Egg-zamine our Egg-zamples…

Batman: The Brave and the Bold #16

After a brief prelude where Batman teams up with — well, more like gets beat up by — the mind-controlled Teen Titans, we get to the main story for this issue — Bats and Wonder Woman try to find the egg-obsessed criminal mastermind Egg Head by looking for a bunch of strange eggs he seemed to be after. But Egg Head captures the heroes and their collected eggs and uses them to hatch out an elder god called Y’ggphu Soggoth — better known as the ridiculously silly Silver Age Wonder Woman villain Egg Fu.

Verdict: Thumbs up. How ’bout this — this series takes two of the DC Universe’s biggest names and pits them against two of their dumbest foes — a bizarrely racist egg (but now portrayed much more like the character from the “52” miniseries, as simply a weird egg-like villain) and a guy who hasn’t really appeared anywhere since he was played by Vincent Price in the ’60s Batman series. And they actually make it work out fine. Egg Head mostly stays in the background directing the action and acting demented, with Egg Fu showing up at the end as the heavy hitter. It was a lot better than I was expecting from the cover, honestly.

Wonder Woman #43

Diana is stuck in Washington, which is cut off from the rest of the world, as a monstrous alien civilization makes war on it. It’s an all-woman invasion that survives by scavenging a hundred women from each world they visit before they unleash a horde of semi-organic snakes on the planet to eat everything biological and convert it into a goo that is used as both food and spaceship fuel. Oh, and the aliens’ leader is Wonder Woman’s aunt, Astarte, kidnapped from the Amazons when she and Hippolyta were just babies. While Achilles, Etta Candy, Steve Trevor, Wondy’s gorilla bodyguards, and the DMA try to get control of the situation, Astarte reveals that even more of her alien fleet is on the way — and she unveils her secret weapon: her own daughter.

Verdict: Thumbs up. Excellent action, good intrigue, better characterization than I was expecting, and an excellent backstory for Astarte. And Wondy’s new cousin, Theana, makes the best mirror-opposite Wonder Woman I’ve seen outside of, well, DC’s antimatter universe. And beside Gail Simone’s storytelling, there’s also Nicola Scott’s downright brilliant artwork, too.