Wait, what?!  Why not???     

Great reviews so far, Scott!!!

It's always nice to see a new perspective on one's favorite comics, and it's been a long time since I've seen anyone say anything positive about Perez' run.

Got it.  You should track down the 4 Perez WW trades, you can find them relatively cheap online.  

But do it soon, so that you can read along with this thread!  

Cool. I keep meaning to re-read (or read for the first time) some of these comics, but I never get around to it. I think I'm scared off by all those tiny little panels and all that damn clutter. As a Tothian that stuff gives me hives.

Well, it could snow in April, but it's pretty rare for there to be any major accumulation. In #4, as we are about to see, there's a fair amount of snowfall and everyone is pretty well decked out in winter gear. It just doesn't feel like April. Though, on the other hand, the stuff in #3 doesn't exactly feel like January either, so... we'll see how it plays out.

Wonder Woman #4
written by George Perez and Len Wein, art by George Perez and Bruce Patterson



Synopsis: Diana manages to rescue the professor and Vanessa from their collapsing house, but Decay gets away. Diana chases her.

Meanwhile, in various subplots: Etta Candy, working on Steve's behalf, sneaks into a secure area at the Air Force base and finds files about "The Ares Project." On Olympus, the gods plan a last ditch effort of some kind.

Back on Earth, Diana battles Decay. It goes poorly until Diana remembers her lasso. She wraps Decay up in it. Since the lasso was forged form the girdle of Gaea, it pulses with Gaea's life-giving power - the opposite of decay. The life energy overwhelms Decay - and Decay explodes! I think we can decisively score that one for Diana. The media also thinks so; they gather around her and ask her a bunch of questions, but she doesn't understand what is happening and flies off.

That doesn't stop the media from creating a hullaballoo around Diana. In a nice bit of meta commentary, the folks at the Boston Globe (more on this later) discuss how Superman's arrival sent sales of the Daily Planet through the roof, so they are eager to cash in on their own superhero. Noting the logo on Wonder Woman's costume - a stylized bird that also happens to look like two Ws - they decide to call her Wonder Woman. Ta-da!

Steve Trevor gets an eyeful of the media coverage and realizes she's the same person who saved him when his plane crashed. He decides she can therefore clear his name, so he and Etta track her down. She's at the professor's "winter home," which in this case is just another house she owns where it snows a lot. That's... basically the opposite of how winter homes are supposed to work. But, anyway. She and the professor are trying to crack the secrets of the amulet, because despite Decay's death, Vanessa is still a shriveled old hag.

Just then! Diana sees Steve skulking about. She goes outside and confronts him. As far as she's concerned, he tried to drop a bomb on Paradise island, so things are pretty tense. But then they hear Etta shouting. They rush over and find one of Steve's Air Force buddies standing over a prone Etta, with his gun drawn! NO!!! Now we may never find out the secret of her French WWII fiance!!!!

TO BE CONTINUED!!

Notes: Four issues in and we get our first real fight sequence with Wonder Woman. She betrays her inexperience by pretty much getting her butt kicked and doing dumb things, but figures it out just in time. It's a nice change from the super competent older Wonder Woman we're used to, and in perfect keeping with how she's been depicted so far.

Besides the fight scene, the subplots all advance. Phobos' plan has now failed, but Deimos is still working on his own plan, which no doubt will come into effect next issue. Steve's subplot also meets up with Diana's again. It's interesting; their stories just split up last issue, but thanks to the density of the plotting here, it already feels like it's been forever.

We get our first lettercolumn here. In it, Karen Berger indicates this first arc, with the search for Ares, is going to run through issue #6. Honestly, it feels like that might not be enough time, but we'll see. It might not be enough time - she also says that Cheetah will be appearing in #7 or #8, but in fact she doesn't appear until #9, so it's possible this first arc does end up being extended.

Boston Stuff: We get some more Boston stuff here. Firstly, my commentary about the Boston Globe not being a tabloid gets nullified, as they rename the newspaper the Boston Globe-Leader. I assume this is for legal reasons. By the same token, when the newscasters show up, they are from channel 3. There's no Channel 3 here; the real channels at the time would have been 2, 4, 5, 7, 25, 38 and 56. But they probably wanted to avoid any potential problems they might have had if they had made it channel 4, and made the newscaster Jack Williams instead of a guy named Fred who just looks like Jack Williams.

As we've been discussing, I'm still not sure what time of year this is supposed to be taking place in. Some of the people in the crowd scenes are wearing scarves or winter hats, but very few of them. It doesn't look so much like full winter gear as it does maybe November or March clothing. That changes when they go to the "winter home" - again, that's not how winter homes work - and there's a full-on snowstorm raging.

I am glad they moved them out of the city, though, because the house on "Beacon Hill" that blew up was so obviously not on Beacon Hill. Wein somehow describes the Beacon Hill house as  a "suburban Boston home," which is just... I mean, Beacon Hill is literally in the dead center of the city. It's not suburban at all. It's like saying The Dakota in NYC is suburban because it's near Central Park. It's as urban as you can possibly be, man!

In other flavor bits, one of the professor's neighbors in NOT Beacon Hill is wearing an M.I.T. sweatshirt throughout. During Diana's battle with Decay, Diana throws the Boston Massacre Monument at Decay. This is a real thing, but for some reason George didn't use photo reference for it, as his version doesn't look much like the real one. There's also a bit during the Decay sequence where she seems to destroy the Pru. No follow up to this development, but given that's the biggest building in the city and dominates the skyline, that would kind of be a major big deal.

My Grade: A-. Everything is still humming along.

This was one of the most memorable moments of the series for me. In the Hero Monomyth Cycle, it's standard for the mentor to eventually die or be otherwise removed so that the protagonist can mature into his/her own hero, but this departure comes way too early for Diana, and it's not just a powerful mentor -- it's her gods, the very basis of her identity and understanding of the universe.

You'll find that the run is shaky and uneven throughout -- the immediate conflicts are rarely as rich as the characterizations and overall directions, but this moment truly stuck out to me as a highlight.