Thursday, July 22, 2010

JLApe part four: Wonder Woman Annual #8, "The Thin Gold Line"


We're just about up to the halfway point of JLApe, and I don't want you to think I'm petering out, but today's will probably be the shortest writeup. Partly, because I'm doing it mostly from memory, and partly because it wasn't very good: Wonder Woman Annual #8, "The Thin Gold Line" Written by Doselle Young, pencils by Brian Denham, inks by Jon Sibal.

Briefly: a rank-and-file, "normal" talking ape narrates, as the ape witch Abu-Gita leads a confusing mission: apparently, they're going to go through the Amazons' island of Thymscara, to Olympus, and the lands of mythology; in the hopes of freeing the Rakhasas, demons of ape lore, to use in the war against humans. But the Rakhasas aren't ape lore, they're part of Hindu myth: the narrator has realized that somehow, the apes' entire belief system has been cobbled together from human sources, like the writings of H.P. Lovecraft. Yet somehow, because the apes believe it, they're able (or at least willing) to travel across the river Styx and hijack the boatman Charon...

I have no idea what the current, official answer is to the question, "How long as Gorilla City been there?" This issue says a hundred years or so, previous stories have said "eons," and we mentioned that Green Lantern story where the Gorillas are really aliens.

The ape-ifyed Wonder Woman is there, but shortly reverts back to normal. To avoid using 'somehow' again, it's because she's not a "baseline human." Wonder Girl Cassie makes a brief appearance, former replacement-WW Artemis is there, so is Amazon librarian/historian/bookworm Shim'tar (she wears glasses in a couple of panels so you know), and so is Nu'bia. Who was patrolling hell, or something...

There's some lines about how reassuring and great Wonder Woman is, but I'm hard-pressed to tell you what she actually did this issue. There's a germ of an idea in the belief in a fake mythology taking a life of it's own; but it doesn't go anywhere. Not good. We'll take a second to flip through this again, anything else...?

Next week? Flash Annual #12!

2 comments:

Fanboy Wife said...

I was expecting to see you write about Wonder Woman as an ape.

SallyP said...

My God, that art is...painful.