Originally Posted by
Guy_McNichts
I can take or leave the costume. It looks better without the jacket, but frankly, I found it kind of plain looking.
But Odyssey's story......is a complete trainwreck. It's an overlong, overwritten, meandering mess that manages to squander two or three decent premises and, frankly, insult Wonder Woman to her core. It's JMS deciding Diana, as she normally is and meant to be, is damaged and inferior and must be replaced with his personal fan-fic version of the character.
When it was first announced, it seemed like it was going to be an alternate timeline positing what the world would be like if Diana never became Wonder Woman. Which is a decent idea for a story. We've never seen that done with her, and there are lots of interesting possibilities.
But that' not the story JMS wanted to tell. He wanted to effectively retcon Diana's origin and backstory and make it canon. A fun side-effect of this is it therefore suggests that if she never became Wonder Woman, absolutely nothing would change. The world would keep on going exactly as it has.
See, usually when one does the It's a Wonderful Life thing--where we see what the world would be like if the hero never was--the world is in ruin or a macabre dystopia. But not with Wonder Woman. In The Odyssey, she's erased from history, and no one noticed.
Off to a great start.
The Odyssey is the story of Wonder Woman facing the goddess Nemesis, failing miserably, dying, and getting turned in Nemesis's avatar. Then the gods, acting as a pretty blatant deus ex machina, create what is essentially an alternate timeline doppelganger to take Diana's place. A barely competent Diana--Nu-Diana, let's call her--who frankly gets everyone around her killed. Seriously, multiple times through this story, she blunders into a trap, nearly gets herself killed, and has to be saved from someone sacrificing themself for her.
Her Amazon bodyguards? They die saving her. Artemis, Cheetah and Giganta after she convinces them to turn good? They die saving her. I'm pretty sure Dr. Psycho dies immediately after he helps her.
IIRC, Nu-Diana saves exactly one life this entire damn story. Literally everyone else she interacts with dies...and usually because she's a jackass.
Then, of course, is the big reveal at the end. I saw it coming because when Nu-Diana learns that the original Wonder Woman died fighting Nemesis, it reeks of that Star Wars "Darth Vader murdered Anakin Skywalker" trick. I remember reading that scene and thinking, "Oh, no...the real Diana is the villain, isn't she?"
Sure enough, the classic Wonder Woman that we know and love is revealed to be the avatar of Nemesis. And we discover the reason she was so easily defeated and corrupted is because...
....wait for it.....
...because she was out of touch with humanity and willing to kill if necessary.
That's right, we got a two-in-the-hole here. The grim specters of Max Lord and the Infinite Crisis fallout hover over this climax like a poisonous cloud. The real Wonder Woman was weak of spirit and easily corrupted by Nemesis because real heroes never kill. Ever. And Nu-Diana learns a valuable lesson about how killing is always wrong.
Also, Nu-Diana is better because she wasn't raised on Themyscira, therefore she's more in touch with the little people. And because she watched her mother and all the Amazons get slaughtered, she understands hardship and it makes her stronger...unlike the real Diana.
Let's recap: Nu-Diana is better and more fit to be Wonder Woman because she's 1) the last of her kind, 2) raised in humble surroundings, 3) has tragedy in her life, 4) knows that killing is always wrong.
In other words, JMS believes Wonder Woman would be better if she was more like Superman with a dash of Batman to boot.
That's just extraordinary. I literally started cursing at the comic in my hand as I read it.
Also, and this might be a small thing, but it stuck out to me:
At the end of the story, Nu-Diana and corrupted Diana come together in a bright light. In theory, this is Nu-Diana and classic Diana recombining to become proper Wonder Woman again.
Question: if you were creating this scene as a writer/artist, how would you convey it visually? A splash page of Wonder Woman in her classic costume, signifying that, yes, she's back and better than ever? A mix of Nu-Diana's costume with the classic, demonstrating that this is a synthesis of the two Dianas into a new, stronger hero? Or do you just have Nu-Diana in the same costume she'd been wearing the whole time, showing that she is Wonder Woman now and the old one is gone forever--nothing more than downloaded memory in Nu-Diana's head?
Guess which one they went with.
Even putting aside the appalling messages and sub-text, the actual story is just poorly told. It's padded like hell. This did not need to be twelve issues long, much less extended to fourteen. The art is inconsistent--at least one issue had three different artists on it.
There is a lot of "tell, don't show" on display because when Diana isn't blundering into traps, she's getting fed long-winded speeches about how important she is and why the world needs her. But we rarely see it proven. As said, she gets virtually everyone she meets killed. Her entire life getting changed has zero impact on the rest of the world, and in fact, they hand-wave that by saying the gods cast a magic spell that get history intact despite everything that happened to her.
This was a bad, bad story. It tries to demonstrate how important Wonder Woman is, and instead makes her seem inconsequential and useless. This is a story that tries to deconstruct and reconstruct Wonder Woman, but only takes a steaming piss all over her mythos. An apotheosis of writers' wrong-headed efforts to "fix" Wonder Woman without understanding anything about her, and as a result, insults everything about her.