I think we’ve gotten one big takeaway from the Future State books so far: Dan Watters needs to be put on a mainline Superman book, like, yesterday. Future State: Superman/Wonder Woman #2 is a book that has the characters of Yara Flor and Jon Kent down pat, and even with the relatively unestablished, new state of those characters, Watters’ book has a real sense of distinctiveness.
As I’ve mentioned before in previous Future State reviews, Jon Kent feels like the inheritor of Grant Morrison’s Superman, the Superman of All-Star Superman and Action Comics. This is a Jon Kent with a trophy room that has a legion flight ring, a black mercy and a wall of different colored kryptonites, and begins each day by firing an atom gun into a black hole in the future to save a planet of insect people. But it’s also a Superman who loves animals and worries about climate change.
Yara, too, is just delightful. She is not Diana Prince — this is not the Wonder Woman of the movies. She’s not an all-loving peacemaker from an island of immortal amazons. She is angry and emotional and determined, and leads with her fists. She admits that her adventures have a lot of punching, even! But it honestly makes me like her more – she is more relatable than Diana is. You can see Yara buying a coffee in a way that you can’t see Diana doing.
So, ironically, the heart of this pair is Superman, while the angrier and tricker one is Wonder Woman.
I could go on about the actual plot, but I won’t. It isn’t a story that is going to change the world forever, or be the most important comic in the history of Superman or Wonder Woman. But it’s just fun in its own right, and I don’t think that there’s anything wrong with a comic that is just good.
Now, that all said, let me tell you the most important part of this issue: the cover of Superman and Wonder Woman by the Dodsons, Terry and Rachel. It’s nothing out of their wheelhouse, just a pinup cover, but what a beautiful cover, with the normal curves, brilliant metallics, and fantastic coloring that the Dodsons are known for. What a great look.
Unfortunately, that cover is the best part of the art on the book. While there are fun details and the coloring is really well done, as a whole it’s somewhat substandard. There’s no sense of motion or movement at any point in the comic. Obviously, the nature of the comic medium is that it is a set of stills, but this one seems especially stiff and posed. It’s an unfortunate lapse in an otherwise really good comic.
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