I know it’s a waste of energy, but I’ve developed a grudge against Greg Rucka’s run on Wonder Woman. It’s my own fault for sticking with the book for as long as I did, but Rucka talked such a good game back in the beginning. He seemed to be bursting with interesting ideas for the character — her beliefs, her various roles as cultural ambassador and adventurer, her inner life, and how people viewed her — that it was particularly disappointing to watch the issues pile up without ever fulfilling the promise of those ideas.
What I got instead were interesting, well-developed bits mixed in with less successful material, none of it ever really blending into anything coherent. None of the various story threads ever gained enough momentum or got enough focus to pay off.
It’s not that there was too much going on; it’s more that it all was inadequately managed or tracked. Diana seemed to be yanked from thread to thread, whether via the machinations of the pantheon, the badly motivated schemes of would-be arch-nemesis Veronica Cale (who seems to have mercifully vanished), or a variety of other influences.
All of these external forces seemed to care intensely about what Wonder Woman stood for without ever actually articulating what that was or why it was so important to them. There was a sort of assumed Amazonian philosophy that never really reached the page. (Early on, Diana wrote a book that articulated her positions, but readers never really saw much of it… only the subsequent uproar.) It had the effect of making the title character fairly irrelevant to her own adventures, and that’s never a good thing.
And now, she’s become something of a utility player for Infinite Crisis and its various feeder plots. I don’t find any of the recent portrayals of the character to be inconsistent or unbelievable. They fit well enough with previous portrayals. But the OMAC-related events don’t really have anything to do with the dozens of issues that have gone before. Diana’s actions and subsequent behavior are plausible, but they’re jarring at the same time, because they were dropped into the book from out of nowhere (at least for people who aren’t following a variety of unrelated mini-series, but I guess nothing is really unrelated at this point).
But really, the neck-snapping and Rift in the Trinity stuff are really just a convenient last straw. It’s been evident for a while that the book was never going to live up to its early promise and Rucka’s interesting ideas for the character. So, more money for manga.
On a somewhat related note, I’m really disappointed to see that Gail Simone’s run on Action Comics will be so short. She’s done nice work with the characters and had pulled off some of the more graceful tie-in issues in the Countdown flurry. I guess it’s a relief that she didn’t have much time to lay down any significant subplots, as it won’t be too difficult to wrap them up, but I’ll miss her take on Metropolis.
It’s just more evidence that there’s no profit for me in investing anything in Superman titles, no matter how much I admire the creators. Since it’s really only creators who draw me to the franchise, I’m inevitably disappointed when their momentum gets derailed by crossovers, editorial mandates, and musical chairs.