Absolute Power: Task Force VII #6 review

So far in this mini-series we’ve seen Amazos based on Superman, Aquaman, Green Lantern, the Flash and Batman. This issue it’s an Amazo with a hint of Wonder Woman, but having absorbed the Amazing Amazon’s god-given powers, there’s a problem.

Amanda Waller’s robotic lackey is finding, like its brothers, that it’s absorbed more than just super-abilities. It’s taken on memories, a sense of self… and the potential for goodness. But the android resists and, using Wonder Woman’s innate link to Themyscira, finds the island which has so far been shielded from Waller.

Elsewhere, Queen Nubia and her top advisors discuss the hell they assume will rain down once Waller learns they shielded superheroes from her. They need to plan a defence.

Too late.

The Amazo is taking down Amazons, but they’re not its ultimate target – that’s the Well of Souls, from which Paradise Island’s midwife, Magala, extracts spirits to be reborn as warrior women.

If you’ve been following my reviews of this series, you’ll likely be bored silly with me saying how much better it is than I expected. Not this time, it’s my least liked chapter. It’s not terrible, but I’ve never been a fan of modern DC Amazons – no matter how hard writers try, if they’re not part of a Wonder Woman story, there’s not much to recommend them. And current Queen Nubia – Hippolyta recently arranged for herself to be murdered, just because – is so much duller than the Bronze Age heroine on whom she’s based. Whereas the original Black sister of Wonder Woman was all-action fun, Nu-Nubia is little more than big hair piled atop a throne.

Writer Stephanie Williams’s narration is painfully ponderous at times, and there are some lines that shouldn’t have survived the first draft (‘They could be a potential threat’) despite there being three editors in Brittany Holzherr, Kathleen Wizneski and Paul Kaminski. Williams does do a good job of capturing the particular flavour of Waller we’ve been getting of late – nasty, vindictive, more imperious than any Amazon queen. And the script gives us a fabulous surprise at the end of the instalment.

Waller has surmised that if the Well of Souls is truly in touch with all the women who have ever died, there have to be super-women in there. Ones she can perhaps revive and bend to her will – well, after their essence has been borrowed by the Amazo (presumably it has a codename, like Jadestone or Red Son, but we don’t learn it here).

Jet from the New Guardians I can take or leave. Blue Ice is a Wonder Woman foe so nothingy I had to look her up. Mindboggler is nobody’s favourite villain. But the original Phantom Lady? All-Star Squadron Firebrand Danette Reilly? Lyta Freaking Trevor, the first, then second, Fury!

Event guru Mark Waid surely gave Williams the list of characters to be plucked from the well – fingers crossed the best of them will be back in the DCU, free of any Waller influence, by Absolute Power’s end.

Khary Randolph’s art is nicely dynamic, when it’s not bogged down by the words placed on it. There are some excellent moments, such as that panel showing the connection between Diana and ‘DianAmazo’, and an Amazon seer on her horse (hey, not everyone can have a kanga).

Randolph leaves room for colourist Alex Guimarāes to do his stuff and he rises to the occasion, making the pages fizz with life. And letterer Dave Sharpe ensures the script looks good throughout… I wish, though, at least one comic book letterer would not put full stops at the end of things that aren’t sentences, such as Amazon’s’ names around a table. It’s annoying, period.

Another thing that irked me is one of those notes telling me this story takes place after a comic that isn’t out yet. Come on DC, get your scheduling right.

The covers of Pete Woods for this series are individually very good, but overall a tad samey

This is a decent event comic tie-in, made much more interesting by how it looks set to advance the bigger story. I’ll take it.