Wonder Woman #20 ~ A new arc begins with Diana in a bizarre scenario, appearing to have travelled far back into the past, to the time of Beowulf (by way of the wolf scene in 300). Of course there's more going on than meets the eye, but this issue is long on foreshadowing and short on answers, and though we do find out what happened to put Diana alongside Beowulf, we don't find out what it means yet - only that it's not just a time travel jaunt. Gail Simone keeps her cards close to her chest this issue, but the quality of the writing (and the quality of the previous issues) is such that she's earned the right to play with her readers a bit before spelling out what's going on in more detail. Strange as the situation is, the self-narration Diana provides as she slogs through a blizzard to arrive at the meadhall is instantly engaging and entertaining, with a fascinating and moving side-step with the aforementioned wolves, as well as little bits and pieces of business that flesh out both Diana and her surroundings, and serve to make them seem like fully-realised people and places, not just constructs put in place to serve this particular story and nothing else. Aaron Lopresti's art is beautiful and powerful, with a fluid sense of action and movement that suits a modern comic well, but obvious respect for the heritage and gravitas that Diana brings with her. It's difficult to review the beginning of an arc, but all the signs for this one are good.
Guardians of the Galaxy #1 ~ I got a bit of a feeling of déjà vu reading this issue, and I finally figured out why - it's structured very much like the first issue of Mighty Avengers, with the team engaging in a straight-up battle interspersed with flashbacks to each of them joining or being recruited. It worked for Mighty, and it works here - the flashback structure allows each character to get a key moment revealing significant character traits and motives to new readers without having to go through whole extended scenes with each of them, while the fight scene... well, it's a superhero comic, we like fight scenes. Unlike Mighty, the fight is over this issue, and insofar as it has long-term implications to this title (which it does), it serves to foreshadow, rather that set up a direct cliffhanger. (There is a separate cliffhanger ending, but that comes out of nowhere, and is a real "Wait, what??" moment, in spite of a probable explanation beind posed for it.) Phyla doesn't do anything really startling, but gets a nice scene with Drax that shows her taking on responsibility and the mantle of her new position; Gamora's introduction is fairly predictable (though good for new readers), but this issue is spread over the whole cast, so I'm sure she'll get more attention sooner or later. An unexpected pleasure is Mantis turning up, as the team's eccentric 'Jarvis', and Adam Warlock gets to explain the specific crisis this title is going to address: fractures in reality, nasty critters from beyond seeping in, nothing we haven't seen before in sci-fi, but this issue has some fun moments of imagination, so I'm not worried about originality yet. All in all, a promising start - now let's see where it goes.
The Last Defenders #3 ~ The first issue was interesting but uneven, the second rather mediocre - this one, I'm sorry to report, is plain boring. We start out with Nighthawk, She-Hulk, and Agent Pennysworth - if there's more to him than an arbitrary plot device, this title hasn't shown it - fighting some serpent goons. This goes on for a long time, and achieves nothing - the heroes fight, bicker without communicating, and eventually leave when it turns out that Agent Whatsisname has already rigged the place to explode. Then everyone but Nighthawk vanishes, and he recruits a few new people, at which point I stopped reading. I'm quite serious, I was too unentertained to keep reading the issue, beyond skimming the remaining pages to see who showed up. There's just nothing left in the book that I find remotely interesting - almost all the characters who were introduced earlier have gone, leaving only Nighthawk, who's written without any sense of character or purpose. And his new team - Atlas, Paladin, and some guy called Junta - aren't characters I'd bother buying a title to see. So this one's off my buy list.
