WONDER WOMAN: MYTHOS

By: Chris Wyatt
Review Date: Friday, January 10, 2003

WONDER WOMAN: MYTHOS the second in the new line of JUSTICE LEAGUE novels from Pocket Books, is OK, without being anything too special. It opens somewhere in the Bermuda triangle when a honeymooning couple gets separated during a scuba dive. The wife returns to their boat, unable to explain bizarre events surrounding her new husband's disappearance.

Cut to: The Justice League on their orbital space platform/headquarters. They're just returning from stopping a twisted plot involving a malicious cabal of evil environmentalists who hoped to commit mass murder by including special whistles as prizes in boxes of children's breakfast cereal. It turns out that when children use the whistles any animals in the vicinity will hear a tone that makes them want to kill all humans...but don't worry, the League has just set everything straight!

They're all about to shut down for the night a head back home, when they discover that the lost honeymoon diver was last spotted somewhere near the location of Paradise Island, Wonder Woman's home town. This presents a problem, since the supposedly secret island is home to Pandora's Box...which if ever opened will release more evil into the world.

Wonder Woman, with the help of Batman's cyber-researcher Oracle, gets the scent and tries to track down the wayward vacationer. The search ultimately leads not to Paradise Island, but to a previously unknown land mass which is home to an immortal race of men. "Race of men" meaning just that... men. There are no women anywhere to be seen (so I guess it's a lot like a West Hollywood bar).

The novel is written by comic strip veteran Carol Lay, who clearly has potential as a novelist, but has yet to realize that potential. Lay's dialogue is artificial and stilted. ("Mortal fools! The contest has just begun!")

Perhaps recognizing the weakness in her dialogue the author frequently sidesteps conversations by inserting unwieldy text. Just one example: the author writes, "Superman started telling jokes he'd heard at the Daily Planet..."

What jokes are funny to Superman? How does Superman tell jokes? What's his sense of humor like? None of these interesting character questions are addressed by Lay, because in this instance, as in many others, she opts out of doing the actual dialogue work.

Even if Lay's dialogue doesn't shine, it is still more welcome than the long bland paragraphs that sometimes replace it.

But it isn't all bad. Lay does a good job of using internal monologue to build a very modern, very human character for Wonder Woman. This is a Wonder Woman that makes sense, that we can believe in, and that we can even identify with. She's depicted as a character that knows the value of good massage, and looks forward to luxuriating in a warm bath. She has friends, she has relatives and she has a strong affection for her team mates.


It's not easy to take a red and blue spandexed super heroine who wears a gaudy tiara...and still make her believable. So Lay deserves kudos for this accomplishment.

Also, during the last third of the novel, the lackadaisical pace of the story speeds up somewhat, bolstered by some well drawn action scenes involving the League working together as a team.

The novel is alright, but just not great. It's worth reading for people who are huge fans of the character, or who are Justice League completeists, but not advised for readers at large...But hopefully this won't be the last novel we'll see from Ms. Lay, who has a keen sense of character, and who might later establish herself as an interesting author in the genre.

One question though...At the end of the whistle-killer-animal episode we see Wonder Woman doing the paperwork on the case. Why is it that the only woman on the team is stuck doing the secretarial work? I guess super heroism is still a pretty chauvinistic work environment.

(P.S. Fans of HP Lovecraft, be forewarned... as cool as it would be to see the League take on Lord Cuthulhu, MYTHOS refers to actual Greek mythology, and unfortunately has nothing to do with "the mythos".)

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