Page 45 Review by Stephen
"I have known cruelty and I have known love. And I choose love."
For those keeping count, this is only the third superhero comic in 30 years which we've allowed in our window.
The last two were brilliant. This one's important.
Rules Number One, Two and Three for disingenuous despots: identify then vilify imaginary enemies, preferably those whom it is easy to brand and reject as 'other'; lie unrelentingly until the public perceive and embrace those lies as truths; leglislate accordingly.
All over the world, every minute of every day, women are man-handled by those who feel safe in the knowledge that they cannot physically (and often legally) be stopped. Often these individual women are expected to treat this as a joke.
It wasn't so long ago that a big celebrity businessman boasted about his ability to do just that, with complete impunity. The recording was disseminated throughout his country. And that same country subsequently elected him President.
The relevance of those paragraphs will become clear immediately following the prologue then throughout the first chapter.
This is, essentially, another book about how we treat each other. Specifically, how we treat women. About how those with power wield it over others. About the impoverishment of truth, justice and the American Way.
I'd elaborate, but my inevitable clumsiness would do a great disservice to the many gentle, deft touches herein which - presented as a series of parallels and often truly astonishing contrasts - form what seems to me (admittedly unversed as I am in the character's lore) the perfect portrait of one of comics true icons. It's just that, until now - until Tom King and Daniel Sampere - I'd never come across a definitive distillation of who Wonder Woman is.
She is strength, kindness, compassion and grace.
And one of the most marked contrasts to the ungrateful, hateful, mendacious atrocities thrown at Diana by the political and military leaders, blithely complicit media and the vox populi of America is her repetition of these three words, a response which epitomises those core qualities of strength, kindness, compassion and grace even under the most extreme duress:
"No thank you."
It's all so deftly done that it's going to both astound you and, I hope, move you. And Daniel Sampere's balletic treatment, over and over and over again, is a neoclassical masterclass in strength, emphasised by his depiction of Diana's grace, composure and most assuredly restraint.
Although do watch out for that hand-held, 50-tonne tank.
