Wonder Woman #52 Review

The Invisible Labyrinth of Tezcatlipoca

Written By: Steve Orlando

Art By: Aco, David Lorenzo, Romulo Fajardo Jr., Saida Temofonte

Cover Price: $3.99
Release Date: August 8, 2018

Now that Steve Orlando has gotten his "thesis statement" of who Wonder Woman is out of the way, maybe now we can get to an actual story of any substance, but right away I'm kind of apprehensive about it because for this story we not only have Wonder Woman, but Artemis and Aztek.  Three women of three different religious backgrounds and I'm sure we're going to get all three of those thrown at us with willy nilly dialog that won't present what any of it truly means.  I know I sound negative right off the bat, but I've already read the issue and my fears came true.  Let's see what else this story has in store for us.  Let's check it out.

What we have here is a story that gets Wonder Woman, Artemis and Aztek together to fight the same enemy, while rescuing a legendary Amazon warrior in the process and while the story works enough to get these three together, I really wish that someone in this trio wouldn't know everything about everything so that there could be some more exposition about Aztek's mythology and powers. 

Whenever Aztek says some nonsense about what she has to do and how she intends on doing it, it's some strange "thirteen heavens" or "the smoking mirror" or even the name of her villain Tezcatlipoca, who I discovered in this issue is the enemy of both sides...........   I have no idea what any of this means.  It's just gobbledygook concepts that are just thrown out there that everyone in this book seems to understand and because of that, they're just left behind so that we can move on, while I'm stuck just sitting here scratching my head.  I'm sure that a lot of people would like to know and understand this new Aztek, hell, even the old Aztek that they reference here that shouldn't be in this continuity, but from the brief conversation that Aztek and Wonder Woman have about it, you'll really get nothing of any real substance.

Overall, the art in this issue is decent, even if I'm not a fan of the panel layouts that depict it, but the main problem with this issue is what's the main problem with any Steve Orlando book and that's Steve Orlando's writing.  He's got some big ideas, but they're never fully fledged out and he's never writing so that anyone can understand what the hell he's talking about.  On top of that, the dialog in general isn't the greatest and his depiction of Artemis in this issue seems like he hasn't read anything of her in over a year because this Artemis doesn't feel like she's spent anytime with the Outlaws, even Steve Orlando has to reference the Bow of Ra for absolutely no reason.  This isn't a fun issue, even though it has a fun concept because in the end it's overwritten in those concepts, without explaining any of them.

Bits and Pieces:

There's a lot of concepts thrown at you in this issue, but I'll be damned if any of them were really explained or if I understand this new Aztek any better.  The art in this issue is fine, but the dialog just throws me completely off and I'd love to actually have an issue where Aztek talks about the things she's facing with people who need her to explain further than her just throwing words and names out there like everyone knows what's going on.

5/10