First, the calm before the shitstorm. I will say three nice things about this book: 1) Cliff Chiang is back. My eyeballs are very thankful. 2) The dialogue is far, far more normal than the punny non sequiturs of the past few issues. There are a few puns (usually on phrases like “what the hell?” and “go to hell”), but they make sense in context and aren’t over-used. 3) The characters recap what happened in the last issue, for those simpletons (like me) who were initially confused about what was up with the candle and the pool on Mount Olympus. (Why they couldn’t have said something like “the point of it was — to blind Hera” in that issue is another point, but I won’t press it.) Now, to the topic everyone’s going to be arguing about for the next week: The further degradation of the Amazons. Not only has Azzarello retconned Diana’s parentage, he’s retconned the parentage of all the Amazons — who are apparently the product of a centuries-long racket of Mata Hari seduction, murder and human trafficking. Every 30 years they seduce sailors, get pregnant, kill the unsuspecting babydaddies and trade any male children they might have to Hephaestus — and these Manazons are perfectly happy with this arrangement, because if the Amazons hadn’t sold them, they would have drowned them. Now, I said some things in Azzarello’s defence when he introduced the Zeus-is-Diana’s-father twist, and turned the Amazons into jealous Mean Girls. I likened it to J.J. Abrams reinventing the Vulcans as dicks and blowing up their planet. It was unpopular, but it was iconoclastic. As a Star Trek fan, it wasn’t my cup of tea, but it must be someone’s. But I don’t know whose cup of tea this is. This is at least a version of the Amazons consistent with some versions of Greek myth, in which the Amazons would have sex with men from surrounding tribes and leave male children to die or be enslaved. So at least Azzarello is being consistent with his approach to this reboot, which draws more from Greek mythology than from the established Wonder Woman mythos itself. Here’s the thing about Greek mythology, though: It’s big, it’s contradictory, and it’s boundaries are blurred after millennia of being soaked in the fabric of Western civilization. For instance: The scrying pool from the last issue, as far as I know, isn’t a “Greek” myth: It’s from Jason and the Argonauts in 1963. The big flat-screen TV in the middle of Mount Olympus is a Hollywood trope to visually depict the gods looking down at mortals. (Hence my frustration last month, when fans of Wonder Woman #6 were accusing critics of being philistines who hadn’t read enough Greek mythology. Maybe they had, and Homer and Hesiod just didn’t say anything about all-powerful flat-screen TVs.) So Azzarello has a lot of myths to choose from in telling his story, both from actual mythology and from the mythos of the DCU. And he chose the one that made the Amazons into all-but-literal man-eaters, instead of paragons of feminism and self-sufficiency. They victimize men instead of living independently from them. I understand why that makes Wonder Woman fans angry, and I’m not that happy about it either. If the intent is to build up Wonder Woman as a character by setting her apart from the Amazons, it doesn’t work — she just ends up being made to look naive and clueless, and her old mythos is made to look equally so. I don’t know what we gain from this, and I don’t want to stay and find out any more.