What do Superheroes do for dates?
I’m not a shipper but I do love a good ship. Yes, the pairing of Superman-Wonder Woman runs counter to the generally held meta cannon of Superman-Lois Lane and Wonder Woman-Steve Trevor, but this isn’t exactly a new pairing. It also doesn’t suddenly make those past meta relationships meaningless.
From the angle Charles Soule is taking, Superman-Wonder Woman is actually a rather interesting pairing given their distance from humanity. This opens up for perhaps some interesting ruminations on the nature of the superhero identity and relationships from two of DC comics most powerful characters. This is visually nicely realized by artist Tony Daniel and colorist Tomeu Morey. Together they create a clean aesthetic for the book, even as Superman and Wonder Woman battle a giant storm and monsters.
I am always impressed by efficient use of space when telling a narrative. Comic books as a medium are able to juxtapose and fold time and space in ways film and television cannot. Generally film and television are able to express simultaneous or nonlinear elements through editing by cutting back and forth in time/space, but normally not within the same frame. As bad as it was in the end 24 digital framing of things like phone calls was both novel and revolutionary, unifying people across time in single frame. While comics are read in linear fashion, the page and frames within that page can act as temporally disjointed units. This is beautifully realized on the final splash page, in the form of a triptych, before the final page (reading this digitally page numbers/count can be a bit different).
This triptych page and the folding of time and space had been building throughout the issue, with Soule jumping across space from the very start. We begin in media res with Superman and Wonder Woman battling the strange storm. After a couple of pages, we jump back to “earlier” for both a scene with Cat Grant and elsewhere, before jumping to that exact same moment in time in London where Wonder Woman is sparring with Hessia. Once again, reading digitally offers a different experience; every page becomes a page turn. In the case of this issue it helps to mechanically reinforce the fluid (and perhaps disjointed) nature of time as I as reader travel thousands of miles with the tap of a finger. The triptych is the final evolution of the nonlinearity in “Power Couple”, fusing together the dialog and silhouette of Superman-Wonder Woman in the past (on the balcony in London) with a bloody Wonder Woman in the present. Time and Space have folded onto one another, creating juxtaposition and irony with their hope for the future only to be confronted with Doomsday in the present. Much credit is due to Tony Daniel’s placement of these past frames as a means of guiding the reader’s eye through a busy page.
Using Doomsday in the first issue is defiantly a statement. Now my understanding of New52 continuity isn’t the best, I’d always thought it more akin to post-Infinite Crisis with timelines/earths fused. But with how muddled the actual timeline was at the start I’m not sure. Is this the first appearance of Doomsday or did he actually kill Superman? Either way it is an effective reveal due to the reader’s extra textual knowledge of what Doomsday means. Ending on a single page of a bloodied Wonder Woman certainly gets the point across to the uninitiated.
Bill, played by David Caradine, in Kill Bill Vol 2 uses the nature of superhero identity to make point to his former lover, Beatrix Kiddo previously known simply as The Bride. Batman is really Bruce Wayne. Spider-Man is Peter Parker. In order to become the Dark Knight or spectacular web slinger they must put on a costume. This is not the case for Superman, he was always Superman he must become Clark Kent, a human. The same holds true for Wonder Woman, Diana Prince, she is and always will be an Amazonian (or demigod) she has to put on a costume to pass as human.
Of course these two identities are not totally binary and segregated from one another, like the nature of time in the book they bleed together. In their date in London they are in their identities of Clark Kent and Diana Prince, talking about Superman and Wonder Woman. My comics knowledge isn’t the best in this sector but the treatment of superheroes as celebrities seems like a very post-modern thing to do. It adds a further wrinkle the negotiation between Clark-Diana and Superman-Wonder Woman identities; they are in some ways also public figures. “We give them everything. This is ours, at least for now.” Clark tells Diana. Part of Clark’s want to keep their relationship a secret isn’t just fear for how the world would react but because it’s theirs and relationships are personal matters not public. But where is the private-public line drawn for superheroes?
I am Michael Mazzacane and you can find on Twitter @MaZZM and at weekntv.com and comicweek.com
