The Dunwich Horror #1

This adaptation of one of H.P. Lovecraft’s most popular stories is written by horror writer Joe R. Lansdale, which is definitely a step in the right direction. It’s a fairly loose adaptation of the story — for one thing, it’s set in 2011, not in the 1930s. We’re focused on a group of friends getting back together after another friend has been killed and beheaded by persons unknown. But the friends know who the culprit is — an otherworldly, invisible horror who they all summoned in a ritual a long time ago. It’s loose now and stalking them, and the only way to avoid being eventually torn apart by the monster is to find it and send it back where it came from. They’ve probably got quite a task in front of them — a local barn has been blown apart by the thing, and it’s stacked up a gigantic pile of dead, bloody animals that it’s partially eaten. And since it’s invisible, they have no idea if it’s far away, or if it’s getting closer and closer…

There’s also a backup feature — an adaptation of Lovecraft’s “The Hound” by Robert Weinberg and a guy called menton3. I couldn’t actually make heads nor tails of it, primarily because the lettering was tiny and crabbed and just plain too much trouble to read.

Verdict: Thumbs up. Yeah, I didn’t get much out of “The Hound,” and it’s a bit odd to see an adaptation of “The Dunwich Horror” that doesn’t start out with Wilbur Whateley and his awful, awful family, but I’m still enjoying what I see. There are enough elements from the original story for me to recognize, and I’ve got enough faith in Joe Lansdale that I expect he won’t steer the story wrong.

Wonder Woman #2

We get to meet Hera — queenly, haughty, hates Zeus, hates his consorts worse — and Strife — skinny, gothy, devious, chaos-loving — before we move to Wonder Woman, arriving on Paradise island with Hermes and Zola. They meet Hippolyta and engage in a tournament — but when Strife herself pays a visit to the island, all bets are off. What secret is the goddess of chaos and discord hiding?

Verdict: Thumbs up. The whole thing is quite nicely done, with great writing, great art, lots of action, intrigue, suspense, and weird stuff. I’m digging this quite a bit.

Today’s Cool Links:

• Ya know what you need? You need a zombie in a penguin suit.
• We could learn a lot about Halloween costumes from our ancestors. We don’t need store-bought costumes — a burlap bag is the best costume of all.
• Can he swing from a thread? Take a look overhead.

Wonder Woman #1

First new Rebooted Wonder Woman comic from Brian Azzarello and Cliff Chiang. And the biggest surprise about this isn’t that Azzarello’s writing is great, or that Chiang’s art is even better — the big surprise is that this isn’t really a superhero story. It’s horror.

We start out with Apollo in Singapore manufacturing his own oracles out of a trio of partygirls. After that, we get someone who looks likely to be Hera creating some centaur assassins by hacking off a couple horses’ heads and letting freakish human torsos claw their way out through the necks. Ewwww. This is all leading up to the centaurs attacking a woman named Zola who is being protected — against her will — by a weird looking guy with blue skin, big black eyes, and wings on his feet. He gives her a key that teleports her into Wonder Woman’s apartment in London. After they teleport back, Wondy beats the centaurs, reveals that Zola’s defender was actually Hermes, messenger of the gods. What the heck is going on here?

Verdict: Thumbs up. Like I said, Azzarello and Chiang are quite outstanding. I don’t know if I like the idea of this being a horror comic from now on, but there’s no doubt that the gods are depicted amazingly horrifically. And it really feels like an amazingly apt interpretation — if the idea of gods doesn’t creep you out a bit, you’re not really thinking about it enough.

B.P.R.D.: Hell on Earth – Russia #1

It’s not a good time to be in the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense. Horrific monsters are roaming almost unchecked across the Earth, Liz Sherman has gone into hiding, and Abe Sapien has been shot, is in a coma, and is probably dying. Kate Corrigan and Johann Kraus are on a trip to Moscow to meet with Russia’s Occult Bureau. And Russia is undergoing some sort of fungal plague that is turning people into monsters. Kate learns from the Russians that many of the B.P.R.D.’s secrets have been revealed to the world by Wikileaks. And the biggest surprise for Kate and Johann comes when they meet the man running the Russia Occult Bureau.

Verdict: Thumbs up. We’re just in the process of establishing the plot right now — but what really has me excited about this one is that it may give us a chance to catch up with the creepy demon girl Varvara, who we haven’t seen in quite a few years.

Severed #2

The year is 1916, and teenager Jack Garron has run away from home to stow away on a train. He wants to make his way to Chicago so he can meet his real father, a musician who he hopes will help make him successful as a performer. Jack has another run-in with the train cop who tried to throw him off, but this time, he’s able to get the better of the man and get his possessions back with the aid of a new friend named Sam. After they get to Chicago, they agree to rent a room together, and Jack learns that Sam is actually a girl disguising herself as a boy to avoid being assaulted or killed on the road. But Jack ends up missing his father — and he’s gone all the way back home to Mississippi. Sam suggests they earn some money by having Jack play his violin so they can take a train south — but the murderous traveling salesman with the horrific shark teeth has Jack’s scent now, and there may be no escape.

Verdict: Thumbs up. A rough-hewn, dirty story set in a rough-hewn, dirty country — it’s easy to forget that the U.S. wasn’t always the clean, heroic place we’ve invented for our myths. Good dialogue and tension — and more tension on the way, from the looks of it.

Today’s Cool Links:

• Just one today. There are a lot of the books in the DC Reboot that I’m very glad I’m not reading, and this article includes a lot of the reasons why. DC looks a lot like they’ve given up on producing comics that are acceptable reading for either children or for mature adults — too much of their focus is on producing comics for, about, and by immature man-children.

Batman: The Brave and the Bold #21

Our teaser story features Batman up against King Rex and his Dinosaur Gang. Things look grim for the Dark Knight until the Lady Blackhawks show up. Yes, a whole squad of characters based on Lady Blackhawk from “Birds of Prey” — but with jet-packs and bazookas! This, unexpectedly, is the most awesome thing in the past 10 million years.

The main story focuses on Batman and Green Lantern taking on some kind of glowing meteorite calling himself “Robert, Supreme Shaper of Worlds.” Wait, Robert? Seriously? Well, Robert has the heroes on the ropes, thanks to the army of yellow carnivorous plants he’s created. But Batman has a plan (Batman always has a plan) and decides to take Robert into a black hole. Which leaves Green Lantern all alone against a bunch of yellow monster plants that his ring can’t touch.

And finally, a reprint from a “Tiny Titans” comic. Kinda lame, but at least it’s not the two-month-old reprint from the last issue.

Verdict: Thumbs up. The reprint from “Tiny Titans” is a bit pants — come on, guys, don’t just swipe stuff from other comics! But the Dinosaur Gang, the Lady Blackhawks, and Robert’s mad rants more than make up for that.

Wonder Woman #603

Wonder Woman is still leading the Amazon refugees toward a safe haven when they come across some slaughtered Turkish soldiers, and Wondy discovers that she’s able to see the Keres, a group of demonic women harvesting the dead men’s souls. The Keres quickly overpower Wondy and drag her off to Tartarus, the Greek Underworld. Hades, the god of the dead, vanished 20 years ago, and Charon, Hell’s ferryman, now refuses to ferry any of the dead to the Underworld, which is now ruled by a multitude of demons. Wondy wants to return home — Charon warns her that she’ll have to avoid or defeat the Keres and get past Cerberus, the monstrous guardian dog of Hell. Once she makes it back to Earth, she ends up making a deal with the soldiers pursuing her to let the Amazons go in exchange for her meeting with the mastermind behind the schemes against her.

Verdict: Thumbs down. We’ve got this new status quo for Wonder Woman, no one knows what the heck’s going on with her, and so we waste a whole issue with a completely pointless trip to the Underworld. DC really needs some strong editors who’ll crack the whip on the pampered superstars like Straczynski.

Today’s Cool Links:

• How to teach about panel transitions using Craig Thompson’s “Blankets” graphic novel.
• Man, I’d really love it if DC would go ahead and release “Flex Mentallo” in a complete collection.
• Bohemian Rhapsody on slide whistles and kazoos

Madame Xanadu #26

Sammy is a little homeless boy who’s plagued by a tremendously noxious odor. No one can stand to be anywhere near him, the schools won’t accept him, animals run away from him. Well, except for dogs. Dogs chase him and try to eat him. When he can escape from the dogs, he sleeps in someone’s basement — always the same basement — and he has happy dreams where he’s a brave hero. But even in his dreams, he’s pursued by the Space Witch. Eventually, after much too long lost on his own, he meets up with the Space Witch — Madame Xanadu, of course. And she reveals the great secret about Sammy’s life.

Verdict: Thumbs up. Another strange, sad story from this series. Don’t be put off by Chrissie Zullo’s art — it may look like a bunch of “Precious Moments” figures, but that’s just to draw you into the storybook feel of this tale.

Wonder Woman #602

The alternate history version of Wonder Woman is trying to save a small enclave of Amazons hiding out at a hidden temple in Turkey. She bonds with them for a while, talks to the gods, and goes out to fight the soldiers waiting outside the temple to kill them.

Verdict: Thumbs down. There’s some fighting at the beginning and the end, and the entire middle is taken up with a lot of talking. And it’s pretty boring talking. Come to think of it, the fighting ain’t that great either. It’s just not a very entertaining comic at all.

Today’s Cool Links:

• Good riddance, you dreadful football-hating cussword. And take that dreadful Texas Tech-hating chancellor with you.
• Aaron Williams’ rant about the latest horrible show on SyFy is not to be missed.
• Watch those clearances when you’re driving a truck! Including rentals!

Wonder Woman #601

The first full issue of J. Michael Straczynski’s run on this title. History has been rewritten — Themyscira was destroyed decades ago, and Wonder Woman has been on the run ever since. A blind oracle grants her a vision of the final days of Paradise Island, after the gods withdrew their protection of the Amazons. A mysterious force attacked the island with superior magical firepower, and Queen Hippolyta died rather than betray where Diana was being hidden. After she leaves the oracle, Diana tracks the men who’ve been pursuing her, but before she can attack them or their shadowy leader, she learns that some of the surviving Amazons are about to be attacked and destroyed. Can she make it halfway around the world in time to save them?

Verdict: I’ll give it a thumbs up. I was not expecting much from this, because in the past few years, J. Michael Straczynski hasn’t done much to justify the very high opinion that people have of him. His work on “The Brave and the Bold” has mostly spotlighted a lot of stories where JMS mangles characters’ personalities, and his just-begun run on “Action Comics,” where Superman sets out to walk across the country, has been greeted with howls of derision. In contrast, this one is… not bad. It’s not the best comic of the week, but it isn’t bad at all.

So why is this one better than his other DC books? My theory is that JMS does his best writing on his own characters — “Babylon 5,” “Rising Stars,” you name it — but when it comes to characters that he didn’t create himself, whose personalities were crafted and established by other writers, he doesn’t do as well, because he gives them the personalities he wants them to have, rather than the personalities that readers have come to expect. And this Wonder Woman, with her completely altered origin and history, with none of her previous supporting cast, is a completely different character than any previous Wonder Woman. Will he be able to write a decent Wonder Woman when the reality-altering storyline is over? Or is JMS hoping we’ll all forget what Wondy was like before he came along? Only time will tell.

Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne #4

Welcome to the Wild West, where murderous thugs execute homesteader families and no one defends them… except for a time-traveling bat-obsessed masked man wearing a black cowboy hat and duster. Vandal Savage, the immortal caveman, has survived to the 1800s and has hired Jonah Hex, the West’s foremost hired gun, to protect him while the diabolical Dr. Thomas Wayne tries to open a mysterious box with a bat emblazoned on the cover. Can Bruce Wayne save the innocent, punish the guilty, preserve the future of the Wayne family, and avoid getting gutshot by Jonah Hex? Hmm, well, maybe not all of that…

Verdict: Thumbs up. Nice Western fun with a little Batman flavor to go with it. I completely approve.

Supergirl #54

We start out with a great moment — with disaster all around and a little kid in grave danger, Jimmy Olsen shows up to save the day. But he runs into trouble soon afterwards after he gets abducted by a Bizarro Supergirl. And where’s the regular Supergirl? Angsting it up at home because she doesn’t want to be a superhero any more after the destruction of New Krypton. When Lana Lang discovers what’s tearing up Metropolis, she calls Kara and convinces her to go take care of the Bizarro. But is Supergirl prepared for the new Bizarro superpower?

Verdict: Thumbs up. Great stuff with Jimmy Olsen at the beginning, and decent superheroics, elsewhere. The Bizarro Supergirl is very nicely creepy, and I’m generally happier with the art style than I’ve been with a lot of previous incarnations of the main character. There are also some nice plot complications going on in the background that will be a lot of fun eventually.

Wonder Woman #600

Where to begin? Well, DC has now re-numbered this series to take advantage of the fact that this is the 600th issue since the ’40s, and this is supposed to be the big send-off for Gail Simone, whose run on this series has been pretty popular. But this issue has mostly been overshadowed by all the hubbub about her new costume.

So let’s take this more or less in order.

We’ve got a half-page introduction by Lynda Carter, and some excellent pin-up illustrations by artists including Adam Hughes, Nicola Scott, Phil Jimenez, Ivan Reis, Greg Horn, Francis Manapul, and Shane Davis. Our first story is written by Gail Simone with art by George Perez. Wondy and a host of superheroines take out Professor Ivo’s newest creations — a bunch of Cyber-Sirens who can mind-control men. Afterwards, Diana attends the graduation ceremony for Vanessa Kapatelis, the former Silver Swan.

The next story is written and illustrated by Amanda Conner and features Wondy, Power Girl, and Cassandra Cain cracking down on Egg Fu before Diana assists Kara with a problem with her horrible, horrible cat.

There’s also a short story where Wonder Woman and Superman have to stop a terrorist who’s taken control of Zeus’ thunderbolts.

The big problem here starts with the last story, by the series’ new writer, J. Michael Straczynski. It’s gotten a lot of publicity because JMS announced his new direction for the series (Themyscyra retroactively destroyed in the past, with an amnesiac Wonder Woman on the run from government agents) and debuted a new costume designed by Jim Lee.

This hasn’t been very well-received, partly because of JMS’s mostly unearned arrogance (his attitude in interviews could be summed up as “Wonder Woman sucks and has always sucked. I’m here to make her cool.” All in the voice of Jeff Albertson.) and partly because of Jim Lee’s new costume:

My thoughts? I agree with a lot of what the folks at Project Rooftop had to say — it’s probably a fine costume for any other character, but it’s not a Wonder Woman costume. And Jim Lee really does stick a leather jacket on every character he can. As for the story, it’s a very safe bet that this kind of alternate-reality scheme will be cleaned up between six months to a year from now, possibly by the end of the first storyarc. This is a publicity stunt, no more or less.

But J. Michael Straczynski really is a bit of a jerk, and I haven’t been at all impressed with his DC work in the past year or so. He’d better bring his A-game, or I’m not going to be reading this title for much longer.

Verdict: All told, it’s still a thumbs up. The first story by Simone and Perez is just awesome, at least partly for seeing Perez’s art on this character again. The second story by Amanda Conner is also really cool, partly for Conner’s always outstanding artwork, partly because it’s got a lot of the Power Girl brand of humor.

And a lot of the pin-ups are just absolutely beautiful, especially the ones by Adam Hughes, Phil Jimenez, and Nicola Scott — they should all be out there as posters or book covers or wall paintings, not buried on the inside of a comic book. It’s definitely worth picking up, even with a $5 price tag.

Today’s Cool Links:

• Huzzah! The winners of the latest Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest have been announced!
• Oooh! The Unspeakable Oath, the greatest Lovecraftian gaming magazine ever, is returning from the dead!
• Gavok may have figured out why Max Lord turned evil, and how he’ll be reformed…

Power Girl #12

Power Girl is visiting Terra’s underground home in Strata. They visit the local spa, which has the side effect of completely dropping all emotional barriers — something Kara isn’t sure she’s all that wild about, since she’s used to keeping her emotions more under control. After meeting Terra’s family and eating dinner with them, she heads back home. Back on the surface, Satanna does the nasty with Dr. Sivanna (Um, yuck?) in an attempt to get him to help her kill Power Girl, but Sivanna don’t care — he got his jollies, and he has her thrown out. Power Girl gets back to her apartment, gives her horrible, horrible cat a proper name, settles her debt with Fisher, beats up an offended alien, throws ’70s-style sleazeball Vartox off the planet, and gets some good news about her company.

Verdict: Thumbs up. Just tons of awesomeness going on here. This is pretty much Jimmy Palmiotti, Justin Gray, and Amanda Conner saying farewell to all these characters, so the good guys get good endings, and the bad guys get bad ones. We get cheesecake, we get action, we get humor — all of this title’s strongest points. We get lots of Amanda Conner’s brilliantly expressive artwork and all those really cool details that you might miss on first glance — the stuff Kara almost eats in Strata, the laser pointer she uses to play with her cat — and all those wonderful facial expressions and body language. Only thing I had my doubts about was the sequence with that Strata spa — looked like they’re trying to set up some future lesbian subplot for the benefit of Judd Winick.

Officially, this title is going to continue, but I’m considering this the last issue. Palmiotti, Gray, and Conner are moving on to other projects, but colossally hacky writer Judd Winick is taking over the comic with the next issue. It’s depressing that DC considers him someone they want futzing around with their intellectual properties. Aside from his deficiencies as a writer, the biggest problem with Winick may be his shallow grasp of drama — the only items in his bag o’ tricks are killing characters, throwing in new subplots about homosexuality, and afflicting them with HIV. Ain’t nothing wrong with those in moderation, but Winick’s got no grasp of moderation — just ham-handed, clumsy overkill on his obsessions.

The “Power Girl” comic is probably going to go through a severe personality change and a steep drop in quality — and I’m not going to be there to watch the disaster. Let’s let this last issue be the character’s coda — at least until Palmiotti, Gray, and Conner make it back.

Wonder Woman #44

Astarte, the sister of Wonder Woman’s mother, Hippolyta, is now the captain of an alien ship that survives by raiding planets, killing their entire populations, and mulching them down into a biological gruel for everyone to eat. And she’s raised Theana, her daughter — Wonder Woman’s cousin — to be a cruel and merciless killing machine. Back on Earth, Achilles, Steve Trevor, Etta Candy, and everyone else try to fight off the invaders, but it may all be for nothing if Wondy can’t figure out a way to beat her cousin and defang her aunt’s treachery.

Verdict: Thumbs up. Excellent action and characterization, lots of subplots getting wrapped up, and lots of old favorite characters making one more appearance. Nicola Scott’s artwork is, as always, fantastic. Writer Gail Simone has occasionally stumbled on this comic, but she knocks this one completely out of the park. And next issue is going to be her last one here, which is a big disappointment. I don’t have a lot of confidence in the upcoming writer’s abilities, but for now, it’s great to see Simone working near the top of her game.

Today’s Cool Links:

• Here’s an analysis of different kinds of hamburgers that will really give you some great ideas for your weekend cookout.
• It’s the fifth birthday of Bully the Little Stuffed Bull! Wheee, party!
• So… Wolverine is… Duckie Dale?

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.

She-Hulk Sensational #1

It’s the 30th anniversary of the creation of She-Hulk, so Marvel has put together a commemorative comic starring the Jade Giantess. We start out with a new story about Shulkie worrying about hitting her 30th birthday and getting visited by a bunch of spirits, including Stan Lee (Why is Stan Lee a spirit?) and the Ghosts of She-Hulk Past, Present, and Future. After that, there’s a story from a couple years ago where She-Hulk and Ms. Marvel team up with a possible Skrulled-version of Spider-Woman to fight HYDRA. And finally, we get a classic and thoroughly goofy story from the John Byrne era of She-Hulk’s comic.

Verdict: Thumbs up. Loved the new story by Peter David and Jonboy Meyers — it had a lot of funny stuff in it, like a few nods to Shulkie breaking the fourth wall, a cameo appearance by former “She-Hulk” writer Dan Slott, and Iron Man proclaiming that “I just barfed in my helmet.” I also loved the Byrne story — it really does encapsulate a lot of the things that make Shulkie so much fun as a character. I actively disliked, however, the more recent Skrull-clone-Spider-Woman story, ’cause it’s mostly just lame and unnecessary. Still, on the whole, it’s all fun and worth reading.

Wonder Woman #42

A trio of Green Lanterns, including the Khund GL introduced a couple years ago in “Wonder Woman,” investigate a planetary genocide caused by an unusual bioweapon — billions of tiny snakes that ate everyone, grew larger, then turned on each other, growing larger and larger as they ate themselves. Two of the three Lanterns make their escape, though the third gets eaten by the snakes. Turns out it’s a really impractical way of raising a really, really big snakey food source — and this time, it’s a food source that’s got some Lantern energy in it. Later, we find these snake-producing aliens attacking Earth — they’re all women, they want 100 Earth women to induct into their society, and they plan on exterminating everyone else for food. Can Wonder Woman stop a bunch of crazy alien cannibalistic snake fanatics all by herself?

Verdict: I hate to say it, but thumbs down. Decent dialogue, nice art, but the background is just too corny to take really seriously. Any society that has to rely on a food source as unreliable and inefficient as self-eating snakes is too stupid to survive at all.

Chew #9

Tony Chu is a secret agent for the FDA with the unusual ability to retrieve pscyhic impressions from anything he eats. He’s traveled to the small island nation of Yamapalu on the trail of a mysterious fruit that tastes just like chicken, but he’s stumbled onto something much bigger, with corrupt cops, corrupt governors, secret conspiracies, and multiple murders. The culprit? Well, Tony takes a few bites out of the corpses in the morgue and finds out that it’s… a vampire? Wait, surely there can’t be vampires in a perfectly logical world of psychic cannibal FDA agents, chicken fruits, cyborg cops, and other normal stuff like that, right? Well, the vampire is planning to attack the governor’s compound. No problem for Tony, right? Nope, his brother, a famous but disgraced chef, is there. The girl he loves, an impossibly talented food writer, is there. And there’s another chef, a guy who communicates entirely through cooking, is there, too. Can Tony save them all in time?

Verdict: Thumbs up. I’m really enjoying this, ’cause we’ve got all these wonderful oddball characters, all thrown into the mix together. It’s a lot like a stew — a really weird cannibal-cyborg-vampire-tropical-cop-foodie stew. Aaaaand I think I’ve hopelessly killed the metaphor, so let’s move along.

Wonder Woman #41

A bunch of evil mind-controlling schoolboys have turned Power Girl against Wonder Woman. There’s quite a bit of slugfesting that goes on before Wondy is finally able to break PeeGee free of the spell, and then they’ve got a couple problems to worry about — Power Girl has to try to be diplomatic and convince a whole lot of people not to riot and kill each other, and Wondy has to track down the evil schoolkids, resist their spells, and dish out a proper punishment. And is anyone going to be able to save Etta Candy and Steve Trevor from killing themselves?

Verdict: Thumbs up. A pretty good slugfest combined with good characterization for both Wondy and Power Girl. We also get a nice moment with Achilles at the beginning and a neat callback for anyone who remembers their history of the Trojan War…