charged into the city, turning the tide against the Amazons and putting them into a perilous position.

And apparently Lady MacBatshit’s response was to storm off in a huff and start throwing a noisy tantrum in the hopes of forcing Diana/everybody to pay attention to her.

Oh, speaking of Diana, she’s found Circe.

“Did you really think I wouldn’t learn the truth? You’re the one behind all this madness, and you’re the one who can end it.”

NO SHIT SHE’S THE ONE BEHIND ALL THIS MADNESS, SHE LITERALLY TOLD YOU AS MUCH. She did a whole monologue about it, remember?

Diana: Damn you, Circe. You started this war! Circe: Well, of course I did! Someone had to get the ball rolling.

Circe gloats that Diana won’t kill her. Diana responds by knocking Circe flat and preparing to stab her in the face, only to be interrupted by—

Baroness Bugfuck: Hello, daughter. I have been looking for you. [punches her off a GODDAMN TOWER and straight through a GODDAMN BUILDING]

ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME

Pfeifer devoted three and a half pages on Empress Shitfit’s tantrum. Three and a half pages of shrieking and wailing and punching through solid sandstone columns and breaking the most expensive things she could find. Three and a half pages of utter hysterical nonsense, and then a scant page later she’s calmly standing behind Diana with her arms folded?

And um. Remind me why she’s trying to murder her daughter again?

Their swords clash. There’s more kicking and punching and rampant destruction of national heritage sites. Diana throws Dame Crackerpants through the wall of the National Air and Space Museum, and Ol’ Wackadoo response by throwing a plane at Diana’s face.

Batshit McGee: Still alive? I raised you well. Too well. [places her sword at Diana’s throat] Diana: Go ahead, mother. Do it.

oh look, it’s the exact same stand-off we had FIVE ISSUES AGO. Here’s Wonder Woman #10:

Diana: Not long ago you asked me if I would die for these humans you once sent me to protect… and I tell you now that I would. But this is no longer what you should be asking. The question isn’t what I’d be willing to lose… The question is, mother… would you kill me to win?

And here’s Amazons Attack! #6:

Diana: Give into your bloodlust. Show me that Circe’s magic is stronger than your will — your sense of right and wrong — the ideals of our people, who none but you have better lived up to.

See, you meant to say here that Hippolyta lives up to her people’s ideals, but because you’re a fuckwit, what you wrote is that Hippolyta lives up to her people.

Diana: Show me that despite our differences — despite all the ways you think I’ve let you down — that you don’t still consider me… your daughter.

Either she still considers Diana her daughter despite their differences, or she does not consider Diana her daughter because of their differences. WHY IS NOBODY EDITING THIS FUCK

Diana: Circe’s magic isn’t working at the moment, Mother. Whatever decision you make is yours and yours alone.

NOW HOLD THE FUCK UP A MINUTE

Believe me, I wish Madame Fruit Loop was being mind-controlled by Circe. I would love dearly for that to have been the case. But not only have we been explicitly told that she is acting of her own free will, without any outside influence — this fact was a major plot point. Diana initially refused to believe that this violent, hateful person could be her mother. Once she realised that this Hippolyta was in fact the real deal, she was convinced that Circe had corrupted Hippolyta’s mind, before finally being forced to accept that her mother was not the one who had changed — she had. Picoult’s entire story hinged on that realisation.

Yes, it was stupid and badly written and wildly out-of-character. But this is the bed you fuckers made, and you don’t get to backtrack twelve pages out from the end.

Anyway, just like at the end of WW #10, Diana looks her mother in the eye and forces her to choose between her crusade and her daughter.

You may remember that the last time this happened, right as we reached this crucial moment where Diana’s words found their mark and Hipponitwit seemed poised to lower her weapon, Superman crashed in all ‘DIANA THIS IS NO TIME FOR CONFLICT RESOLUTION WE STILL HAVE SIX ISSUES TO FILL’ and forcibly dragged her out of the scene.

Well, Supes has apparently learned nothing from that incident, because his first instinct is still to swoop in and haul Diana away. Only difference is, this time Batman is there to stop him.

Hippolugnut drops her sword.

At which point Circe, realising that there’s only ten pages to go and everybody’s stopped paying attention to her, barges back in to reveal her real grand plan.

Circe: You idiots!!! Do you really believe this changes anything?!?

There’s a certain strain of bad comic writers, I’ve noticed, who use excessive exclamation marks and interrobangs as a substitute for convincing drama and emotion. It’s as if they think that if they put enough FORCE!!! and EMPHASIS!!! behind their poorly-written words, people will be fooled into thinking they make sense.

Anyway, the only effect it ever has on me is to put me in mind of Terry Pratchett’s Maskerade: “And all those exclamation marks, you notice? Five? A sure sign of someone who wears his underpants on his head.”

Circe: This was never about you, fool daughter of Hippolyta!

It absolutely was.

Circe: Every body lying on the broken ground, every drop of blood staining this pristine marble… all spilled in the name of vengeance—

—against Diana and the Amazons, yes, we know. This has been clearly established.

Circe: AGAINST THE GODS!!!

…wait, what

Circe: When I chose to exit the gods’ realm in order to claim your powers [in WW #1-4] I believed my ‘beloved’ Ares had my back! But he used my absence to claim our daughter as his own — and the rest of your miserable gods allowed it!

no, seriously, WHAT.

Circe’s daughter, Lyta, has been raised by the Amazons as one of their own. It’s one of the reasons Circe resents them so much — one of the reasons why she might feasibly want to take vengeance on them by, say, manipulating them into a war that goes against all their values and then nuking their island while their backs are turned.

Lyta was kidnapped from Themyscira by Ares in a 2005 story.

Circe didn’t steal Diana’s powers until 2006, over a year later.

So either Pfeifer and his editors are more confused than usual, or they’ve decided at the eleventh hour to drop a whole new storyline on our heads, wherein Circe and Ares had figured out some kind of shared custody arrangement, but then Ares reneged the moment Circe stepped out of frame for a minute, and it wasn’t necessary for any of us to know this until now, and oh my god i need a drink

Circe: It was ridiculously easy to feign repentance, to offer a piece of my own soul to resurrect your mother… Little did the gods know she’d be tainted. That she’d be more like me!

Again, this is a direct contradiction of everything that’s come before. It’s been well established that Queen Dingaling is under nobody’s influence.

Circe: The gods sanctioned the theft of my daughter. And so I’ve vowed to take their children from them. You Amazons will die for the folly of your deities, and then I will reclaim my child.

Um. Few questions?

If that was the goal all along — kill the Amazons to make the gods suffer — why not just skip the war and just use your infiltrator in the US government to nuke Themyscira with all the Amazons on it?

And, okay, maybe the idea was to prolong the suffering by forcing the gods to watch the Amazons turn against all their values before being slaughtered? But that’s a plan that hinges on (a) the Amazons being written so egregiously out-of-character that somebody tries to retcon in mind control at the last minute, and (b) the gods being completely unable to intervene because, unbeknownst to everybody, they’ve fallen victim to another crossover event.

It’s also probably going to be a lot harder to reclaim your child once you’ve orchestrated the slaughter of the gods’ favoured servants and publicly taken responsibility for it. If anything, all you’ll have done is motivated the gods to put aside their differences and unite to crush you. Dude, they’re probably going to start by murdering your daughter to punish you, have you met the Greek gods?

Circe finishes by screaming, “The conflict ends when I say it does!” and attempting to kill Queen Cuckoo-for-Cocoa-Puffs.

Then Athena appears in the sky, intoning, “THIS HAS GONE FAR ENOUGH” and oh good Circe’s going to monologue some more.

Circe: Oh, yes. Please, mighty Athena, please do forgive us. Then again, that’s the only thing you can do now, isn’t it?

I… erm. What?

Circe, who do you think you’re talking to right now?

Circe: Look around you, ‘bringer of wisdom’. A city in ruins. Dead bodies as far as the eye can see. Two peoples ravaged. And who is responsible for this? A goddess? A just and mighty deity? No. I did this. While you— you did nothing. You are every bit as responsible as I.

(wait, are you trying to say the gods are responsible for this, or that they aren’t, because...)

And then Circe is completely shocked when Athena responds by causing the ground to open up and swallow her whole, condemning her to Tartarus. Lady, where did you think talking shit to the gods was going to get you?

Athena then proceeds to lecture everybody at length. She reveals that the gods knew all about Circe’s plans from the start and chose not to interfere, because “the time had come for the Amazons … to face a test”. They all failed, so now they will all be punished.

First, Themyscira is expelled from the realm of the gods, reappearing off the coast of the continental US. Then, all the Amazons vanish, and… nobody has any further questions about this.

I mean, we’re going to find out what happened to them in a couple of pages, but as far as Diana knows, Athena has just unmade them all or plucked them from existence or otherwise killed them. She even kind of implies as much — “Every conflict has its casualties. This conflict has claimed the Amazons. They are no longer your concern.”

…aaaand Diana doesn’t even try to get any clarification on this point.

Athena goes on for another couple of pages — let that be a lesson to you, look within yourselves, you have much to answer for, etc. etc. — before returning to Olympus, where she… begins to narrate the comic we’re reading?

I won’t bore you with the full monologue, but the key points are that

The Amazons have been dispersed throughout the world, their memories rewritten, leaving them ignorant of their true identities. Each now believes herself to be mortal.

All except for Hippolyta, who has been returned to Themyscira with her memories intact, a ruler with no subjects.

It’s a pretty rubbish punishment, all things considered. The world is, as Athena says, a more dangerous place with the loss of the Amazons; and with no memory of their actions and no knowledge that they are supposed to be atoning for something, the Amazons have no way of recognising their wrongs and making amends.

But I suppose you could say that it’s at least somewhat plausible coming from a patron god like Athena. Even if it is rubbish, it’s not unreasonably cruel, and each Amazon theoretically has the chance to rediscover the power within herself, prove herself worthy and reclaim her place on Themyscira.

Except, oh, there’s just one more thing I haven’t mentioned.

some rando god: Justice? Who are you to speak of justice? You, who dare imprison us? You who stole Athena’s identity and left her for dead? Athena: Hmm. Perhaps you’re right. Perhaps “justice” isn’t the proper word. But you must admit... [shapeshifts into… oh for fuck’s sake.] …GOODNESS HAS CERTAINLY TRIUMPHED!! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

‘Athena’ was really Granny Goodness all along hahahahaha! psych! you were reading a Countdown crossover this whole time hahahahaha hahahahahahahahahahahahfahhaahahhahahaah

Which also leaves me wondering why she didn’t just kill the Amazons or send them to Tartarus or brainwash them or absorb their power or something? rather than leave their power intact but hidden from them, leaving the door open for them to reclaim their identities? Like, I get that she doesn’t want to show her hand yet, but she could have done any and all of those things and nobody would have questioned it. And I know this because, as far as Diana is aware, Athena did do all of those things to the Amazons, and nobody questioned it. god, I hate this comic so much.

Only one more issue to go, folks. We’re almost out of the woods.

[themyskira]

Amazons Attack! - part 13

PREVIOUSLY! A rogue sect of Bana was revealed to be aiding Queen Bugfuck’s invasion by carrying out attacks across America. The Bana are distinct from the Themyscirans in that they use advanced technology (as opposed to the Themies, who only have a futuristic death ray), are mostly women of colour, and wear a mish-mash of tribal-ish attire and face paint (and are therefore Savage and Primitive and Uncivilised). And they want Grace Choi to join them.

Meanwhile, Circe (previously presumed dead) has magicked an impenetrable force field around DC, for… reasons?

This time: Various grand plans are revealed, and none of them make a whit of bloody sense. And thanks to Will Pfeifer’s ridiculously over-the-top Batgod complex, every hero except Batman is useless and incompetent.

Part 13: Amazons Attack! #5 — Will Pfeifer (writer) and Pete Woods (artist)

We open on another Lex News recap. A newsreader reports that the President survived the Air Force One crash and was personally delivered to safety by Superman.

“Superman himself escorted the President to safety at the government base at Mount Weather, where what remains of Congress resides!”

As per usual, this is a direct contradiction of what happened in the previous issue.

In Amazons Attack! 4,

Supergirl said she could not fly the President to safety because he was too badly injured: “he’d never survive a flight”.

After the military dispatched the Amazons attacking Air Force One, a soldier told Superman that “Medevac’s on the way [for the President]. Better let us handle things from here. Three of you should be getting back to DC. They need you there. Badly.���

Superman flew away from the scene with Wonder Girl and Supergirl.

He then accompanied them all the way to a tie-in issue in Teen Titans #49.

Listen. Leaving aside for one moment any criticism of of the Amazons Attack! team’s writing, plotting, pacing, characterisation, dialogue, consistency, coordination, continuity, editing, basic judgement, sense of shame, respect for Wonder Woman as a character, or recognition of readers’ basic intelligence.

Leaving all that aside.

There’s really only one requirement you need to meet to write a passable recap of the previous issue, and it’s a simple one: you need to know what happened in the previous issue.

Since Will Pfeifer wrote the issues he’s recapping, and Matt Idelson and Nachie Castro edited them, one would think it nigh on impossible to fail to hit this most basic of benchmarks.

One would think.

And yet here we are again, a-fucking-gain, watching Pfeifer flounder and fail to recall what he wrote one issue ago, because not one of the three people working on this script is paying a whit of attention to what they’re doing.

Oh, and check out the delightful news crawl!

“DEATHS, DECAPITATIONS REPORTED ALONG SHIELD PERIMETER”

Superman is flying back to DC. He’s seconds away from re-entering the combat zone when he suddenly registered that something is strange; is that water vapour beading in mid-air, or—?

and then he crashes into the forcefield, like a chump.

Superman [thought bubble]: I spent precious time making sure Kara and Cassie didn’t accidentally kill the President… only hope the situation back here hasn’t become too— Superman [out loud]: Wait… something’s not right. Water vapour is beading on— [THOOM]

Buh… but… wasn’t the forcefield visible before?

In fact, forget about that for a moment. What happened to super-hearing? Super-sight? The forcefield is causing mass panic, preventing civilians from fleeing and soldiers from getting into the battlefield. People are talking about it all over the TV and radio. They’re making frantic phone calls and freaking out in the streets. Trains are unable to leave stations. Soldiers are firing at the forcefield to no avail. Cars are colliding with it. Even if Supes can’t see the forcefield itself, he of all people should have been able to pick up the chatter about it well before he reached DC.

And yes, I know writers tend to play Clark’s super senses up and down at different times to suit the narrative, but he’s flying into an active war zone. You cannot tell me that he isn’t actively looking ahead and scanning the airwaves, keeping a keen eye out for people in imminent danger and any new developments he may have missed while he was off the field. You cannot tell me he’s simply cruising along daydreaming and not paying attention to anything outside of his skull while all round him people are fleeing for their lives and oh fuck me, that’s exactly what’s happening, isn’t it.

After faceplanting on the shield, it takes Supes less than a second to assess the scene and determine that a spherical forcefield surrounds the entire city, including the sky above it and the earth below. Yeah, dude was slacking off before.

Superman radios Batman and oh, bullSHIT.

Batman left DC halfway through AA #4 to take an unnecessary trip to Gotham so that he could force Selina to make an unnecessary trip to the Batcave so that he could tell he something he could have told her over the phone.

Superman, by comparison, began flying back towards DC at the end of AA #4. Even taking into account Supes’ brief detour into a Teen Titans standoff scene, there is not a chance that Bruce beat him back to the capital.

And there is no way that he got back before Circe conjured the shield around the city in the penultimate page of AA #4.

BULL. FUCKING. SHIT.

There’s a tedious back-and-forth that ends with Batman posing this question:

“If the Amazons did do this, then where’s the major assault? The one that finishes us off, once and for all? What are they waiting for?”

I have some questions of my own.

How does being sealed inside the city as a nation’s military and some of the Justice League’s heaviest hitters gather around the perimeter help the Amazons at all?

The government has been evacuated to Virginia, and the United States has many more military bases than the single one the Amazons managed to destroy. All that remains inside DC is rubble, a bunch of panicking civilians, a few surviving soldiers, and Batman. Who exactly are the Amazons supposed to be ‘finishing off, once and for all’ with this brilliant plan?

How does this in any way serve them?

“Not far away”, Grace Choi and evil Bana lady Karna are driving towards oh you are fucking kidding me.

When last we saw Grace and Karna, halfway through AA #4, they were in the National Mall, in the centre of the World War II Memorial.

Now, hours later, they’re well outside the city, driving towards the forcefield — which, by the way, is clearly visible again.

What have they been doing these past couple of hours? Just taking a joyride through bombed-out neighbourhoods?

Karna says the forcefield is “[p]robably some sort of Amazonian black magic […] Just the sort of trick the Bana will put an end to. A permanent, painful end.” Grace snarks that Karna’s melodramatic pronouncements are getting a little boring. Karna melodramatically pronounces that it’s time for Grace to learn THE TRUE STORY OF THE BANA.

First, the actual true story of the Bana: In the days of ancient Greece, the Amazons were betrayed and enslaved by Heracles and his men. After they fought their way free, many Amazons were incensed by Athena’s command that they not seek vengeance for the abuses they’d suffered. They felt their gods had abandoned them in their time of need, and so they renounced their gods, and a faction led by Hippolyta’s sister Antiope chose not to follow the rest to Themyscira.

After many years, this splinter group of Amazons found new gods and a new sanctuary in the deserts of Egypt, where they built their hidden city of Bana-Mighdall.

After many more years and conflicts, the Bana were reunited with the Themyscirans. The unified Amazon nation is a democracy governed by both Bana and Themyscirans.

And here is Karna’s revisionist history: The Bana were FORCED OUT of Themyscira by Hippolyta and lived a SHITHOUSE existence in the desert where they were BETRAYED by men and gods and everyone else under the sun, and for CENTURIES they have thought only of enacting REVENGE against their TREACHEROUS “so-called sisters”.

Um.

How, exactly, is… helping Hippolyta take over the continental United States “revenge”?

(I mean, granted, they could be playing her in order to get close and stick the knife in. Spoiler alert, though? They’re not, and they don’t.)

Karna finishes by saying that ran a DNA test on Grace, which proved that Grace is Bana.

They arrive at the city’s perimeter, and Grace says she needs a second. After three panels of moping wordlessly, she decides to fully buy into the evil Bana’s agenda because

Grace: [eyes brimming with tears] A family.

The most frustrating thing about this reveal about Grace’s background is that it could have been awesome. I love the idea of Grace discovering her Amazon heritage, finding a community among the Bana, gaining a connection to the family she never knew — as well as navigating the difficulties of finding her place in a culture she grew up apart from, wrestling with feelings of being an outsider among her own people, and questioning whether she truly belongs among them. There’s a lot of great stories you could tell there. WE COULD HAVE HAD GRACE FIGHTING MYTHICAL BEASTS WITH ARTEMIS, FFS.

Instead, we get her being won over by the transparently dodgy assurances of an offensively written villain because ooh boo-hoo I never had a family before!!

Karna tells Grace that this is “only the beginning of your education”, and leads her to a rendezvous with an army of bikini-clad, tribal-paint-wearing Bana.

Meanwhile, Diana is teleported back into the city from Themyscira, conveniently appearing right next to Batman. He asks if she brought the murderbee-sting antidote for Tom, and reminds us how remarkable and resilient and eligible a match Tom is.

Batman: Nemesis is resting in what used to be the Library of Congress. You brought the antidote? Diana: Yes, of course. Batman: Then I think he’ll live. He’s strong. Surprisingly strong.

Sooooooooo…

Is Tom the only person who got critically injured by the Amazons’ ultimate WMD bee weapon that was supposed to “kill us all”?

Or have our heroes just stopped bothering with rescuing dying civilians?

Batman tells Diana about the forcefield, and says that it could only be Circe’s magic, because Batman is the expert on Wonder Woman’s rogues in this conversation.

Diana launches a feeble protest of ‘but she’s dead, I saw her die’, which she absolutely did not. She saw a badly wounded Circe teleport away after being speared by Dame Stabs-a-lot, which is a very different thing, particularly when you’re dealing with a powerful sorceress with a well-known penchant for trickery and deception. With Circe, even if there is a corpse, you can’t necessarily be certain that she’s truly dead.

Bats stares at Diana wordlessly, allowing the idiocy of her statement to sink in.

Then he tells her to get the antidote to Tom. Once again, the dudes in this story think the most important thing Diana can do is keep her love interest alive.

Back at the forcefield’s perimeter, Karna tells Grace that the Bana are her family and will always be there for her. Superman swoops in and declares that he’s been listening to their entire conversation (oh, of course now he’s using his super-hearing) and Karna is lying: the Bana are the ones who’ve been blowing things up all over the country. Grace looks at Karna questioning, and Karna… ahhhhh…

…Karna seizes Grace, brings a knife to her throat and threatens to kill her.

Really. The pages of build-up that you’ve given this ‘Grace joins the Bana’ story, and this was your game plan. Karna works her arse off to gain Grace’s trust and bring her over to their cause, and the moment Grace agrees to join them, the Bana go ‘LOL PSYCH!’ and try to murder her. Really.

Oh, no, but it was “necessary”, says Karna! Why is that?

Superman: Let her go. Karna: No, I don’t think I will. I know you could fry me or freeze me or just plain pummel me into oblivion, Superman. But ask yourself one question… Could you do it before I cut this girl’s throat?

YES. YES, HE ABSOLUTELY COULD.

Karna: You probably could. But are you sure?

I AM EXTREMELY SURE.

Grace Choi has superhuman strength and durability. Oh, sure, the Bana are strong, too, but are they catch-a-goddamn-plane-with-their-bare-hands strong? Grace may be at a disadvantage in this scenario, but she’s by no means helpless, and that’s before you even bring Superman into the equation.

In Clark’s last stop-off before he faceplanted on the forcefield around DC, in Teen Titans #49, he melted all the communications devices and every single weapon’s firing mechanism in a heavily armed military unit, and he did it faster than the eye could track. Again, I know Superman’s power levels work on a sliding scale of narrative convenience, but we’re talking about one woman with a knife. Yes, he and Grace can take her.

Karna: I did not think so.

WHAT DID I JUST SAY.

Karna: So, rather than let her go, I will do this instead. I will pass through this shield… and then my friends will follow me… and you will stand there, wondering how we did it… knowing all the while that you cannot.

Awkward phrasing renders it unclear what Superman “cannot” do. ‘Knowing all the while that you cannot follow’ would work better.

But that’s the least of Pfeifer’s problems.

Karna: And as for you, sister Grace… Thank you for helping us get past the most powerful man in the world. [Karna stabs Grace and walks away]

So, just let me see if I’ve got all this straight.

The evil Bana tailed Grace into DC, spied on her, tested her DNA, assessed her fighting prowess and determined she was worthy

They approached her, convinced her to leave the city with them and listen to their pitch

They gained her trust and convinced her to join them

Then they all met back at the perimeter of the newly-conjured forcefield surrounding DC

Where they waited for Superman to arrive, before taking Grace hostage so that he’d let them pass

Thus allowing them to re-enter the city unharmed

Therefore, it was “necessary” to win Grace’s loyalty and immediately betray her, because there was no other way to get past Superman, through the forcefield and into the city

There are… so many gaping holes in this logic that I hardly know where to begin, but let’s start with if you knew a forcefield would close off the city at a proscribed time, WHY DIDN’T YOU SECRET YOUR TROOPS INTO THE CITY BEFORE THE FUCKING FORCEFIELD WENT INTO EFFECT?!

Why did you leave the city to begin with? Why did you make your entrance above ground, in broad daylight and in plane view of everybody as opposed to sneaking in through a subway tunnel? Why did you practically go out of your way to attract Superman’s attention? Why did you waste this much goddamn time courting the loyalty of a powerhouse just to needlessly take her hostage and then try to kill her?

Why is this subplot in this book at all!?

But okay, the evil Bana are in the city now. They’re about to come face-to-face with the Amazons, the people they’ve allegedly been plotting to destroy from day dot. This should be good, right?

Karna: Now, let us proceed… It’s time we came face-to-face with our beloved queen and her subjects.

Let the revenge commence!

…aaaaany minute now.

any. god. damn. second.

Karna: Your majesty. Queen Wackadoo: Karna. I am honoured you have chosen to join us. At last, the sisters are one, our enemies are trapped— and the final battle can begin.

oh sorry, I forgot to mention! This is the plan:

Help the Themyscirans take over the world

???

REVENGE

Meanwhile, Circe stands on a tower and gives the big villain monologue about how everything is proceeding exactly as she planned, all the players are exactly where she intended them to be, the “grand, glorious end” is at hand and “none of these fools even suspect I’m alive.”

Her audience, an Amazon guard, bizarrely neither tries to accost Circe nor get a warning out to the Themyscirans that the witch who betrayed them all is still alive, but instead attempts to strike up a polite conversation. “Mistress Circe… not that I’m not flattered… but why are you telling me all of this?”

“Because I’m going to kill you, of course.” Of course you are.

Batman sneaks up, knocks out the guard and mutters a meaningless jumble of letters. Circe attempts to last him with her magic, but nothing happens. Fwhaaaa?

Batman: Those words I recited… Zatanna supplied them. I don’t know where she got them. I don’t want to know. But if I pronounced everything correctly, they’ll short-circuit your magic for one hour. It’s not much… [pushes Circe over] Batman: But it’s enough.

Nope.

NOPE.

KNOPE.

This is some Batgod-Complex-run-rampant fucking idiocy right here.

I don’t know what pisses me off more: the idea that Batman, who doesn’t have a magical bone in his body, can cast a spell to depower one of Wonder Woman’s most powerful foes simply through the art of careful pronunciation, for no other reason than that it’s compulsory for Batman to always be the smartest and most competent person on the field, or the idea that Circe’s one weakness is a secret password that anybody can use, anywhere and at any time, to render her completely powerless.

It’d be like if, instead of going to great lengths to make Mister Mxyzptlk say his own name backwards in order to get rid of him, you could just shout ‘Kltpzyxm’ the moment he appeared and he’d have to fuck off. If that’s all it takes to defeat Circe, then there’s no real reason she should ever be a serious threat again. One uttered phrase undoes all her spells. One phrase stops her in her tracks. Say it once to take her down; have a recorded voice repeat it diligently at precise hour intervals in her prison cell and you’re golden.

Batman alerts the League that the forcefield is down, while Cuckoo-For-Cocoa-Puffs rallies her army.

“The remaining American troops are there — in what used to be their Capitol Building. They’re exhausted, they’re injured and they’re barely armed. Finishing them off should take mere moments. That leaves the heroes. But thanks to our Bana sisters and their well-timed attacks— the most powerful among them can’t enter the city.”

W H A T .

Hey Google, quick question, how many personnel are currently serving in the United States Armed Forces?

The projected active duty end strength in the armed forces for fiscal year 2017 was 1,281,900 servicemembers, with an additional 801,200 people in the seven reserve components.

Now, granted, these are the numbers for 2017, not 2007, but it’s a reasonable ballpark figure. And even subtracting personnel in non-combat roles, stationed overseas or presently occupied with other vital assignments, it’s a big fuck-off number.

The Amazons have taken one (1) city and destroyed one (1) Air Force base. I don’t care how good they are with those spears and longbows, you cannot expect me to believe that they have defeated THE ENTIRE US MILITARY save for a few hapless blokes hiding in a bombed-out building.

Anyway, Superman swoops in and knocks Baroness Batshit to the ground. The cavalry has arrived! All… twelve... of them.

…seriously, the US Armed Forces has been completely wiped out, but you couldn’t convince the JLA reservists, the Titans, the Teen Titans, the Birds of Prey, the Outsiders, the Suicide Squad, Checkmate, Shadowpact or any of the other myriad super-powered individuals in the country to pull their weight a little?

Meanwhile, it appears Batman did a piss poor job of knocking Circe out. The moment he leaves, she groans, climbs to her feet, and then launches right back into her villainous monologue. ‘Where was I? Ah, yes: It’s all going exactly as I planned…’

In a weird little epilogue, Grace gets up, pulls the knife from her back and looks at it morosely, whispering, “Family”. Then Diana runs past her and asks her to join the fight. What fight, Grace asks?

Hey, remember two pages ago when we were told that the US Armed Forces were virtually destroyed and “barely armed”? Because this splash page begs to differ.

[themyskira]

Amazons Attack! - part 12

PREVIOUSLY! Batman and Superman stopped Diana from ending the war, because they still had a good four or five issues of crossover to fill.

Batman realised that the high-tech attacks across the country could not be the work of the Themyscirans, who only have access to Bronze Age technology and magic, because everybody working on this comic has forgotten that the war was started over a HIGH-TECH THEMYSCIRAN DEATH RAY. But anyway, it turns out an evil group of Bana are now involved, too.

Oh, and Tom Tresser is hanging onto life, more’s the pity.

This time, Diana briefly becomes a fervent believer in the power of prayer and asks her gods to do everything for her until they get annoyed and tell her to do it herself. Also, more retcons!

Part 12: Wonder Woman #11 — J. Torres (writer) and Paco Diaz (artist)

It’s been a while, so let’s recap what’s been happening in Wondy’s story.

In WW #10, Jodi Picoult’s final issue, Tom was brought down by murderbees and Diana impulsively attacked her mother. She overpowered Lady MacBatshit, but rejected the opportunity to kill her and take the crown, instead giving Baroness Wackadoodle her dagger and delivering a challenge: “Would you kill me to win?”

Then in the very next issue, AA! #4, Will Pfeifer retconned it all. In his version of events, Diana decided that there was no time to save Tom’s life by getting the murderbee antidote, because it was up to her to save everyone — by killing her mother. They engaged in a fight to the death, which somehow-or-other ended with Queen Stabbypants holding the dagger and Diana issuing a somewhat different challenge: “Would you kill me to win? BECAUSE THAT’S WHAT YOU’LL HAVE TO DO!”

At which point Superman swept in and whisked a protesting Diana away with a patronising “Diana. Please. We have more important things to worry about right now.”

He took her to a rendezvous with the other heroes, where Batman berated her for being stupid and incompetent and selfish and short-sighted, before selfishly and short-sightedly abandoning everybody to go on a 100% unnecessary jaunt into Gotham.

Somewhere in there, he also got to explaining the “more important” thing, which is the discovery that there’s a second aggressor in this war, namely the Bana, who have been responsible for all the attacks outside of Washington.

And now it’s time for Torres to retcon Pfeifer!

Diana [VO]: It took my sisters mere hours to do to Washington, DC what took the ancient Greeks ten years to do to Troy… It took the combined efforts of the JLA and the JSA close to half an hour just to slow the Amazon onslaught.

Torres is telling us the whole calamity has unfolded in under twenty-four hours. Meanwhile, the supposedly concurrent Amazons Attack! miniseries is already into Day 3.

Superman whips Diana away from the confrontation with Madame Murderbee. Not because Batman thinks Diana is an incompetent who’s about to get herself killed, and not because they simply couldn’t wait to fill her in on the Bana development — no, there’s something far more pressing that Diana has to deal with.

Diana [VO]: And in the blink of an eye, Superman took me out of that stalemate to remind me of another life or death situation. Superman: We have more important things to worry about right now. Diana: No, right now you need to put me down. Superman: No, Diana, they need you elsewhere. Someone else needs you, remember? Nemesis is dying.

‘We have more important things to worry about than ending a war and preventing civilian slaughter and destruction on a mass scale! Your proscribed love interest is dying!’

This gets even stupider when you take into account AA #3, which featured a page of Batman monologuing about how nobody could be spared to retrieve the antidote needed to save Tom’s life, because as cruel as it sounded, this was war and they needed to prioritise the greater good. Now suddenly he and Supes are willing to prolong the war and risk countless lives just to save Tom.

Diana [VO]: It took Batman less than a minute to lecture me… assess the latest frontline developments… and quickly make his next move.

By “next move”, she means abandon everybody and leave the Justice League short-handed so that he can take a cross-country jaunt to drag Selina and her baby out of bed and subject her to a slide show of dead mothers.

Out of nowhere, the League receives word that somebody in the Department of Metahuman Affairs just initiated a missile launch sequence. Remember, this was part of Circe’s original convoluted plan: Get Everyman to impersonate Sarge Steel, infiltrate DOMA and fire a missile, which would fly through a portal that Circe would open and blow up Themyscira.

The League are like, ‘but Circe’s dead… right?’. I think they’re ignoring the more important question here, which is why does the Department of Metahuman Affairs have access to ICBMs?

Diana has her priorities in order, at least.

Diana [VO]: In the midst of the chaos and carnage… I have no choice but to stop fighting… Stargirl: Wonder Woman…? What is she doing? Diana [VO]: …and kneel in supplication. Diana: Athena… goddess of wisdom… divine mother… I have an urgent mission and must return to Themyscira immediately… Please… bring me home. Superman: She’s praying, Stargirl. Stargirl: Thanks, Superman… but what happened to her?! Superman: Her prayer was just answered!

This may be the most unintentionally hilarious turn of events in the whole crossover.

Diana does have a close relationship with her gods. Throughout the post-Crisis era, we see her praying to them, communing with them, doing their will and asking them for guidance and strength.

In this issue, she just mooches off them. She treats Athena like a glorified taxi service. And, as we’ll soon see, she gets really mad when the gods don’t immediately solve all her problems for her.

It’s awful writing, but it’s champagne comedy.

Diana arrives in Themyscira and spends a couple of pages wandering the empty buildings and mulling over mangled cliches.

They say you can’t go back home. While people can’t change who they are or where they come from… home is never the same once you’ve left it. This was once my home but I left it… and now so has everyone else.

I changed my mind; bring back Jodi Picoult.

Meanwhile, Black Canary, Wildcat and Mister Terrific race to DOMA, where they confronted by a horde of Circe’s Bestiamorphs — fierce animal/human hybrids. Mister Terrific works on overriding the missile launch while the other two hold off the baddies.

Having retrieved the antidote, Diana calls another divine Uber.

“Athena… goddess of wisdom… divine mother… please… send me back quickly…”

[beat]

[opens an eye]

“Goddess…?”

This will never not be hilarious to me.

Terrific initiates the override, but the countdown continues, and some kind of red sludge starts oozing out of everything. The art’s so bad, I’m not quite sure what’s going on, but apparently the room is supposed to be melting around them.

Mister Terrific says they need to warn the others: “If the missile is launching, hopefully they can stop it.”

Cut to two full pages of DC’s heavy-hitters staring in shock at the missile, making some belated and sluggish attempts to capture it before it enters Circe’s portal, and failing utterly.

Diana sees the portal opening in the sky over Themyscira and assumes that her ride has finally arrived.

“Is that my way back…?”

Then the missile appears. Diana snares it with her lasso and flings it away from the island, then tells Athena to deal with it.

“Athena… hear my prayer! Please guide the missile towards the safest possible—”

She stops short because she realises the missile is looping back towards Themyscira.

She races back meet it, and we’re subjected to this eyesore.

and this… I don’t even know.

“…THEMYSCIRAAAAA—”

Diana rips into the missile, tearing out any wires she can get her hands on, only for the electronics to magically repair themselves.

Some more quality art!

She flings the missile away again, and it circles back. Now she’s really mad.

At Athena.

For not doing Diana’s job for her.

Diana [VO]: I can’t keep ripping out those wires… and redirecting the missile… over and over again! Diana: Athena! Why am I being tested so? If you will not save your once favoured daughter, then what about your once favoured island, Themyscira?! WHY have you FORSAKEN us?!?

‘How dare you expect me to do my literal job? This is unacceptable.’

The missile explodes in mid-air and a giant, angry, irritatingly sexualised Athena appears before Diana.

Diana bows her head and tells her goddess “I should be thanking you”.

Then, instead of doing that, she launches into a tirade against Athena and all the Olympians for ‘allowing’ this shithouse crossover to happen.

Athena: Yet you harbour anger and bitterness in your heart towards me. Diana: Towards you! Towards Zeus! Towards all of you! Forgive me, but… have you lost your way?! Why else would you allow the Amazons to wage war on the world of man as they have? Why allow the senseless violence? Why all the destruction? The pointless deaths of your most loyal servants! The deaths of innocents! You could end it all with a wave of your mighty hand— just as you only now saved Themyscira from that missile!

Oh, please.

Diana’s not a child, and she knows her gods better than to expect them to intervene in every conflict. Batshit McGee may have been deceived by Circe, but she chose of her own free will to instigate an all-out invasion of DC, and the rest of the Amazons chose to follow her and carry out a mass slaughter of innocent civilians — even the ones who hemmed and hawed and looked uncomfortable about it. They are responsible for the acts they’ve committed, and it’s nothing short of outrageous to claim that it’s Athena’s fault for ‘allowing’ them to do it.

“Diana, today you invoked my name twice, asking for my help as the goddess of wisdom…”

Four times, actually, but carry on.

“…but you seem to have forgotten, or perhaps chosen to ignore… that I am also the goddess of war… and the goddess of strategy… and it is for me and me alone to say when and why I have my ‘mighty hand’!”

With that, Athena scoops Diana up in her huge hand and appears to crush her in her fist.

This is of course super out of character for Athena, but to be fair, she’s actually Granny Goodness in disguise. Plus, Diana is being SUPER ANNOYING, so it’s hard to blame her.

Next time: more Bana bullshit!

[themyskira]

Amazons Attack! - part 11

PREVIOUSLY! Batman baselessly accused Diana of being irrational and irresponsible and prioritising her own wants over everybody else’s needs… and then immediately abandoned his position of command on the battlefront to deal with a secondary threat in Gotham, a city that has a glut of heroes.

The story picks up in this Catwoman tie-in arc, as Bats asks Selina to infiltrate Feminist Al Qaeda.

Catwoman #69 and #70 — Will Pfeifer (writer) and David Lopez (artist)

The first issue opens on a Bana woman, standing alone in the middle of a Gotham intersection and holding aloft some kind of grenade as a heavily armed SWAT team swarms around her. Selina’s narration tells us that the woman’s name is Magda and she’s “part of a high-tech terrorist group called the Bana”, which is some fresh bullshit.

Oh, and did I mention the racist-as-fuck character design?

She’s brown, of course — the large majority of the Bana depicted are brown, because eeeeeverybody knows that terrorists come from the Middle East and are never white American men. The mish-mash of generically ‘tribal’ attire — which features face paint, feathers, shells, grass skirt, tattoos, and blow darts — serves as a shorthand for savage, uncivilised, primitive, Other.

You might think it’s weird that a group of soldiers who we’ve been told have mastered highly advanced technologies and are extremely adept in modern warfare would enter combat wearing a bikini and a grass skirt, but you’re not meant to think about it. You’re meant to see that character design and understand that Magda is Not Like Us, and is therefore threatening.

Magda invites the cops to shoot her: her grenade has enough radioactive material to kill everybody in a half-mile radius, and if she dies, it detonates. (Later, Pfeifer will contradict himself and say that it’s a bio bomb.)

Selina tells us that this is her fault: she infiltrated the Bana to stop them from the inside, stole the radioactive material as an “initiation stunt” and gave them the tools to create a dirty bomb that’s now seconds from going off.

And… that’s it. That’s pretty much the whole issue. The remaining twenty pages are more or less just Will Pfeifer rehashing everything we’ve just been told, in excruciatingly boring detail.

Flashback to one week earlier. Selina is neglecting her baby daughter (this being that brief period of time when Selina had a child) so that she can watch the horrific mass death and destruction unfolding on the TV news, which is definitely appropriate viewing for a toddler.

Helena: Kaa-wun Selina: Helena… Honey, please… Mommy’s trying to watch the news. Helena: Kaa-wun, Kaa-wun, Kaa-wun

Helena wants Karon, her babysitter and the long-term girlfriend of Selina’s friend and ally Holly Robinson.

Have a guess why Karon isn’t there. Go on, guess.

Helena: Kaa-wun! Kaa-wun! Selina: I’m sorry, kiddo… Karon’s not here anymore.

Yes, in a truly shocking and never-before-seen turn of events, a queer character was horribly injured to make the protagonist sad.

This isn’t at all relevant to the tie-in plot, it’s just super shitty.

Later, Selina is woken by the sounds of Helena stirring in the nursery. She gets up to check on the baby, while the TV continues to play in the background:

Reporter 1: …a turn for the worse, as the heroes defend the capital in what can best be described as a scattershot approach. Reporter 2: Yes, Eric, there doesn’t seem to be any organisation at all. I can’t say what the difference has been for these last few hours, but clearly, some element is missing. I don’t know who was in charge of coordinating this admittedly diverse group of metas before… but one thing’s clear — whoever that person was… they’re not here right now.

GOSH DO YOU THINK THE TV IS TRYING TO TELL US SOMETHING

Yes, apparently everything has gone to shit without the Batgod around to tell everyone what to do.

I imagine this is intended to drive home how important and indispensable he is, but for me it just underlines what a massive asshole he’s being, abandoning his friends when he’s needed most so he can race across the country to break into Selina’s house and play with her baby. You have a communicator, Bruce. You didn’t have to leave DC to have this conversation.

Bruce thinks differently. Not only was a phone call not good enough for him, he’s not even content to have this conversation in Selina’s apartment. No, he has to drag Selina and her daughter out to the Batcave in the middle of the night — having already taken the fairly creepy liberty of packing clothes for her — and refuses to so much as tell her anything until they’ve arrived at a suitably dramatic location.

And then he launches into a conversation that could easily have taken place OVER. THE. GOD. DAMN. PHONE.

He recaps the events of Amazons Attack!, tells Selina the Bana are planning “something big” in Gotham, and then emotionally manipulates her into coming out of retirement to infiltrate their terrorist cell.

Selina: I almost hate to bring this up, seeing as how you’re the world’s greatest detective and all, but things are different now. As you may or may not have noticed, I’m a mom. Batman: Yes, you are. So was Eleanor Hayes. And Pam Harris. And Miranda Torres. And a lot of other women who died in the Bana attacks.

He actually shows her a slide show of photos of dead mothers to twist her arm, the prick.

The Bana already have their eye on Catwoman, so the infiltration plan basically amounts to ‘go out in the costume, make yourself visible and wait for them to try and recruit you’, which is what happens. Magda approaches Selina while she’s robbing a jewellery store and gives the pitch.

“And so she talked. For a long, long time. And you know what? She hit all the right notes: female empowerment, tearing down a flawed system, redistributing power… In fact, if it hadn’t been for all the innocent victims that she failed to mention… I might have been convinced myself.”

It’s true, feminists talk a big game about empowering women and addressing systemic inequalities, but underneath it all we just want to bathe in the blood of men.

Almost immediately, Magda introduces her to the rest of the crew. So much for easing her into the murdering-innocent-civilians side of the mission.

Magda: Look, Catwoman. This… This is what we do. This is who we are. Selina [VO]: Trouble is, even when I saw them together, I couldn’t get a handle on them. The costumes, the chants, the frighteningly fierce dedication… combined with the Silicon Valley on steroids vibe… It didn’t make any sense.

Again we’re reminded that the Bana are strange and primitive and uncivilised. Savages who’ve organised and mastered the white westerners’ weapons. They’re basically just one big colonialist bogeyman.

The Bana send Selina to steal something from STAR Labs. She tries to switch it out for a dummy, but, like everyone in this crossover, she’s incompetent, so they catch her immediately and knock her out with a blow dart. When she comes to, well…

Selina: M-Magda? Bana 1: Magda is occupied at the moment. She’s bringing about the destruction of this city — and our glorious martyrdom. Bana 2: We thought you’d want to experience it first-hand. After all, you deserve the credit for all this… with the theft you committed last night. Don’t worry. It will all be over soon.

Not soon enough, believe me.

Selina overpowers her two captors and races to seize the grenade from Magda, which is where issue #69 ends.

#60 opens with Selina struggling to wrest the grenade from Magda while dodging a spray of bullets from the cops. She succeeds. Moments later, a police sniper blows Magda’s brains out, spraying gore and body parts everywhere. It’s unnecessarily graphic.

Selina gives the police the slip. One of the two surviving Bana (the one with the giant X on her face) is watching from the alley. She murders her injured companion, because blah blah evil, then reports back to the boss.

Boss Bana: Magda is dead. So is Larra. But that is not the problem. The problem is that you and I and the rest of Gotham City are not dead, too. Our sisters elsewhere succeeded in their missions. The Air Force base. Kansas. Even the Star City blast caused some damage. But our mission — enveloping Gotham in a could [sic] of death? That would’ve been glorious But it didn’t happen. Thanks to Magda. And Duva [sic—Larra?]. And you, Rena. Thanks to you. One woman. One ordinary woman beat all three of you. Pathetic.

The Bana are the Feminist Al Qaeda in Pfeifer’s absurd War on Terror analogy, so naturally they’re heavily into martyrdom through suicide bombings. Thing is, this is at odds with everything we know about the Evil Bana in this crossover.

Suicide attacks are not their usual MO: as Boss Lady helpfully reminds us here, so far they’ve aerially bombed an Air Force base, set the state of Kansas on fire and planted a timed explosive device in a nuclear reactor in Star City. 

The sudden obsession with “glorious martyrdom” is bizarre. The Evil Bana aren’t fundamentalists. We’ve never seen them justify their atrocities in terms of religious struggle, or make promises of a divine reward for those who die in their service. We’ve never seen them talk about gods at all. Mostly, they just seem to want to kill a bunch of men and maybe double-cross Hippolyta.

And even if all of this wasn’t completely incongruous — why the hell was the rest of the cell just sitting on their hands waiting to be incinerated in Magda’s suicide attack? Why hadn’t they all cleared out of Gotham to rendezvous with the rest of the Evil Bana outside of Washington for the final assault (which is what they’re preparing to do now that they have disappointingly failed to die)?

So, Boss Lady orders X-Face to stay behind and go kill Catwoman.

Selina, oblivious to this, quietly gloats about having saved Gotham. Until Oracle calls to warn her that X-Face is unaccounted for and somebody with sophisticated hacking skills has figured out that Catwoman is Selina Kyle.

From there, everything unfolds exactly as you’d expect: Selina stands over Helena’s cot before walking out of the nursery to lie on the couch. X-Face breaks in, moves past the apparently sleeping Selina and into the nursery. She pulls out a knife — Selina’s eyes open — and stabs the baby, which is of course a dummy. A gas canister inside the dummy goes off, Selina appears behind X-Face and beats her with a hammer in a momma bear rage of ‘you could have attacked me, but you had to go after MY BABY.’

The issue ends with Selina picking up the real Helena from Wayne Manor, telling her she’s “safe and sound”, while horrible visions of her enemies attacking her baby dance behind her eyes, foreshadowing her decision to give Helena up for adoption because comics won’t allow superheroes to have stable family relationships.

Next time: Diana gets lazy and asks the gods to do her job for her. It goes down super well.

[themyskira]

Amazons Attack! - part 4

Previously! Circe is working with Fake Sarge Steel to fuck with Diana, just cos. Fake Sarge Steel arrested Wonder Woman, then Circe resurrected Hippolyta and used Diana’a arrest to manipulate Polly into a launching full-scale Amazon invasion of Washington DC. Tom busted Diana out of her cell, only for the two of them to emerge into a warzone. The last issue left off with Diana coming face-to-face with Hippolyta.

This is it, guys. We’ve hit Amazons Attack #1. Let’s see how long it takes for Will Pfeiffer to drive this crossover directly off a cliff. (Spoiler alert: it takes him exactly three pages, and that’s counting a wordless double-page spread.)

Part 4: Amazons Attack! #1 -- Will Pfeiffer (writer) and Pete Woods (artist)

We open at the Lincoln Memorial, where a father is introducing his son to the story of Abraham Lincoln. They’re standing in front of the inscription of the Gettysburg Address, and the kid keeps pointing at random words and asking the dad what they say.

Kid: What’s that word? Dad: “Fathers.” Kid: What’s that word? Dad: “Equal.”

It’s a clumsy device, but it serves a purpose here: right from the get-go, Pfeiffer is invoking Abraham Lincoln, the Founding Fathers, the Declaration of Independence, notions of equality and democracy. These are the values the America of his story stand for, and they’re the values the Amazons — monarchical, man-hating, merciless, ruled by bloodthirsty women — seek to disrupt.

Then, just to underline the point, the Amazon army teleports into DC and murders the dad in front of his terrified, weeping kid.

They they murder the kid as well, for good measure.

And that, right there, is one of the fundamental problems with “Amazons Attack!”. Even before you get to the wildly terrible writing, the idiotic characterisation, the continuity nightmares— the moment DC decided to make the Amazons the villains of the piece is the moment this event lost any possible merit.

This is what the Amazon army looks like, by the way.

Women on lions and flying horses, wooden catapults, foot soldiers, and a bunch of mythical creatures including some Cyclopes and what looks like the Lernaean Hydra. Basically, once you put aside the magical shit, it’s all primitive stuff — swords and shields, plus a few siege weapons.

But hang on, because remember the context for this invasion? The US government has ostensibly taken Diana hostage because they want her to hand over the secrets to the Amazons’ ultimate weapon, a piece of advanced technology called the Purple Death Ray.

This is what the PDR looks like in action, the one and only time it’s been deployed, in Wonder Woman #224 (published around 18 months before Amazons Attack! #1):

This story goes OUT OF ITS WAY to reference the advanced technology of the Amazons and the “destructive power” of the PDR — and then it has them show up to an invasion with pointy sticks and some mythical attack dogs.

Oh, and did you catch the detailing on the Amazons’ war banners?

Every one of them is topped with a female symbol. Alan Jones warned us this day would come, you guys! Bloody feminists storming the seat of government and destroying the joint!

As the army wreaks havoc, two Amazons loiter at the foot of Lincoln’s statue.

Amazon 1: Who was he? Amazon 2: A man. Just another man. This city is full of them. Not for much longer.

fuuuuuuuuck. This is going to be a long ride, isn’t it?

In the White House, the President’s receiving a hasty briefing via a West Wing-style walk-and-talk. His advisers don’t have much to tell him, because right now all they know is that “an army of women have attacked the city.”

Firstly, no. ‘Women have attacked the city’, or ‘an army of women has attacked the city’. It’s simple subject/verb agreement, and an editor should have picked it up.

Secondly, how is it that the only piece of information that had filtered back to the White House is ‘we’re being attacked by women’? You expect me to believe that nobody thought to mention the one-eyed giants, the flying horses or or friggin seven-headed serpent monster? Or the fact that a horde of Bronze Age warriors appeared out of nowhere and started attacking people with swords and catapults? The fact that the invaders are all women is out of the ordinary, yes, but it kind of pales beside gigantic mythical beasts rampaging through the National Mall.

The adviser says that “at this point, [the attackers] appear to be… Amazons”, which, way to bury the lede, dude. If you knew that already, why’d you feel the need to tease it out?

The President and his entourage are walking through a second-floor corridor of the White House, when a wall explodes. Two figures step through the rubble, and the Secret Service agents fall down dead, with arrows through their skulls. POTUS and his surviving aide are cornered.

Here’s a fun game! See if you can count all the continuity errors in this next panel.

The Amazons exploded a wall and then shot people with arrows. Things they are not holding: bows, arrows, anything resembling an explosive device.

Behind the rubble of that second-floor wall that exploded? Tunnels. So… suddenly we’re on the ground floor? Or underground?

Ugh, why am I trying to make sense of this?

The Amazons advance, preparing to murder the President (Hippolyta wants his head on a stake hahaha I hate everything), but then Black Lightning shows up and electrocutes them.

Meanwhile, in the Smithsonian, Hippolyta has acquired a throne and a couple of bonfires and is wondering whether she should build a robot so it can peel her a grape.

Circe is there Wormtonguing it up and urging Hippolyta to embrace her warlust. Which Hippolyta does, immediately, because Diana who? Who cares about the daughter she came here to save when she could be murdering innocent civilians and vandalising phallic monuments?

“The President’s fate, the military’s impending arrival — even the freedom of my daughter… none of it matters at this moment. What matters is that for the first time, the world of men is at our mercy… and we must make the most of it. Come, my warriors… there is work to be done. Just as their enslavement of my daughter mocks our hard-fought freedom… so this city and its architecture mock the buildings of our beloved Themyscira.”

what the flipping fuck.

Hippolyta says she knows exactly where to start, and I was honestly surprised the next scene wasn’t the Amazons castrating the Washington Monument. What she does go for is almost as on the nose, though.

Hippolyta: This. This is the seat of their government. This is where they make their laws. Men’s laws. No more. Amazons: HURRAH!

Also, throughout this the Amazons are all ‘yes, Majesty!’ and ‘what are your orders, my queen?’ because apparently everybody has forgotten that Hippolyta herself abolished the monarchy and Themyscira now has a democratically elected government.

(That second panel? That’s from Wonder Woman #208, which was published only two and a half years before Amazons Attack! #1.)

The army goes in search of something else to vandalise, and…

Yep. Yeah, that was Hippolyta beheading Abe. Who is sculpted from marble.

(I dunno, I guess she could conceivably have a magical sword capable of cutting through stone? Really, this is one of the less implausible moments in the issue, when I think about it.)

At the Department of Metahuman Affairs, Sarge Steel is coordinating with Batman. “The military, God bless ‘em, is all set to hit those ladies soon, and hit ‘em hard,” he says, “but you and I both know that they don’t have much of a chance.”

Ah, yes. If only the United States military had something, anything to match the destructive power of swords and catapults.

Batman says the Justice League, including Superman, are on their way, and that Steel should focus on finding “the other big gun. The one with the initials ‘W.W.’”, which is a really long and convoluted way of saying “find Wonder Woman”. It’s not like he has any reason to be coy. And why would you bother using an abbreviation of ‘Wonder Woman’ that has more syllables than her actual name?

For that matter, why is Batman tasking Steel with finding Wondy? Since Batman apparently doesn’t know that Steel captured (and then lost) Diana, and Steel isn’t supposed to know that Wonder Woman is working for him as Diana Prince… it seems like, from Bats’ perspective, he (or the League) would be much better positioned to track down Diana than Steel. Not to mention, at this moment Diana would appear to hold the key to understanding why the Amazons are attacking, which is a lead you with think Batman — THE DETECTIVE — would want to follow up on himself.

Steel wanders off into his office, where he indulges in some light gloating at the expense of the real Steel, who is bound and gagged inside a closet, in the plot twist everyone saw coming.

We close exactly where Wonder Woman #8 ended, with Diana coming face-to-face with Hippolyta in the ruins of the Lincoln memorial. Except that

Diana’s alone now (Tom was by her side her in the last issue’s cliffhanger),

the Washington Monument is a piece of rubble (it’s visibly intact not only at the end of WW #8, but at the start of WW #9 — the issue directly following on from this one), and

she’s now calling Hippolyta “Mom”, something Diana has never done ever.

Not that it matters, because none of this is going to be followed up. I’m serious; WW #9 picks up as if this encounter, which is teased in two separate cliffhanger endings, never happened.

This fucking crossover, I swear to god.