Wonder Woman Annual 1 Spoilers

There were some interesting developments in this issue. Donna Troy has an amazing new ability. Wonder Woman describes her point of view of what it means to be an Amazon. Wonder Woman escaped being severely injured or killed. The roots of Derinoe's resentment is described, but she's a sad tale, but her tragedy seems to have selfless roots. The tragedy of Hippolyta's rise to the throne is described. However, despite witnessing betrayal, the Amazon's enmity against men is left even more confusing. The final fate of the underground aliens is not resolved.

Everything was so... underwhelming.... I can't even... why!

So those aliens just killed thousands of people then WW told them that they could go home and they were like oh well thank you lady we will cause no more trouble and everyone shook hands.

While I can reluctantly accept that as a diplomatic accident where Earth was not ready to have a formal diplomatic relation with those aliens and JL had to let them go on Earth's behalf, the fight between Diana and Donna was just like a bar fight between two super strong people. Diana's fighting skills wasn't that impressive at all. She got hit so many times and it seemed that she only brought Donna down by using the lasso instead of actually winning the fight. While I can let this go by convincing myself that she wasn't really trying, and that she didn't want to hurt Donna, what was the function of the lasso in the fight? Did she use it to tie Donna up or did she use it to make Donna understand whatever she wanted her to believe or both? If it was the first one then why didn't she just use it the first place but allowed herself to be beaten around? If it was to make Donna understand, why didn't she use the lasso in Donna's first appearance? Why not use it on the Amazons when they couldn't understand her point? And how come they just snapped out of their madness by witnessing Donna's defeat? Also, she was so into her own not-so-impressive speech that she failed to notice an old lady sneaking up on her. To me a large part of this arc was just a device to get rid of the male Amazons and was done unwisely.

The second part of the story was also confusing. Hippolyta condemned men for the actions of just a small fraction of them, for centuries. Am I correct to think that on the one hand the Spartans sent the guy to poison the Amazon queen because the witch forced them, on the other hand they also wanted to know the secret of internal youth themselves? And then the witch tried to stab Hippolyta to make her get old? So what there would be a new queen. What did the witch accomplish from this? I don't understand why her army just left without a fight. She got spooked so she decided to go home? Nothing showed that the Spartans were invading their island so that they had to go home. Why did Derinoe said "no Spartan would dare...", she already knew the witch was behind this...

Besides that, Hippolyta didn't seemed to care about Derinoe and just let her run away and picked up new lover. But then I finally understood why Diana couldn't hear the Derinoe coming: she had been practicing the art of stalking for centuries on Hippolyta without being noticed. She had become a ninja master.

..... I need someone to show me Donna sticking her arm back together.. This is disturbing.

Yeah that bit about the Spartans went completely over my head, glad I wasn't the only one. I'm not sure why Hekate attempted to kill Hippolyta and why the dagger was shaped like a lightning bolt, it made me think Zeus had some kind of involvement..and what is the price of immortality?

I feel like we've been going round in circles plus we've had to wait a long time for the conclusion so I kind of expected more than just a pretty straightforward duel accompanied by a trite monologue.

And I thought she was setting up the next arc before I realized that those alien creatures, as well as Strife, were actually just plot devices to have Wonder Woman neglect her duties, cry and yell at people. That's crazy. And upon seeing the murdered bodies of her amazon brothers whom she completely failed, Wonder Woman shed a tear

@csg_cl: so .... i guess they watched The Mummy......because that is some Imhotep sh*t right there....

right? What gets me the most about it is that they didn't even bother to give the ability a purpose. Sure we can all understand the "oh she's made of clay" bit to it, but why give her the ability and then do nothing interesting with it?

@brunnhilde said:

Glad to see I am not the only one sensing huge plot holes. At first I thought I have forgotten important hints from previous issue, but nah...

Every emotion in this arc is so hollow. In comparison the Azz run was way more intense/touching.

If this was from a superior writer I'd say the whole bit about "the price of immortality" was some kind of foreshadowing, but then she also turned around and killed everyone involved in the set-up story so it seems like a dead end.

@csg_cl: well, at least we know now you can't dismember her.....and apparently doesn't feel pain by the looks of it. I assume they didn't explain her powers either? Smh. I need to read this to give my thoughts properly

@csg_cl: It could be picked up by other writers in the future but I don't want any more ww story in the like of this one that filled with astonishing death rates, underwhelming villains and fights, bland conversations/monologues/speeches and messy logics/plot holes...

agreed

In deed no explanation was provided but it probably was because she was made of clay (the sticky kind, I presume).

I find it harder to explain her fighting skills though. She was born like yesterday by the making of some amazons (not gods) but was presented as the prominent foe of Diana the god of war... And not surprisingly Diana could almost one-shot her with her lasso.

@hastalavista: well, i'm taking into account Hippolyta's clay was used and Finch said she'd be a mix between hippolyta and the dead amazon which explains the fighting skills. And anyone noticed shes technically Derinoe's grand daughter, in a sense?

@malachi_munroe: So their skills transmitted through but not their minds? Muscle memories? But still, all those people's ability combined won't be matching Diana's skills because she was the student of Ares and defeated FB when everyone else couldn't (probably even better than Ares himself, in my dreams anyway). Their skill levels are too different, just like two cars won't make a plane.

If Donna sees herself as Derinoe's granddaughter will she try to revenge her death?

Also, I recall someone on the forum asking whether Donna was sentient because if she was then it's hard to turn her back to be a hero as she used to be after all those awful things she has done. If she wasn't then did the lasso sort of wake her up? So she either had a hibernating soul or the lasso has the ability to create one for her, wow. If her soul was hibernating, considering she was make with several amazons, will she has some vague memories or possess some of their personalities? Will she feel hippolyta's love for her 'grandmother'? Interesting. And it's so sad that I have to imagine things myself to make the story intriguing.

@hastalavista: all good points. But given the current run I'm usually going "f*ck it. It happened". Plus we know she's up to something in issue 41(still trying to eliminate Diana) then seems to begin redemption in 43.

Just going from what I read here, is Donna's "new ability" referring to that scan of her putting her arm back together?

If so, it seems kind of fitting given how she was made from clay.

xoxo, -Saint Sophie

@saint_sophie: Imhotep had a hand in that. (horrible pun?)

Eh, I make some pretty horrible puns sometimes so no. :P.

xoxo, -Saint Sophie

@malachi_munroe: LOL ... Love it!

I gave the Finches a lot of passes and leeway because at least they weren't Azzarello and Chiang, but this was terrible. Anticlimactic doesn't begin to describe it. Issues worth of build-up for a five page "fight" with lots of preaching and horribly unsuitable and unsatisfying punishments handed out all around. The back up story made Hippolyta and the Amazons look even worse than before. The whole thing sucked, please save your money.

@hastalavista:

If I were being really, really cynical I'd say the lame backstory for the Amazons was just done to make them less sympathetic deliberately. As someone said in another thread, many writers struggle with the Amazons having a backstory of oppression and slavery at the hands of men because it can come off as painting the entire male gender as consisting of monsters (but writing these women as weak and irrational is just a-okay). Even when Perez used a god's influence to explain Heracles' behavior that god was a male. Here not only is the source of the Amazons anger female she uses a man to do it (making said man a victim of her's as well).

@malachi_munroe said:

lol yeah I guess that the direction we all have to go in the end...

@agent_z:

For one thing the men that did horrible things to the Amazons could not represent all men, plus they were from ancient times and certainly cannot represent men today. And on top of all these, WW is still a feminist inspiration, recognising the oppression of men to women is a perfectly justified theme in her book. So I don't know if I understand... You mean Azz and Finch made the Amazons crazy murderers because they felt uneasy about the feminist element and they found no better way around this but had to make the Amazons monsters in turn?

@hastalavista: I was talking about how the old continuity had the Amazons being victims of men (something that was brought up less and less when their misandry was highlighted) to apparently having no legitimate grievances with men.

And those men pretty much did represent the men of their time since their attitudes were pretty common at the time.

@agent_z: And the alternative to write men as abuser is to turn the Amazons into murderers? If that's true it'd be a disgrace to the wonder woman legacy. It turned the amazons into man haters for no justifiable reasons. I can only hope that's not the direction the writers were meant to go.

@hastalavista: Believe it or not, it happened.

I'd say the alternative is to do what Marston did and have the Amazons be amused at the pettiness of men. Hate generally comes from fear, something Marston's Amazons (and really Perez too) had overcome. So the best alternative IMO is to have the Amazons let go of their fear and hate and start progressing. Azzarello had left them in a good place for this to happen, sadly Finch regressed them even further.

@hawk80:

@csg_cl: Nor did Finch explain why the amazons went for raids. If they hate men so much, why go raid them? If they won't die, why do they need children? Don't they worry about population explosion? Any way I'll just go read the JL comics because WW makes much more sense there. Can't believe Johns actually is treating ww right... We really have to thank Fabok.

@hastalavista said:

@hawk80:

@csg_cl: Nor did Finch explain why the amazons went for raids. If they hate men so much, why go raid them? If they won't die, why do they need children? Don't they worry about population explosion? Any way I'll just go read the JL comics because WW makes much more sense there. Can't believe Johns actually is treating ww right... We really have to thank Fabok.

Amen to that, thank you J-Fab! I'm really hoping the 2nd Finch arc is better!

OH BABY OH YES! LOL!

I have got to read this based off the backlash I am seeing.

@hastalavista: Well in the Batwoman crossover, the amazons ran a prison where creatures deemed more dangerous than Wonder Woman were incarcerated, I suppose they also caught those creatures and suffered casualties. In smww they guard the gates of tartarus which is a likewise dangerous occupation, perhaps that's why they replenish their numbers every now and then.

@brunnhilde: I see. Well I really hope they can just use gene technology or magic to reproduce in the future...

@hastalavista: wouldn't be surprised if they assigned Geoff Johns to sanitize her mythos before the movie, I suspect the succubi amazons will be short-lived

I thought it was a ok issue.

I was going to say the price for immortality wasn't having any children but we know they can in the 52. Though I could still see ways it's related into their procreation. Perhaps not all the Amazon's are immortal.

Interesting that Hercules wasn't involved with the Amazon's which makes me happy.

I don't have a problem with the Queen moving on after the sacrifice. We don't know how much she ever was in love with her in the first place and it seemed like Hyp had already moved on before the Amazon gave her youth up.

It didn't come across to me that she broke ties with the man's world only over the Spartans betrayal. It seemed that it was only the straw that broke the camels back. That they had a history of issues.

I don't really see any plot whole so much as see hints of future stories. Especially at the end where they talk about knowing a witch. Seems to be she's going to be an upcoming villain which will answer questions when the times is right.

But the Amazons, if written competently, lure men to their death, but copulate with them beforehand. Afterward, they kill the male children. In WW, the males were sent to be slaves of Hephaestus. In this WW story arc, those slaves, these women's brothers and sons, were brutally murdered themselves. But Queen Diana doesn't execute the Amazons who murdered them. Heck, none of the other Amazons stand up for the dead men (who are their brothers and/or sons). The Derinoe story arc was odd for all the reasons discussed here - but I reconcile all these stories as writers' attempts to deal with the moral flaws in the Amazonian culture.

At first I found it off-outing, but I quickly realized that these types of stories, over the last three years, are attempts to finally deal with the 800-pound gorilla in the room: namely, the Amazon's irrational fear of men, and the base cruelty that makes up the underbelly of their society. I have argued that Diana is odd because she doesn't share the cultural attitudes of the people with whom she grew up, and I've griped that it was never explained how this young woman came to have these values - when there was NOBODY around to teach her. I get the fact that it makes her unique, but her loyalty to her man-hating, man-murdering "sisters" doesn't elevate the character in my eyes.

In that story, swap Diana out for Thor (the male or the female version), and Donna Troy would be dead, her Amazon co-conspirators would be dead, and then Thor would leave the island in disgust, warning them to change their ways or face justice.

I haven't been following it, but I'm curious: Just how good a way was this to introduce this new Donna?

That is one way of writing the Amazons; it's not the only way and it's far from competent. There is also another gorilla that writers don't deal with; what could have happened to these women that makes them have such a seething hatred of men. Could it be that they've been exposed to how cruel men could be, particularly in ancient, patriarchal times? That's what the Perez run did when he had the Amazons as former victims of slavery.The only time his Amazons ever killed any men, it was made clear that those men had brutalized the Amazons. That was the closest thing to the type of cruelty you see here and it was still depicted as a morally gray action. It's easy to condemn them when you've never experienced what they have. Since issue 7, Azzarello and the Finches have pretty much avoided exploring this idea.

To dismiss the Amazons' fear of men as irrational you would have to ignore the centuries of women having been killed, abused and degraded by men.

Ok, let's do this @agent_z - because you make some good points about the current authors not giving equal time to explain just HOW a culture like this developed in the first place. However, I counter with the fact that the women who freed themselves from the yoke of slavery, or the cruelty of past horrors, would have the moral high ground in their actions against their former slave masters - but only those of THAT time. Even given their past, the Amazons have codified and absorbed the hatred of men into their values and culture, and have thus visited cruelty and slavery and murder to thousands and thousands of innocent men who had no remote connection to the Amazon's (certainly ancient Greek) tormentors.

Their current fear of man is indeed irrational, as the mortal men whom they hated are long dead. That world is long dead. The nations of that world are dust, having been replaced with new nations and empires, which are also dust. And there is no story arc in WW that depicts that the Amazons endured cruelty for centuries and centuries. Now, if the Amazons took in women from throughout the ages, from all over the world, THEN I could understand why their society would carry on their murderous attitudes towards men - and even then, the longtime inhabitants of "Paradise" island might be more moderate than the newly recruited former victims of human trafficking, slavery, or whatever horror they were recently rescued from.

In addition, I can't hold up a culture of women who would kill their own sons as anything other than culturally evil at its core. That these same women look at themselves as superior to the world around them is ridiculous. Let's give them an Amazon funeral??? That's how this ends? Wonder Woman has her work cut out for her, if she's going to transform these people into a moral society who can co-exist with the world around them.

@dogsoldier88: Okay I should have been clear on this. I don't like what Azzarello or the Finches have done with the Amazons. And a part of it has to do with the lack of backstory for the Amazons that they left out. It's why I stated in my post I preferred the Perez take. In that run, it was stated that the Amazons being man hating murderesses were lies created by patriarchal propagandists who hated the idea of women being independent and that they were the true victims. Their biggest crime was staying on their island minding their own business so they wouldn't have to got through all that hell again.

As for that world that the Amazons coming from no longer existing? That's debatable given their are still countries in the world were women being treated unequally is still a problem. Not saying this excuses stuff like what we see the Amazons doing here but gender inequality is not something of the past that the human race has collectively outgrown. In fact, the main reason I hate portrayals of the Amazons like Finch's or Azzarello's is because it's a straw man (or straw woman) invented to turn attention away from the way women have been stepped on throughout the centuries. Many have defended Azz by saying that what he did was a metaphor for how men have mistreated women and that he was trying to say that men and women can be better but to men that's a false equivalency.

Also the Perez Amazons did what you suggested; taking in girls who had been washed ashore. And quite a number of those girls had a lot to say about patriarch's world which did not help the Amazons' feelings regarding men.

Not so sure about that... But it'll be great if that's true.

@agent_z: I totally see where you're going. Yeah, there are SOME parts of the world to this day that would definitely be easy for Amazons to recruit women for their army. In parts of the world there are women who can't go to school, drive, vote, travel without male relatives, show their faces except to immediate family members, own land, or have jobs w/o approval of the ranking male relative. Some can be killed by any male members of the family if they feel she has shamed the family for things like: not marrying a (pedo)rapist, or being raped in general. And yes, women are sold as sex slaves throughout the world in one form or another.

There is definitely a large pool of women who would love to seek sanctuary in a place like Themyscira(?), but I don't believe that even abused women will condone the murder of their own children (male or female). Sadly, the current New 52 version of Amazons are not the redeemers of any of this. The Azz/Finch story arc didn't paint the Amazons as a moral, and neutrally good people. In fact, I don't know why the Justice League allows the Amazons to continue operating in this fashion. The Avengers or X-Men would have shut them down already - despite Wonder Woman's pleas and example.

Here's the problem with Perez's take on the Amazons. If they replenish their numbers with non-Greek, non Hera worshippers, who don't share their genetic or religious heritage, then why would they all have the Amazon physical gifts? The dominant culture of Paradise Island would, over time, change - and change a lot. These women would no longer be Greek, have any shred of Greek culture, and wouldn't be worshipping Greek gods. If the Greek Amazons were indeed immortal, this trait would not be passed to the non-Greek, non-Hera worshippers. Can you picture a Christian or Muslim woman from a 3rd-world country worshipping a Greek goddess? Not happening. The Greek Amazon immortals would be overrun by mortal, non-Greek women who, though adopting the martial customs, will resist Hellenization entirely.

It's a plot problem, not unlike many plot problem other DC books have because the original works were children's stories (for younger children at that) from the 1940's.

Pretty underwhelming issue

@dogsoldier88: purple healing ray imbues the non-genetics with gifts?

@unbreakable_fs4: It's a plot problem, not unlike many plot problem other DC books have because the original works were children's stories (for younger children at that) from the 1940's.

Can't say I am loving what they are doing with Donna tbh. At least they are planning on redeeming her.

This arc was underwhelming.