Wonder*Woman, Zatanna, and Batgirl

J. Michael Straczynski & Cliff Chang

It looked good on the stand in the Borders, I swear.  Three female superheroes, linked arm in arm, strolling over a bunch of fallen villains (including a monkey with a ray gun!).  How could I go wrong?

Well, to start off with, Wonder Woman makes yellow light explode out a man’s pants, and not in a good way.

First, I couldn’t tell which direction the yellow stream is even supposed to be going.  And what’s with the old duffer’s flying trucker cap?  Isn’t it enough to be disrobing one person per panel with unfortunately pee-yellow light explosions?

Grand Ballroom, this way to the yellow pants!  It’s like a Dr Suess, except not funny.

Anyway.  Zantanna pops by via a mirror and tells Wonder Woman she wants a ladies night out.  No, I’m not kidding.  Eight minutes later we watch Batgirl capture some purse-snatchers.  Purse-snatchers!  The cover promised me monkeys with ray-guns, dammit!

As Batgirl leaves the scene, we get this:

I stared at this page and tried to figure out what the heck is happening.  Finally, I decided that her bike flies between panel 4 and 5, although I don’t know why.  Apparently so we can see Wonder Woman hanging onto the middle of the bike?  I don’t even know.  Where the hell is my armed monkey, dammit?

Zantanna and Wonder Woman convince Batgirl that even supes need to relax or the stress puts them off their game.  They need to go dancing to relax!  I’m not making this up.  By now, I have resigned myself to never seeing the ray-guy monkey and to reading lame jokes about shoes, and in that respect, I am not disappointed.  Alas.

When the get to the club, Batgirl doesn’t dance, because her shoes are too tight, but she doesn’t want them magicked because her dad bought them for her.  Aw.  Or something.  Besides, no one asked her dance!

Whereupon the handsome fella below gets hit in the back of the head with a pink paintball and the action resumes and the monkey appears and–!  But no.  I’m afraid not.

Instead, as you can see, there’s some pathetic hipster dancing with a guy who might as well be wearing gold disco chains.  Blah, blah, blah dancing.  Blah, blah, blah girls eating fries in a diner.  Blah, blah, blah heartwarming talk about Batgirl’s dear old dad.

You can see where this is going, can’t you?  When Wonder Woman starts talking about “her people” the Greeks and how they used oracles as a kind of pretechnology super-computer for getting intel, I just wanted this stupid comic over.  I wasn’t getting my monkey, I wasn’t getting girl-group fighting, I got a comic book with family scrapbooking and a cheap plot twist at the end that made me roll my eyes.  You know it’s bad when the most interesting thing in the comic is an ad that appears to be for puffer-fish.