As a fan of both Gail Simone and George Perez who doesn’t read much/isn’t very interested in Wonder Woman; as someone who’s most recent exposure to WW was in Wednesday Comics, I was worried that maybe it was a DC mandate that they cram as many panels as possible into every page of every issue.  The page was so busy with balloons and boxes that I didn’t have any desire to read it.  And when I did sit down and go through it, I wished I hadn’t.  It felt very heavy handed.  Perhaps because I have no affinty for the characters in the book, I just didn’t have any emotional response to the commencement speech or..well..anything in the first story.

Luckily the second story is an Amanda Conner story featuring Cassandra Kain Batgirl and Power Girl.  It is expectably awesome.  And the only five star story in the book.

The Louise Simon story is a fun 90sesque WW & Superman jaunt.

There is absolutely nothing I like about the Geoff Johns/Scott Kolins story.  I usually think those two are the top of their respective crafts, but Kolins art, while penciled really well has a very throwbacky color scheme that looks…chalky.  Not blackboard chalky, but street art chalky.  It’s technically done very well, but I don’t like the look of it.  And the story is a bland lead in to the first Straczynski Wonder Woman story which is itself…boring.  It’s WW in a new world (which is the reason for her new costume which appears to be bothering lots of WW fans, but I think looks fine), a new world which is…similar to our own but someone is out go get Wonder Woman, and she needs to find out why from the Oracle!

The story really reads as though Straczynski had a storyline idea, and he just didn’t care to read what came before him so he had Johns write a four page story of her going into another dimension, allowing him a clean slate.

There’s not enough story here to judge whether or not Straczynski is off to a good start, but it certainly didn’t excite me enough to pick up the next issue.

Apart from the odd chalkiness on Kollins’s art, and the over-panelling of Perez, I thought the art in this book was all over the map.  For some reason she has stupid face on Shane Davis’s pinup (which is a weird juxtaposition with the first page of Kollins’s art, where he gives her the patented Liefeld grimace), and Gillem March, in an attempt to make it look she’s quickly lassoing something, instead makes it look like…like something poorly drawn.  March seems to excel when characters are posing or standing still.  But he has some serious perspective problems, and he sometimes has a difficult time conveying the action to the reader, and that’s incredibly apparent in his pinup.  Especially when it’s followed up by Horn, and then Manapaul, both of whom do spectacular work.  There’s also fantastic work by Nikola Skott (who I wish would do more WW stuff.  I’m glad Lee’s on for a while, but Nikola Scott seems made for the Amazon), Jock, and Ivan Reis.

So there’s a lot of good in the art, and nothing is purely terrible.  Still, it didn’t get me amped for diving into Wonder Woman.