Welcome home.
Okay, I'm officially excited. If I'm not mistaken, Wondy #605 is the start of Phil Hester's run on WW, and if he goes on like this I may actually have a new favorite writer. Of course, I may be getting ahead of myself, but 605 was just so awesome compared to the weirdness we got for the first five issues.
First of all, Diana has a house! Here I thought she just slept on tunnels and benches and ate gum! It even has a guardian statue! And--wait for it--a talking cat. Not to mention a PS3. Go, Diana!
Hester does in these first few panels what JMS has failed to do since his first issue--establish the world in which Diana lives, the people she constantly interacts with, and the circumstances under which she grew up. This is an alternate universe here, one that none of the readers are familiar with, and what irked me so much about the start of the JMS run was that we weren't even given its parameters or the baseline of Jeggings!Diana's character (happy, generous, heavy metal fan Diana) or environment (Amazon sorority house, talking Sailor Moon cat). We jumped straight to overdrive with Angry!Diana!WithIssues! and went to deserts and bases and the Underworld (I really don't remember?) like a really bad action movie, so this interlude of sorts is refreshing and, for the the first time, I'm seeing glimpses of the old Diana, and actually remembering characters and what happens to the story.
Philippus! Playing football! I was pleasantly surprised that Hester took the time to go into the secondary characters and create wonderful back stories for them--totally in the vein of Rucka, which is just unexpected and amazing.
And we have backstory! Baby!Diana is so adorbs. I love that we see how Diana grew up--we have a clearer picture now of how protected she was and still is, and we have glimpses of that rebellious streak in her as well, which is very reminiscent of canon.
Overall, this new issue is like a completely new run altogether, which has both positive and negative results. The transition is an absolute mess and plot holes abound, but tbh I really don't care as long as we have another writer as good as Rucka revamping JMS's stale story and giving us a Diana we can recognize. She's still not the Diana we know, but we're getting there.
First of all, Diana has a house! Here I thought she just slept on tunnels and benches and ate gum! It even has a guardian statue! And--wait for it--a talking cat. Not to mention a PS3. Go, Diana!
Hester does in these first few panels what JMS has failed to do since his first issue--establish the world in which Diana lives, the people she constantly interacts with, and the circumstances under which she grew up. This is an alternate universe here, one that none of the readers are familiar with, and what irked me so much about the start of the JMS run was that we weren't even given its parameters or the baseline of Jeggings!Diana's character (happy, generous, heavy metal fan Diana) or environment (Amazon sorority house, talking Sailor Moon cat). We jumped straight to overdrive with Angry!Diana!WithIssues! and went to deserts and bases and the Underworld (I really don't remember?) like a really bad action movie, so this interlude of sorts is refreshing and, for the the first time, I'm seeing glimpses of the old Diana, and actually remembering characters and what happens to the story.
Philippus! Playing football! I was pleasantly surprised that Hester took the time to go into the secondary characters and create wonderful back stories for them--totally in the vein of Rucka, which is just unexpected and amazing.
And we have backstory! Baby!Diana is so adorbs. I love that we see how Diana grew up--we have a clearer picture now of how protected she was and still is, and we have glimpses of that rebellious streak in her as well, which is very reminiscent of canon.
Overall, this new issue is like a completely new run altogether, which has both positive and negative results. The transition is an absolute mess and plot holes abound, but tbh I really don't care as long as we have another writer as good as Rucka revamping JMS's stale story and giving us a Diana we can recognize. She's still not the Diana we know, but we're getting there.