Wonder Woman abandons people.
Not really, but that is what the villain of this arc thinks. Vanessa Kapatelis was a young girl who ended up crippled after getting into a crossfire between Wonder Woman and a villain. As she recovered, Diana visited her every day until a surgery involving Nanites popped up. Vanessa was soon able to walk again, but Wonder Woman stopped visiting. Feeling betrayed, Vanessa used the Nanites from her surgery to become the villainess, Silver Swan. Diana goes in with her brother, Jason, to confront the former friend, but they all end up in a stalemate, falling from the sky wounded. Will Wonder Woman and Jason defeat this ghost from the past?
**Some Spoilers Below**
Story:
After their fall, Diana and Jason pick themselves up and get to work trying to figure out where Silver Swan went. They are able to piece together that she would first go to the hospital where she was treated. Wonder Woman is informed by the staff that the Silver Swan had to use her Nanite-ridden blood to purge all files on her origin. With no other leads, the children of Zeus head home only to find the villain waiting there for their final battle.
If you can’t tell by the shortness of the paragraph above, the main plot of the story wraps up quickly and unceremoniously. Most of the issue feels more like a set-up for future storylines than a conclusion to this one. We get scenes of Darkseid’s forces fighting Steve Trevor, the return of Dr. Psycho, and Jason getting kidnapped by a dark force. This wouldn’t be so bad if they weren’t jammed in at random.
If they were all at the end of the issue, it would be a nice haunting sign of things to come. Instead, two parts are forced into the middle of the Silver Swan fights. The battle against Darkseid doesn’t even get a conclusion! It has a two-page spread, then it’s never mentioned again. If one of these plots were removed, there would have been more time to have an emotionally impactful finale. This issue could have had all of this if it was stacked properly. Since it’s not, the issue is just a mess.
Art:
The art is still the selling point of this story arc. Emanuela Lupacchino and Carmen Carnero work together on the pencils and it looks amazing. Every page pulls you into this eye-catching world and doesn’t let you go. This is also in part of Romulo Fajardo jr.’s colors, that has the characters look colorful yet realistic. The team created art that could be breathtakingly beautiful and horrifyingly dark in the matter of a single page. It has such range and skill behind it, it’s a shame that it wasn’t paired with a better story.
Conclusion:
It’s sad to see a story with such a great opening fall so hard. While it’s beautiful to look at, most of the emotional connection of the book has faded away. Any of the pages that hinted at future stories could have easily been removed to make room for the emotional connection this story so desperately needed. The only positive I can really point out is the fantastic art, but even that isn’t enough to save the issue. This storyline flew so high at the start, but sadly swan dived before the climax even began.
