Wonder Woman #5

At first I kind of thought, huh, Tony Akins' art isn't too different from Cliff Chiang's, it has a similar minimalist cartoony look to it. Then I realized they're actually extremely different versions of that type of style. Chiang's art emphasizes the straight lines, keeps things rough and almost chiseled in a great way. Akins' is round and a little goofy at times. And even if his style was as similar as I originally thought, the lingering nag of 'Why?' must be accounted for. Why use Tony Akins for an issue or two here? Storyline does not justify it by any means whatsoever. It's just one of those random temporary artist changes that serves no purpose and breaks up the flow. And the worst offense of Akins' art is the way he draws Wonder Woman. Everything about her appearance in this issue reminded me for the first time in months why I used to dislike her. I spend 4 issues of this series and Justice League not remembering my old dislike for Diana at all, then this issue comes in and that thought starts to creep back in. It makes me sad because of how much I've been liking her lately too.

But the story is still on definite fire, as we start to see the backstabbing extended family politics come back into play. Zeus is dead, and major players in the Greek pantheon are coming out of the woodwork for a shot at the throne they've desired for eons. But how many of them are making big obvious power plays, and how many are manipulating things to go their way? This uncertainty keeps things clever and tense. Although speaking of crawling from the woodwork, I've loved all the redesigns of the Greek gods, but I'm hesitant about Poseidon. All the rest have been at least humanoid, Poseidon is...... very much not. It's kind of col and interesting, but I'm not totally sure its a good idea.

And then someone else comes out of the shadows, a new character named Lennox emerges. I can tell you this, I really don't like Lennox. He's just.... lame. He feels like a really lazy Constantine rip-off, with a lazy personality to boot. He doesn't seem to muster up any kind of emotion whatsoever, and not even in an interesting and creepy way, he just seems dull. And on top of that, he feels extremely out of place in this story. He doesn't fit at all, and I want him the hell out of this comic as quick as possible because he just doesn't belong.

Plus he seems to be the catalyst for a lot of offhanded dialogue that reads very awkwardly and doesn't make sense, even if you want to suggest its trying to be cryptic. It's just some bad lines.

In Conclusion: 3/5

I wanted to give this a higher score, god knows the overall storyline of this series is stellar, and the progression of it depicted in this issue is actually great, considering we're seeing things actually starting to happen. But that part of this issue fills all three stars it got, because the artwork really screwed with my head. I was reading a Wonder Woman comic that appeared to star the old Wonder Woman in my mind who never caught on with me. And then Lennox just dragged things down worse. I could've gone for 3.5 Stars, but those odd lines of dialogue that made me stop and go "..... Whuh?" forced me to deduct a few more points down to a 3/5. That's my score based on my experience, this was just an off issue, I don't think the series will continue this downward trend of only 1 issue, all signs point to this, and possibly the next issue, just being low points in the quality, that's all.