Wonder Woman Annual #1 Review and *SPOILERS*

Give Me Wonder Woman!

Written By: Greg Rucka, Vita Ayala, Michael Moreci, Collin Kelly, Jackson Lanzing

Art By: Nicola Scott, Romulo Fajardo Jr., Jodi Wynne, Claire Roe, Jordie Bellaire, Josh Reed, Stephanie Hans, Dave Sharpe, David Lafuente, John Rauch

Cover Price: $4.99

Release Date: May 31, 2017

*Non Spoilers and Score At The Bottom*

It's Annuals week and with that we get ourselves Wonder Woman's first Annual of the Rebirth era of DC Comics.  It's always weird to try and talk about an Annual in my little opener here because besides for when writers use these over-sized books to try and tell more of current arc, it's usually a one-shot that there's really nothing to say about to begin with.  Here though, we get ourselves book of many short stories that possibly fill in Wonder Woman's timeline a bit now that we know the New 52 was full of things that only happened as implanted memories from the Gods........... Yeah, I'm not sure how all of that makes sense, but hopefully this issue will do its best to make us understand or at least, give us some fun, interesting stories.  Let's jump into this issue and see how Wonder Woman Annual #1 fits into our current story.  Let's check it out.

Explain It!:

Our first story deals with Batman and Superman's first encounter with Diana, after her encounter with the terrorists at the Mall we saw early on in her Year One story after she first arrived to Man's World.  Too bad this totally throws a monkey wrench into our New 52 Justice League beginnings because after Wonder Woman is moved to a secure location so that the government can be sure of what her powers are, Superman and Batman show up and begin watching her from a distance and right away I was annoyed because the World's Finest duo already seem to know each other.  Yeah, a lot of things have changed since Superman Rebirth and also with the Lies told to Wonder Woman, but I feel so in the dark now about what went down with our heroes that got them to start working together as a team.  Was Darkseid still involved?  I guess it doesn't matter because all we really get from this story is Wonder Woman flying over to meet our other heroes because she's curious to why they are watching her.  Long story short, she offers them the Perfect so that they can communicate and afterward when they could see into each other's hearts, Batman is pissed because he thinks that both Superman and him have to work harder to be as pure as she is. 

In our next story, King Shark is being sentenced to death in Markovia because he has been found guilty of murdering General Laurent, but a Captain in the military doesn't believe that King Shark would have been able to do the deed from where he was during the murder.  Really though, there's not enough here to really get into what actually went down.  It seems that another General went searching for King Shark and then possibly killed the other General because he had it coming.  All in all, Wonder Woman showed up and used her Lasso of Truth to get to the bottom of it and King Shark is set free and is told he can make up for his past deeds with the help of Aquaman, but as we leave our favorite former Suicide Squad member, he's not about making any promises on that. 

Next, Wonder Woman finds herself in Japan sparring with a warrior named Kikori, who asked her there for a favor.  Too bad that the favor he asks her for consists of her taking his life, which she obviously doesn't want to do, but the skinny on all of this is, his land was cursed, he took the curse into himself and is now a monster.  Wonder Woman has to fight Kikori after he turns into said monster and even though she wished she could find another way to break Kikori of this curse, she ultimately has to slay him to keep his village safe, which was all he ever wished to do and in honor of Kikori's sacrifice, Diana offers herself as the village's new protector for whenever they might need one.

Finally, we have Wonder Woman fighting a Pacific Rim monster that ARGUS just really wants to destroy themselves, but after Diana places her Lasso of Truth on the creature, she learns that she can understand its language.  It's with that that we learn this monster's origin, where it was born, its mother was already dead and after a time it left its island home and now surfaced on the Pacific Coast.  Eventually, after ARGUS continues to try to blow the monster to holy hell and Wonder Woman protects it, she takes the monster to Dinosaur Island, where she makes it a bunch of sweet promises about visiting and all that and we end this story with her playing fetch with it.  

That's it for this Annual of Wonder Woman and man, besides for the first and third story, there really wasn't anything here.  Even with that, the first story just went and gave me a shit load more questions than I already had about what was going on in the DCU with all the changes lately because who knows how and when the Justice League got started if Superman and Batman were already chummy by the time Wonder Woman showed up and while the third story was nice and decent to look at, there really wasn't much to that either.  Yup, not a lot going on with the best stories here so imagine how little we got with the worst.  Really, this is a hard issue to rate and review because of all the creative teams and with this being an anthology type Annual, but overall, if you like these kinds of stories and don't expect much out of it, then you'd probably like this more than I did.  I was just looking for a bit of substance and something that tied into what we've been dealing with in Wonder Woman and while we did get that with Rucka's first story, it just wasn't enough to get me happy with this Annual.

Bits and Pieces:

While I'm happy as hell that we got Nicola Scott back on art for the first story of this anthology type Annual, the rest was just meaningless drivel that didn't do anything for the character or for me.  At the very least, we did get something that tied into our current Wonder Woman story with the first installment of this Annual, but it raised more questions about what the current timeline of the DCU looks like and not knowing is driving me nuts.  All in all, there isn't much here, but if you like short little one-shots that don't mean much, then you'll probably be into this.

5.7/10