You Can’t Trust a Big Brain and a Smile
Written By:
Mark Andreyko
Art By:
Tom Derenick, Carrie Strachan
Lettered By:
Wes Abbott
Digital Price: $0.99
On Sale Date: August 4, 2016
**NON SPOILERS AND SCORE AT THE BOTTOM**
Ahh, I’ve finally finished all of my comic book
reviews for the week, editing Cosmic Treadmill (each week on the Weird Science
DC Comics Podcast!) and Weird Comics History (new episodes on the Weird Science
DC Comics Podcast feed every Sunday morning!), checked the vacuum-sealed room
that contains my mint-condition Binky and
his Buddies collection, and fed my deformed, feral brother some raw meat as
proscribed by the witch’s curse that condemned him. Time to sit back, relax,
and enjoy the fruits of my labors, no comics to think abou…what’s this? A new
chapter of Wonder Woman ’77 sneak-dropped last Friday? To be fair, I had heard
that new chapters were coming, but I didn’t think it was going to be this soon.
Mea culpa! I will get right back to the only task I’m worth, good masters:
reviewing comics that no one else will! So read on!
Our yarn opens at the Cyberdynamic Labs in Maryland,
where two old dudes—or dudes in old dude masks—are fleeing the scene with a
heavy sack of what I must only assume are ill-gotten cyberdynamic parts. A
guard (remembering his training) steps from around the corner and fires his gun
on the robbers, shooting one in the stomach and the other in the shoulder. The
one with the more superficial wound calls the guard a fool, denoting him as a
supervillain of some stripe, and then uses some kind of invisible force to seen
him careening. The thieves escape, the one with Jedi powers helping the one
that got gut shot. At…I guess FBI headquarters? Steve Trevor and Diana Prince
are going over some security footage of the crime, and Diana notices something
through one of the eyeholes in the less-wounded crook’s mask: the eye-stalk of
bodiless brain, Harlow Gault!
Surely you remember Harlow Gault, don’t you? He was
the floating brain in what looked like a nineteenth-century fire pump that
sought to find the perfect body in an Olympic athlete. Episode twelve of season
three? Aired in 1978? Well, neither did I, until I looked it up. Luckily, the
comic does a great job recapping the episode, at least the parts pertinent to
this story, so you don’t need to have ever watched the Wonder Woman television show to follow along—though, after reading
about Harlow Gault, you are probably going to want to watch this episode. He escaped
at the end of that program and he’s back again, in a new robotic body that is
much more mobile and humanoid, besides looking a lot like Bender from Futurama. We know this because we cut to
Gault’s lair, where he is going over his pilfered robot parts while some lady
looks after the severely wounded non-robot guy. I can only assume they are
being compelled to work for Gault by use of his telekinesis, because he treats
them both like dirt, but after the woman insists he allows the dying dude to be
dropped off at a hospital—but only after he wipes his mind completely!
At the hospital, Wonder Woman and Steve Trevor are
visiting the recuperating criminal, who can’t tell them much because his mind
is blank. Now wait, does he even know language? Will he have to re-learn using
the bathroom and stuff? This is what I never understood about amnesia, at least
as depicted on television: they’d lose every memory accrued up until the point
of getting bonked on the head or whatever, but they didn’t forget how to speak
or walk or deal with the lecherous jerk working the register at the corner
store. To coax this guy into speaking, Wonder Woman wraps her golden lasso
around his arm, and he gives up the location of Gault’s hideout. Wonder Woman
and Steve descend on the abandoned warehouse with a team of special agents,
that spirit away Gault’s mind-controlled lady helper, I guess secure the area
too. Wondy and Steve try to sneak up on Gault, but he turns around like FOOLS!
and blasts them back with a sick mind wave. There’s a tussle where Steve and
Wonder Woman struggle to get at Gault, which ultimately results in the bubble
containing Gault’s brain cracking open and spilling its contents! But where
could the brain be? You don’t think…I’m going to make you pay a buck to find
out???
Yep, because this was a really fun, well-drawn story
that is worth reading. No disrespect to the epic story Greg Rucka is building
over in the DCU, but I just love these Wonder
Woman ’77 chapters because you can dive right into the deep end. If a
villainous brain in a jar isn’t enough to entice you to give this comic a look,
then we don’t understand each other at all. The rest of us normal people who
know the value of a crusading Amazon fighting a telekinetic robot will enjoy
our comics, like regular folks.
Bits and
Pieces:
8.5/10
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