Wonder Woman #6: Powerplay Review
Medium: Comic
Release date: 7/1/1987
Review date: 11/7/2024
Score: 8/10
Here we go, the grand conclusion to “Wonder Woman’s” introduction - the showdown with Ares. After leaving our heroes surrounded and outgunned at the end of the last issue, the God of War reveals that his mind controlled General Tolliver at the American nuclear missile base, as well as his Soviet counterparts in Russia, are set to nuke the planet into complete destruction, enacting Ares’ master plan and destroying all the other Olympian gods. Wonder Woman and the rest Team Good Guy don’t take too kindly to that proposed course of action and make a surprise attack at their captors, with Julia, Etta, and Michaelis holding off the psychically controlled US soldiers by just, uh, killing them all, giving Trevor and Diana a chance to escape further into the base to stop General Toliver and Ares. After loudly calling out Ares for being scared of her, a wee mere mortal, Diana is magically teleported to the god’s mystical realm to pay for her jive smack talk, and it's here the two finally meet face-to-face for their ultimate confrontation.
The art again really shines in this issue, with much of George Perez’s work centering around portraying Ares in hyper stylized, mythic poses. The god looms imposingly over all the humans in the panels, and I appreciate how even in her climactic battle with Ares, Diana is still shown as being insignificantly strong to pose any sort of threat to the mad deity. Just because Diana is the protagonist of the series doesn’t mean she is the most powerful gal around, and I appreciate DC’s commitment to keeping Ares as impossibly untouchable as they could. Diana’s ultimate triumph over the god comes not from her punching him just the right number of times in the face, but by using her magical lasso to show the barbarous deity what would happen if he ultimately succeeded in his plan - complete and utter loneliness, with no one left to fight and kill in his name, a fate that even Ares could not bear, causing him to abandon his plans of nuking the world and killing the other gods. A rather thoughtful conclusion to a story about war, and while maybe a bit twee, it was probably the only way to write a victory for Diana that didn’t completely invalidate Ares’ established godlike power. I really enjoyed Ares’ line about wanting to kill Zeus like Zeus had killed his father Chronos like Chronos had killed his father Uranus; a good play on established Greek myth. Though I did find myself a bit puzzled why Hippolyte and the other Amazons were aging so quickly and severely in Diana’s various visions; maybe I missed some dialogue somewhere but it seemed like a deliberate choice that I just didn’t get. If I had any complaint about the issue, I guess it's just that I feel like the reveal as to what Ares’ big secret master plan for world domination was, and then the prevention of said plan one issue later, felt a bit rushed, especially with just how much everything was built up about the substantial threat Ares posed to the planet in the first couple issues, though I could understand if the “Wonder Woman” team was just ready to wrap up the Ares plot line and give their readers a little something else - it's easy for me to forget this kind of thing when reading these comics today, but this storyline would have played out over six months for the “Wonder Woman” comic readers, so getting some sort of conclusion by this point, even if that conclusion may have felt a little rushed, was almost certainly in order for the run. And I am very interested to see where the comic goes next, what with Diana now being in Boston and having set up a small but loyal group of allies (Trevor’s currently a wanted criminal and seemed pretty fed up with the military too, so his future is a bit up in the air as well). Pour one out for Michaelis, RIP, gone but not forgotten, however things are looking good for our Wonderful Woman and her wonderful friends.