Marie Javins

I had intended to briefly review each story in this anthology, but real life has been particularly bothersome in intruding upon my Goodreads time the past few weeks and now my loan of the book is minutes from expiring, and I don't have the energy or time to race through it or even renew it, especially since the book itself is just good enough to give a thumbs up but hardly worth much more effort than that.

There are ups and downs as with any anthology, but overall it's filled with nice, solid, upbeat little stories about Wonder Woman. The gold accents in the art underwhelmed for the most part, but at least they didn't clutter or mute the art as some colorists today do. I liked the mix of writers and artists, with first-class mainstream house stylists rubbing shoulders with the indy crowd.

Worth a look if you are a Wonder Woman fan. I wasn't too impressed with the current Becky Cloonan run I recently sampled, so this was a nice palate cleanser.

FOR REFERENCE

Contents:

Wonder Woman Black & Gold #1 / Jen Bartel, cover artist
* Mother's Daughter / AJ Mendez, writer; Ming Doyle, artist
* What Doesn't Kill You / Nadia Shammas, writer; Morgan Beem, artist
* I'm Ageless / John Arcudi, writer; Ryan Sook, artist
* Golden Age / Amy Reeder, writer and artist
* The Wager / Becky Cloonan, writer and artist

Wonder Woman Black & Gold #2 / Terry Dodson and Rachel Dodson, cover artists
* Without Love / Mariko Tamaki, writer; Jamie McKelvie, artist
* A God with No Name / Che Grayson, writer; Corin Howell, artist
* Homecoming / Tillie Walden, writer and artist
* A Common Motivator / Stephanie Williams, writer; Ashley A. Woods, artist
* The Acquaintance / Rachel Smythe, writer and artist

Wonder Woman Black & Gold #3 / Jae Lee and June Chung, cover artists
* We Built a New World / Janet Harvey Nevala, writer; Megan Levens, artist
* Espionage / Robert Venditti, writer; Steve Epting, artist
* Beat the Heat / Paula Sevenbergen, writer; Inaki Miranda, artist
* Do No Harm / Nnedi Okorafor, writer; Jack T. Cole, artist
* The Stolen Lasso of Truth / Aimee Garcia, writer; Sebastian Fiumara, artist

Wonder Woman Black & Gold #4 / Tula Lotay, cover artist
* Prayer / Andrew Constant; Nicola Scott, artist
* Amazing / Paul Azaceta, writer and artist
* Whatever Happened to Cathy Perkins?! / Sina Grace, writer; Leo Romero, artist
* Love Failed / Andrew MacLean, writer and artist
* Wing Woman / Sherri L. Smith, writer; Colleen Doran, artist

Wonder Woman Black & Gold #5 / Julian Totino Tedesco, cover artist
* Hellzapoppin' / Peter J. Tomasi, writer; Christian Alamy, artist
* Beyond the Horizon / Sanya Anwar, writer and artist
* How the Wonder Woman Was Brought Low by a Mouse but Captured the Stars / Kurt Busiek, writer; Benjamin Dewey, artist
* Feet of Clay / Josie Campbell, writer; Carlos D'Anda, artist
* Memories of Hator / Trung Le Nguyen, writer and artist

Wonder Woman Black & Gold #6 / Lee Bermejo, cover artist
* Role Model / Marguerite Sauvage, writer and artist
* The Prophet / Liam Sharp, writer and artist
* A Lesson in Truth / Michael W. Conrad, writer; Noah Bailey, artist
* "Attack of the 50 Foot Wonder Woman" / Christos Gage, writer; Kevin Maguire, artist
* Fresh Air in Philly / Dr. Sheena C. Howard, writer; Jamal Campbell, artist

Wonder Woman Black & Gold #1-6
* Variant Cover Gallery / Frank Cho, Yanick Paquette, Ramona Fradon, Sandra Hope, Joshua Middleton, Carla Cohen, Warren Louw, David Mack, Janaina Medeiros, Simone Di Meo, Matias Bergara, Simone Bianchi, Rose Besch, Stephanie Hans, David Nakayama, artists… (more)

The Flashpoint volumes of Convergence strike me as distinct from the earlier ones. Almost all of the characters in the Crisis, Infinite Earths, and Zero Hour volumes continued to exist after the points where they were plucked from for these tales: the Earth-One Legion had many more adventures, so did the Justice Society, so did Aquaman and Kyle Rayner. Those stories mostly revisited old status quos that the characters had moved on from. But Convergence: Flashpoint picks its characters from around the time of Flashpoint: this is, from around the time they ceased to exist. After Flashpoint, the Superman we'd been following in DC Comics since 1985 was gone, so was Renee Montoya, so was Stephanie Brown, so was Nightwing and Oracle. DC brought them back in different forms, but these characters just stopped, without endings.

So Convergence: Flashpoint is different, in that many of its stories seek to give closure to characters whose stories never received it. How did Clark Kent's marriage to Lois Lane turn out? Did Barbara Gordon and Dick Grayson get over there will-they-won't-they thing? How did Stephanie Brown's tenure as Batgirl go? What ever came of Renee's weird relationship with Harvey Dent, the man who had outed her?

All of these questions (with the added complication that the characters spent a year in a domed Gotham) are answered in Convergence: Flashpoint. Unlike with some volumes of Convergence, these are character versions I'm familiar with: I know the post-Crisis, married Superman; I know Nightwing and Oracle from reading all of Birds of Prey; I know Renee Montoya from Gotham Central and 52. So these stories carried a lot more weight than the ones in, say, Infinite Earths or Zero Hour. Plus, in many cases, the writers in this volume worked on these characters themselves. Dan Jurgens wrote and drew the post-Crisis Superman a lot in the 1990s, Greg Rucka didn't create Renee but he may as well have, and Gail Simone defined Oracle in what's still the best Birds of Prey run.

All of this is to say that as exercises in nostalgia and loose ends, these stories mostly worked for me. The Superman tale, where Lois ends up giving birth to a super-baby, is a heartwarming one of how Superman stands for light against darkness. I liked that Rucka used the Convergence framework to have "our" Harvey Dent confront a version of himself who never became Two-Face in a city-to-city fight unlike any other in the series so far. I actually haven't read a lot of Stephanie Brown Batgirl stories, but this seemed a fitting and cute way of tying up her adventures, with her finally finding an identity of her own. And though I never was a Babs/Dick shipper, letting them both get married and be badasses one last time is a nice final story. There's some great art, too; both Lee Weeks and the Dan Jurgens/Norm Rapmund team draw a stunningly heroic Superman; and I was delighted to see Jan Duursema (who I know from decades of Star Wars comics for Dark Horse) doing her thing in the DC universe.

The book's not perfect. I've complained before that the rules for city battles are different in each story, and the ones in the Stephanie Brown story are in particular difficult to reconcile with other volumes-- Stephanie finds out she's Gotham's champion from watching tv (did Telos send them a news bulletin?) among other weirdnesses, and in the Nightwing/Oracle story, Telos has enforcer robots that appear in none other of the thirty-five Convergence battles I've read thus far. Also, I've never read the pre-Flashpoint Justice League, but Frank Tieri's take on it doesn't make me want to. They're obnoxious "strong female character" types, and they don't exactly acquit themselves well here.

The title has a double meaning. These are the versions of the characters from the time of Flashpoint, but in all of the stories, they're fighting Gotham from the "Flashpoint" universe. This actually worked surprisingly well, especially in the first story, where Jurgens extracts some pathos from having the Flashpoint Kal-El ("Subject One") meet the Earth-Zero Lois Lane, and having the Flashpoint Thomas Wayne (who realizes these characters come from the same world as the Flash he met) get to talk to Superman about the kind of man his son became. Wayne's sadness that his universe didn't vanish in a flash is a nice touch.

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This volume collects the Convergence adventures of five more sets of 1990s heroes, hailing from September 1994 or thereabouts. There's the hook-handed Aquaman (he lost the real hand in September 1994's Aquaman #2); Batman is joined by Azrael, who substituted for him during the Knightfall storyline (February 1993 through August 1994); Kyle Rayner is Green Lantern (he took over in March 1994's Green Lantern #50), and Hal Jordan has become Parallax; Supergirl is a protoplasmic blob from a pocket universe (she adopted the role in February 1992), working for Lex Luthor, who's transferred his brain into a younger, sexier, Australianer, hairier clone body (he first appeared in October 1990; the two dated until Supergirl #4 in May 1994, so there's some timeline wonkiness here); and John Henry Irons, who substituted for Superman while he was dead, is the superhero-in-his-own-right Steel (he got his own series in February 1994).

Maybe I lack nostalgia for these 1990s set-ups (I've read very little of any of them, except clone Luthor and protoplasmic Supergirl both feature in the Death of/World Without a/Return of Superman trilogy). Like all of these Convergence stories, it has to contrive to get the heroes all in the same city; apparently that was because everyone turned up in Metropolis to fight Parallax. Does this mean the city was domed during the events of Zero Hour? I don't remember the events of Zero Hour well enough to say; it seems a pretty tepid explanation that Azrael came to Metropolis because couldn't "miss a gathering of heroes like that." Additionally, the stories are inconsistent as to whether Superman was in the dome or not. He doesn't actually appear, but Kyle includes him among those who forgave Hal for his actions as Parallax, while on the other hand, both Steel and Lex mention that he's absent.

Whatever. Probably none of this really matters, what matters is the story... but I didn't really care about the stories here. It's impossible to care about Aquaman, the Azrael story was pretty uninteresting, and I don't know what planet Keith Giffen was on when he wrote the Supergirl tale, but it is bonkers, and sometimes in a good way, sometimes in a bad way, most often in a what is this i don't even way. I did like that Parallax isn't evil per se (remember Hal's actions were all in aid of trying to bring back the destroyed Coast City), so he ruthlessly fights on behalf of the city against its enemies, and Kyle has to try to stop him from going overboard. But even though in theory I do like the character of Steel, his story still didn't do much for me, even if it did reunite the actual creative team the character had back in the 1990s.

Probably part of the problem is that in three of these stories, the opponents are from the Wildstorm universe. This is definitely thematically appropriate, as Wildstorm is the most 1990s thing of them all, and thank God that Grifter doesn't turn up, but seriously, who gives a shit about Wildstorm? And these folks are like the Wildstorm also-rans; I could tolerate the Authority or maybe even Stormwatch, but Gen¹³ and Wetworks? In two of the stories, it's the denizens of Earth-6, which is kind of random, but thankfully Giffen makes a joke at the expense of that randomness. Earth-6's Lady Quark was a member of L.E.G.I.O.N., which Giffen wrote, and he has a joke about that, though it's anachronistic to say the least.

Anyway, whatever. All the 1990s stuff I cared about was frontloaded in the first Convergence: Zero Hour volume, which didn't leave me with much to enjoy here.

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