More than any other version of Wonder Woman right now, Sensation Comics Featuring Wonder Woman has managed to identify what makes the character successful and necessary. Published as a digital-first book, Sensation Comics is composed of individual issues written and drawn by different contributors, telling short stories that epitomize the character in all her strength—and faults. Sensation Comics Featuring Wonder Woman #13 (DC) is written by Barbara Randall Kesel. Kesel is an experienced writer and does very well by this book; she’s known both for her solo writing as well as work she did with ex-husband Karl Kesel, though she’s also won awards for editorial work on titles like Hellboy and she’s long been vocal in her opposition to sexism in the comic book industry.
Kesel works with three different artists and three different colorists to deliver a deceptively straightforward issue. Diana interrupts three young women on the beach and their conversation, in turn, is interrupted by the arrival of the Crime Syndicate’s Superwoman. The first third, which focuses on Wonder Woman and the young women, features soft, almost cartoony art from Irene Koh with matching colors by Wendy Broome. Koh is also the artist on IDW’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Casey & April miniseries, but her style here is a little looser and upbeat. Part two has art from Emma Vieceli, who’s worked on titles like Vampire Academy. Her lines are sharper, more traditional than Koh’s, and saturated colors from Kelly Fitzpatrick highlight that difference. Most of this section of the story focuses on Wonder Woman and Superwoman’s battle of wits, and the art relies heavily on Vieceli’s excellent expression work. The final portion is all fists and fighting, which artist Laura Braga delivers with stunning skill. Here is proof that female warriors can kick ass and look sexy without being sexualized, that a cat fight doesn’t always require improbable poses. Colors from Carrie Strachan keep Braga’s lines dynamic and interesting, highlighting each individual character beautifully.
Ten women, many of them relatively unknown to the industry, were featured in this single issue: letterer Saida Temofonte and editors Jessica Chen and Kristy Quinn were just as vital to the issue as Kesel and the art team. As a digital-first series, Sensation Comics #13 (which in digital sales is chapters 45-47) is not only available online before it goes on shelves but also is less expensive than print copies. Sensation Comics doesn’t require knowledge of decades of backstory, it doesn’t require a massive monetary commitment to read an entire story arc since they’re contained in one issue, and perhaps most importantly, doesn’t require physical access to a comic book store or months of waiting for a trade. It is the ideal jumping-on point for a newbie, particularly women. Unfortunately, it’s not going to be around for much longer, as DC recently announced that Sensation Comics and Batman ’66 are two of the digital-first titles to end this November. It’s a staggering loss for new readers and those who love Wonder Woman, given the problems faced in the other editorial offices at DC.
Kesel’s Diana is brash and brave and a little bombastic. She’s not always right, she says some things you maybe rather she wouldn’t, but at the end of the day she protects people who need her and believes in herself without equivocation, two traits that are so foundational to the character it’s difficult to believe in a Wonder Woman who doesn’t have them. Too many current versions of Wonder Woman seem to focus first on the fact that she is a woman and assume that means she should be identified by her love interests or her insecurities. Sensation Comics understands that, at the heart of all things, Wonder Woman is identified not only by her womanhood, but by her sense of wonder and the joy she takes in the world around her. It’s a shame that won’t last much longer. [Caitlin Rosberg]
The consumption of the artist by their art undergirds Becca Tobin’s Frontier #9 (Youth In Decline), the most recent installment of the quarterly one-cartoonist showcase. The issue, whose slimy, chunky cover exudes an uncanny balance of repulsion and attraction, features a young musician who is so desperate to create new, original music that she develops a new, original instrument by which to do it. But like something out of a David Cronenberg film, the instrument is sentient and seeks to supplant its creator. This all happens rather quickly, and Tobin emphasizes mood and feeling rather than plot; it would be more accurate to describe Frontier #9 as a sequence of emotional states than as a sequence of events. Much to the work’s benefit, Tobin has an immense facility with drawing emotion; she is able to visually render impossibly vague, inarticulable feelings. The sensation of pure joy, for example.
Comics, lacking an aural component, is a medium notorious for its difficulty to approximate sound. It has images as well as text, which gives it an advantage over prose, but even still—no easy feat. It’s the rare cartoonist who can represent sound in any meaningful or interesting way. Liz Suburbia’s recent Sacred Heart contains a few moments where sound, the physical phenomena, is rendered in an aesthetically compelling way. But the experience of hearing a sound is something completely distinct, and something that few cartoonists even attempt. Tobin, who colored this issue with an incredibly rich palette of watercolors, uses an almost-surrealistic style to great effect, and she does attempt to visually approximate the transcendent quality of a particularly enjoyable sound. She does so by altering her line weights and her colors, by drawing her characters’ heads exploding and reforming, and by translucently overlapping multiple bodies on top of one another. She manipulates both form and content to achieve her effect.
Beyond just that particularly resonant moment, however, Tobin’s art is a revelation. Her watercolors add a splotchy, uneven texture that lends itself well to the psychologically tenuous elements of the narrative, and the hues of the radiant, kaleidoscopic palette make for a very jarring read. The colors don’t match; they scratch and scrape at each other, creating a dissonance that unbalances each image. Everything is just slightly off-kilter, and the effect is a slight unease—similar to the low-frequency industrial hum that permeates David Lynch fare. That is to say nothing of her incredibly expressive linework, which is more stylized than illustrative. She favors a curvilinearity that, with the shifting textures and shades of her watercolors, imbues the images with a discordant energy that makes each form seem living, tangible, animate. This inconsonance is a recurring element of Tobin’s aesthetic, and while it does work well with her themes of art and artists and, more specifically, music, its most potent affect is the way it makes her figures and forms seem alive. [Shea Hennum]