Welcome to Loneliness & Cheeseburgers Presents: Wonder Woman (Vol. 4), Issue #1 – “The Visitation”!

Enough Batman. Enough Superman. Enough men for now, for reals. I’ve ignored Wonder Woman for far too long. She is arguably just as important to DC’s history as either of the other two aforementioned blowjobs. She made her official comic book debut in 1941 and got her own title in 1942, and this was a time when women were basically still considered personal property somewhere on the tier between a refrigerator and a lawnmower.

I barely know anything about Wonder Woman except for her magic truth lasso, her Xena Warrior Princess Amazonian roots, and that Gal Gadot might be slightly racist. I hope to rectify this by digging into the highly-acclaimed New 52 reboot. By that I mean rectify my knowledge gaps, not Gal Gadot’s racist leanings. I won’t be able to solve that by sitting on my ass reading comic books.

Wonder Woman (Vol. 4), Issue #1 [November, 2011]
Written by: Brian Azzarello
“The Visitation”

Fuckin’ A, man! Look at that cover! Raw fucking feminity! Blood-spattered aggression! Jumping straight into a barrage of arrows! Uppercutting one into splinters! This is more like it!

Singapore. The issue begins in Singapore. That’s not very Amazonian. Correct me if I’m wrong, I’m no scholar of world geography, but Singapore is in a whole different continent altogether! Three women are on a balcony of a very tall building that overlooks the bustling, urban sprawl of the capital city. “How did you get this room?” one asks. “My job,” answers the thus far unseen man, “Calls for me to be on top of the world.”

Already sounds like an asshole! An asshole that’s going to murder three women in Singore. And there’s nothing I can do to stop it EXCEPT shut this comic book forever… Let’s keep reading.

When asked what this man does, he tells the women that he’s the “sun of a King”. This dude, now visible, looks like he’s made of steel. He has eerie glowing eyes and equally eerie glowing mouth. These women must all be trashed, perhaps roofied, perhaps on fentanyl. They’re all on fentanyl.

Glowey’s dad gets around. He appreciates faithfulness, sure, but the dog gets around. He has fucked many women, which are my words of course, but the implication is that Glowey is just one of very many. “Like I said, he gets around. And where he’s gotten to now, I need to find out. See, he’s missing.”

He claims that they’re all on top of the tallest building in the world! And even in 2011 that’s a complete fucking lie, but I’m not here to split hairs. No building in Singapore even came close! But I’m not here to split hairs! But Jesus Christ, I’m already mad! Someone could have looked that shit up, man!

Anyway, yada yada yada, he grabs the three of them all at once and does something menacing and scary off-panel. MOVING ON.

Now we’re in Virginia, a place that’s fractionally as exotic as Singapore, in a barn no less, where a glowing woman wearing a hooded robe made out of peacock feathers ambles through and scares the cows. She leaves behind several weapons on the floor: bow and arrow, knife, sword, spiked mace, stuff we all carry with us from time to time.

After kindly petting a horse, she grabs a scythe down from the wall.

She feels the sharpness of the blade. It seems to be of adequate sharpness for her pursuits.

Ah yes, this will replace my Slap Chop nicely.

This lady swings that fucker right at the horse’s neck, lopping it off completely. The head falls near the abandoned weapons.

From the horse’s neck stump, a creature emerges looking like an H. R. Giger alien. It’s weird and gross. Definitely more exotic here than Singapore, as it turns out.

Presumably, on the same farm, a very bony man wearing what looks like either Vietnam war gear OR African elephant hunter garb steps into a farmhouse. He finds a young, short-haired blonde woman, in her underwear, pointing a shotgun at his face.

“Zola, we must leave now,” he says.
“We? Make that you, Mister. I don’t know how you got in here–”
“–Listen to me, girl– They’ve come for you and your child.”
“Who?”
“Assassins.”

“House” is being a little too generous, honestly.

Nuts to this! Who wants some weirdo barging in and telling you that assassins are gonna come getcha?

The sound of approaching horse hooves clomp-clomping is worrisome! Vietnam War Elephant Hunter shoves the young woman out of the way of the open front door just in time to catch a bellyful of loosed arrow with a sickening “THUK”. This dude has bird feet. This bird dude got thukked.

His body slams on the floor in front of the terrified young woman. He looks to be still alive, possibly grasping at the arrow to pull it out, but I can’t tell! Comic book pictures aren’t animated! This ain’t Harry Fuckface Potter!

We catch a full-page glimpse of the assailants rushing into the house. Two of them, one male and one female. They look like angry, demonic centaurs! The kind you’d find in Harry Fuckface Potter. They’re wearing armor that look like chastity belts. They’ve got a bunch of scary weapons, and they’re gonna split this lady in half with a giant sword.

“ZOLA!” yells Vietnam War Elephant Hunter Bird and tosses her an ordinary key. But it’s no ordinary key! Sorry for leading you on like that. It’s a magical glowing key that fills the room with a bright, blue light. Zola holds it up above her…and then disappears. The sword hits the empty ground with a CHOK. As in, CHOK full of fantastic sound effects.

Zola has been transported! She appears, or apparates, if you will (harry fuckface potter), into an apartment or a hotel room in London. Still sitting on the floor, bewildered, she stares at a bed with a depressed-looking naked woman. Zola thinks she’s sleeping. Zola gets that part wrong.

WONDER WOMAN TO THE RESCUE!!

This wonderful woman, a wonder of a woman, I don’t know who she is yet! I wonder what kind of woman she is? She calms down once she realizes this 80-pound woman isn’t going to hurt her, and she assures Zola that she won’t kill her. That’s polite.

After Zola stammers and stutters nonsense about “a man with eyes”, she is asked how she got in here. “The man threw me this key,” she responds, displaying the extraordinary object. The woman with the dark, flowing hair goes “?” and then demands that Zola relinquish the key.

Fuck that, lady! They saved her life! She’s not gonna give it up now, goddamnit! There’s all sorts of situations where it would be useful to be suddenly transported to strangers’ homes in other parts of the world in the middle of the night!

The woman introduces herself as Diana, and she wants to help, but she doesn’t really look to me like she wants to help that much. “I can take that key right out of your hand,” she says, hefting her nude body over to a cabinet full of Wonder Woman clothes and accessories, “but I’d prefer if you gave it to me willingly.”

Zola starts looking kind of shifty. Maybe she thinks she could kick this lady’s ass if the opportunity presented itself. That thought is quashed quickly as Wonder Woman puts on her Wonder Woman outfit. “YOU’RE WONDER WOMAN?” she exclaims to Wonder Woman. Wonder Woman tells her to call her Diana, and now that she has gotten all these clothes on in order to prove that she’s wonder woman, please hand over the fucking key.

Wonder Woman appears to be 9’8” tall. That’s two stacked Danny DeVitos!

So Zola hands over the fucking key, but Wonder Woman makes sure to hold onto Zola’s arm first. With a flash, they’re transported back to Zola’s farmhouse. ”YEEAARGH!” screams an individual within the house, possibly Birdguy Jones, the “man with the eyes” as it were.

The two women slowly approach the house. A bloody feather wafts through the doorway…followed by a speedy arrow. The cover lied to me! I was promised a veritable HAILSTORM of arrows! Not one piddling arrow! Wonder Woman leaps in front of it and blocks it with her steel wristbands, splintering it into pieces. My hero!

“You want us to tell you what we see?”
“Dear ladies, you are my oracles, my eyes that gaze on what is yet to be… Please tell me…what you see.”
“There is a storm gathering just beyond the horizon and the one responsible shall rule in fire…Sorry about that.”
“Who is it?”
“Too much smoke.”
“What?”
“We can’t see clearly.”
“It wears a crown of horns. And a cape of blood flowing from its shoulders onto a naked woman at its feet.”
“The feet?”
“They’re bare, like the woman.”
“Then it is my family.”
“Your family… is broken, beated, and betrayed. By blood.”
“Tell me something I don’t know…”
“Well, your father has abandoned fate to someone who can blow away the smoke if they choose to. Seriously, this is mental.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“We mean that what your father wants is nothing anyone should. It’s dirty. It’s irredeemable. And it won’t end good for you.”

Where do you think Ted Lasso learned everything he knows! Ha! That’s a pun that works on half a level.

That previous exchange? Alternating dialogue boxes, one green and one black, that bounce between flowery poetry and casual conversation. I don’t know yet who these two are. During this dialogue, the two angry, demonic, Harry Fuckface Potter centaur-like creatures ambush the two women. Zola runs the hell away while Wonder Woman does all manner of neck thigh-crushin’ on the male centaur. The female centaur chases Zola down with a knife and hungry look on her face. Wonderful Wondrous Woman bends up, KRAKs the male with a headbutt, and steals his sword. The female grabs Zola by the scruff and starts running off with her. Wonder Woman flings the sword from 20 yards away and dismembers the female centaur’s arm, thereby releasing Zola from her grasp. Zola, on ground, watches the two centaurs book it on out of there.

That’s when she gets lassoed! And so ends the LEAST dull action sequence I’ve come across in over a year of reading comic books. Huge compliment. That was fun.

Whoops, you want Jeff Bezos. Look up in the sky, someone launched the fucker into space.

“I thought I told you to stay close,” Wonder Woman chides with the wryest of grins! What a cut-up. This young woman has been irreversibly traumatized in only the last 15 minutes and Wonder Woman thinks she’s fucking hilarious!

I forgot all about this guy! Birdbeak the Mighty. He’s not dead even though it seems like he should be, taking an arrow in the gut and all. It’s still in his gut, too. He lumbers out of the house. “You shouldn’t be here,” he huffs and pants and puffs and rants, “Take the girl and run to the end of the Earth.” Uh-huh, Earth is a sphere, nimrod. You’re not one of those people, are you?

Birdman removes the arrow from his stomach. It’s covered in blood. You’re not supposed to do that. Leave it in and go to a dang emergency room, ya turkey.

“HERMES!?” Wonder Woman yells at the bird. The bird is named Hermes.
“Diana…” he responds, dying of arrow gut perforation, “Protect her…or the queen will see her dead.”

Hermes asks what they’ve done to him. Wonder Woman says the impossible has been done to him. Right now, if I were Zola, I’d be slowly sneaking away from all this drama. Rent a hotel room or something.

I looked up “Hermes” on Google and got a lot of herpes-related information, which is fantastic to have on my work laptop’s search history. Basically, he moves fast. He’s like the Roman god Mercury, except he’s Hermes. I hope that cleared things up.

Anywho, Hermes is dying but he’s also not. Zola is important to protect even if she doesn’t know it yet. The “baby” that Hermes referred to about ninety pages ago and Zola didn’t really give another thought? Well, Hermes has her attention now so he drops the big ol’ bomb on her: she’s pregnant with Zeus’ baby! Ohhhhh snap! Ha ha ha looool.

Back in Singapore, where Mr. Glowey possessed these three lovely ladies (presumably to get information out of them), it is learned that NOT only will “she kill one of them”, whatever that means, but also…well, here’s the panel:

One of your father’s brother’s cousin’s daughter’s cousin’s aunt’s nephew’s cousins will also get his penis caught in a Venus flytrap.

So Father’s pulling the strings again, is he? Where is the deadbeat these days?

“He doesn’t exist.”
“Yet.”

Glowey starts emanating flames from his person, catching the three floating women on fire. They char up nicely into three burning skeletons.

“Fascinating,” says Glowey as he burns a bright yellow and flies up into the sky.

The three women become a flaming pile of falling bones.

Final Thoughts

Well that’s pretty fucked up, innit? Lots of setup, lots of intrigue, lots of…mythology? BORING!

Here’s what I noticed in this issue: there’s about 60 goddamned panels with women’s bare feet. Looks like I know what artist Cliff Chiang is into. Great. That’s great.