Before Greg Rucka’s run on Wonder Woman, he and Jeff Jones turned out a 2002 graphic novel, WONDER WOMAN: The Hiketeia. A young woman invokes the Hiketeia, an ancient Greek ritual, to gain Wonder Woman’s protection. Trouble is, she’s just murdered the Gotham City crooks who sex-trafficked and killed her sister; now Batman shows up and demands Diana give up the killer, never mind about this oath stuff.
Astonishingly the cover is accurate: Wonder Woman kicks Batman’s butt. The “bat god” concept has become so dominant in this century, I absolutely loved seeing him in over his head.
Beyond that? The plot could have been comfortably fitted into a single regular issue. At 90 pages this is a showcase for the art and while Jones is good, he wasn’t 90-pages-with-little-plot good.
In the afterword to BOWLING WITH CORPSES AND OTHER TALES FROM LANDS UNKNOWN writer/artist Mike Mignola said he’d begun thinking of himself as in semi-retirement, then decided nothing he could take up in retirement would be as fun as writing and drawing comics. He adapted the title story from an old Italian folktale, then developed the Lands Unknown as a place to put them. These stories of witches, ghosts, creepy inns (“Don’t share your bed with a corpse, even if the landlord offers you a discount.”) and yes, bowling with a group of flesh-eating corpses, don’t break fresh ground but they’re good and the art is typically amazing.
The follow up volume, URI TUPKA AND THE GODS: A Tale From the Lands Unknown has the eponymous heretic fleeing the inquisition only to encounter bandits, hermits with horror stories, pirates, demon frogs, finally learning the truth about why the gods have withdrawn from the mortal world. The art is again amazing but this spends too much time on the history and geography of the setting. The lurking horror also feels too close to the Oghdru Jahad of Hellboy’s mythos
TRASHED by Derf Backderf is the story of a slacker who winds up taking a job as a garbage man, discovers it’s disgustingly dirty and gross — wow, you could almost make a metaphor for the human condition out of this! This is way too talky and not interesting talk: lectures on how we’re doing sanitation and waste management wrong, how absurdly much waste we create and constant grousing about how shitty the life of a garbage man is. I’d agree with a lot of the sentiments but that doesn’t make them interesting.
Covers by Jones and Mignola; all rights to images remain with current holders.
