Mad
Adversary
June 7, 2004
Wonder Woman #202: Leaks
Writer: Greg Rucka
Artist: Stephen Sadowski
By Avi Green
Veronica Cale, the pharmacy researcher from Dallas who’s sworn to
take down princess Diana of Themyscira, whether by media defamation
or even deadly force, is now reeling in anger at the abortive
attempt to use Doctor Psycho as a weapon, and now is trying to come
with plan B, and we also get to know her motives for wanting to see
Diana destroyed.
Rucka, aside from having come up with a line that I found brilliant
in the 198th issue, has here done another good job in delving into
what it is that’s driving the decidedly very mentally insane for
vengeance Veronica Cale to want to defame our beloved Amazon
princess. She was the daughter of a blue-collar woman who’d earned
some of her living working in a strip bar in Dallas, and had been
the mistress of a married bigshot who hung out there in his spare
time. He’d later made her pregnant, and soon afterwards threw her
out of his life, and she’d taken to working in being a janitor in
order to support her daughter when she was growing up. Worse still,
her mother later became seriously ill when she was in her late teens
and getting ready for college, and while Cale managed to persuade
the bigshot who’d used her mother to pay for medical bills, she
passed away some time later.
She certainly is more than a bit mentally off balance, to say the
least, percieving Diana as naive, when that is but a mere
perception, and aside from not being the fool that Cale apparently
wants to make her out to be, while she may have born to royalty, it
was royalty via tragedy, given what kind of hell the god of strength
Heracles and his army put the Amazons through centuries before. As
one of her victims here argues, her hatred is irrational and
illogical, and is akin to the jealousy she harbors towards Diana.
The thing that impresses me most about the story is that it's almost
like a comment on the enemies of FOX News and Australian businessman
Rupert Murdoch, owner of both that and 20th Century Fox film
corporation, the parent company of the news division.. In other
words, Cale is in the role of such a figure as LA Times editor John
S. Carroll, and Diana is in that of Murdoch (or Roger Ailes, the FOX
News manager).
While previous artist Drew Johnson did some splendid work here,
Sadowski’s is even better, ditto the cover artist.
2012 Update: I no longer
stand by this review. I've since written off this story as
pretentious.
Copyright 2004 Avi Green. All rights reserved.
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