Greg Rucka's Wonder Woman Volume 2

Greg Rucka's Wonder Woman Volume 2 (2004-2005/ Collected 2017): written by Greg Rucka; illustrated by Drew Johnson, Rags Morales, and others: Greg Rucka is one of Wonder Woman's three or four best writers. His early oughts work on WW gave us an Amazon who fought mythical monsters, talked to the animals, and acted as the Ambassador of the Amazon Nation of Themyscira to the United Nations. 

While several long arcs continue all the way through this volume of a year's worth of Wonder Woman, there are also satisfying short arcs and single-issue stories here as well. The volume begins with the revenge of Medusa and the Gorgons against Diana and ends with Wonder Woman descending into Hades to bring Hermes back from the dead. It's all fun and engaging, with solid and occasionally inspired art from Drew Johnson and Rags Morales. 

A successful Olympian coup of the major female Greek gods over Zeus and his brothers Poseidon and Hades drives the overall mythical arc -- as Athena's Champion, WW is drafted into the conflict.  Wonder Woman's on-going battle with a shadowy, high-tech and deep-pocketed enemy on Earth continues into and through its second year. Highly recommended.

Botch Sauvage

First Wave, written by Brian Azzarello, illustrated by Rags Morales, Ed Bryant and Phil Winslade (2010-2011): My God, what a fantastic fucking botch DC Comics' resurrection of pulp hero Doc Savage in his own weird little comic-book universe turned out to be. Cancellation now seems to be set in stone, and all I really care about is whether or not DC will still publish the Showcase compilation of Marvel's great, short-lived Doc Savage B&W magazine-sized comic of the mid-1970's. Now that was a resurrection!

It looked so promising to begin with, as Doc, an alternate take on Batman, the Spirit, the Blackhawks, the Avenger, and a number of other reconfigured DC characters would fight evil in a reimagined 1930's where the inventions of Doc and other heroes and villains had essentially started the 21st century 70 years early.

Unfortunately, grimness and moral murkiness dominated -- it all felt like a reboot from the grim 'n gritty late 1980's. Furthermore, this introductory miniseries took forever to get anything going in the way of an interesting plot, and was perennially late to boot (as in, close to 18 months for 6 issues). And here and in the First Wave Doc Savage series, fun was pretty much nowhere to be found. Instead, we got a grim slog and a paucity of likeable characters.

I suppose a further problem arose from the concept itself (that is, a universe reconfigured by Doc's presence). Alan Moore's Doc Savage homage, Tom Strong, pretty much followed the same premise. The difference lay mainly in the fact that Alan Moore was writing that in his full jolly metafictional mode, making Tom Strong's adventures a delight whereas NuDoc just kept giving me more and more of a headache.

Future pulp reboots should probably leave Azzarello out of the mix -- I can think of few good contemporary comic-book writers less suited to updating a frothy pulp hero originally aimed at a readership of 14-year-olds. Tom Strong is awesome, though, as are the appearances of Doc-like heroes in Warren Ellis's Planetary and Dave Stevens' Rocketeer. Buy that stuff instead. It may be time for the original Doc to be reabsorbed by the eternal slurry of the pop underverse. Not recommended.