Review by Tony Keen

By 1988, after two years on Wonder Woman, George Pérez could no longer square the circle. He was writing and drawing the series, and it was selling better than ever – but it still wasn’t selling enough. Pérez simply couldn’t spend as much time on the comic and had to find more lucrative work. He had already cut down on the detail in his pencils, leaving more to his inkers, and at the end of 1988 he stopped pencilling Wonder Woman completely. But he clearly felt that there were still stories he wanted to tell for the Amazon Princess, so after Volume 2 he just continued as writer, quite a change of circumstances for someone who was, before he took on Wonder Woman, known almost exclusively as an artist.

This collection contains the first ten months or so of Pérez as writer but not artist. It is, sadly, considerably less impressive than Pérez’s first two years. For a start, the art isn’t anything like as good. Of course, after Pérez, almost anybody would be a disappointment, but Chris Marrinan (mostly inked by Will Blyberg, who earns a cover credit) seems a particularly unfortunate choice. Wonder Woman evidently couldn’t recruit any star talent, and so Marrinan was given his first job at DC. He puts himself at a disadvantage by trying to ape Pérez, and his faces look oddly elongated and ill-defined, though he does improve as the run goes on. A fill-in by Tom Grummett, inked by Steve Montano, is equally undistinguished, but there’s a constant reminder of what could have been through the covers Pérez supplies. Some are inked by Pérez over Marrinan’s pencils, but most are solely by Pérez, and he really pulls all the stops out, as if he was determined that the one artistic contribution he was making to Wonder Woman would be the best it could be. These covers are some of Pérez’s best art anywhere.

Problems with this volume aren’t confined to the art, though. The stories aren’t great either. To start with, there’s a couple of chapters of nonsense, as Pérez’s Wonder Woman is dragged into yet another DC cross-title crossover ‘event’, this time, Invasion!, with Princess Diana fighting alongside the Justice League. Keith Giffen (whose idea Invasion! was), J.M. DeMatteis, and Cary Bates all contribute to the writing, but not particularly positively. Invasion! chapters are mainly notable for bringing back Etta Candy and Steve Trevor, who had been forgotten for a while. Once that’s out of the way, the rest of the volume is taken up with the return of the Cheetah (last seen in Challenge of the Gods), which then links in to the discovery of the lost tribe of Amazons. These are clearly ideas Pérez had been working towards for a long while, but the execution is weak as the story meanders for far too long, moving from one dull fight scene into which Diana is reluctantly drawn to another.

Fortunately, things do pick up for the Amazon Princess in Volume 4. This content is also included in Wonder Woman by George Pérez Omnibus, Volume 2.