Wonder Woman has to deal with the ramifications of her constant fights with supervillains and metahumans. In a second story, she teaches a young man about responsibility and caring for those you love even if they are difficult to control.
The Wonder Woman digital first anthology gives us two new stories. In the first story, “Our Little Dance” Wonder Woman is testifying against moving her nemesis Cheetah to a minimum security facility. The story takes place after the two have fought. Cheetah’s defeat has lead her to being incarcerated, but her family, that is Debbi Domaine’s family, is pushing for her to be moved to another facility for treatment. The story focuses on the innocent bystanders often caught between superhero and supervillain, and those affected by the actions of metahumans.
The follow-up story is a much shorter and more simplistic, a tale of a young man and his pet lion. The lion has become too much for him to handle on his own and he doesn’t know how to properly care for him anymore. Wonder Woman is there to teach him a lesson from her own past about dealing with wild animals and the virtues of patience and understanding.
The Positive
“Our Little Dance” is not a story you usually see in superhero comics. Instead of focusing on the exciting battle between Cheetah and Wonder Woman, they focus on the innocents, those caught in the middle. The story is mainly told through the eyes of the attorney, Shawn Latimer. His personal story is one of tragedy due to an escaped supervillain, the Scarecrow. They choose to focus on the personal drama as opposed to the action.
We also get to see a Wonder Woman who is fighting for the person trapped inside the Cheetah. She focuses on her, speaking to her by name instead of calling her Cheetah, trying to reach the person inside the monster.
The second story, “Both Ends of the Leash” tells a different kind of story, but it is another one that focuses on the drama as opposed to the action. We get a look back at a young Diana as her mother tried to teach her lessons of patience, that Wonder Woman then passes along to the young man here.
The Negative
“Both Ends of the Leash” is more like a morality play than a real story. There is no reason given as to why Wonder Woman is there. Nor do they go into the real consequences of keeping a wild animal like a lion as a pet. The art style was not really working for me, it could have been better and it left me wanting more.
The Verdict
Both of these stories work to show a different side to Wonder Woman, one that is not always well represented. They show her caring and compassion more than they show her fists. That is the advantage of an anthology title like this, they can explore different aspects of the character and place her into different situations without worrying about it affecting the overall canon.
