Wonder Woman #764 – Mariko Tamaki, Writer; Steve Pugh, Artist; Romulo Fajardo Jr, Colorist
Ray – 9/10
Ray: After the emotional intensity of the last issue, Mariko Tamaki and Steve Pugh team up on a surprisingly light done-in-one—but the team-up never lets us forget that Diana is working with a monster in Maxwell Lord. The search for the stolen Lord Tech weapons taken by Liar Liar leads them to Miami, with Diana doing her best to rein in Lord while being distracted by all the tourist traps of Miami. It’s great to see a more human take on Diana—it’s easy to forget that she’s only been in Man’s World a relatively short time compared to other heroes, and a lot of things are new to her. That’s contrasted with Lord’s cynical approach to everything, and it’s especially funny to see him increasingly frustrated by the fact that he keeps getting mistaken for the star of a popular 1980s cop show. Or is he? Lord has had so many weird lives that it wouldn’t surprise me if he was hiding a secret life as a Hollywood heartthrob.
The plot here is a little thin—Diana and Max Lord are on the trail of a corrupt scientist who has some of the stolen technology and is planning to use it to assassinate the world’s superheroes. After a funny segment involving them falsely identifying a bunch of weird beach-goers as the actual culprits, they come across the real scientist—and he promptly unleashes an army of translucent robots on Diana while Lord watches from the beach and makes sarcastic comments. The superhero/supervillain team-up is a time-honored tradition in comics and usually annoys both parties, but this is one of the best examples because it does such a good job of reminding us of why Lord is a dangerous villain. He’s so charming you almost forget he’s a monster, and then he’s about to mind-wipe a young woman just for annoying him slightly. I don’t know if he’s ultimately the big bad of this run, but he’s a compelling part of one of the best WW runs in a while.
To find reviews of all the DC issues, visit DC This Week.
GeekDad received this comic for review purposes.
