It’s surprising how infrequently villains try to take effective advantage of a hero’s altruism. A hero must always save innocents. A villain is ambivalent to them. Given the right conditions, a hero could be coerced into doing awful things. Such is the case with Diana of Themyscira in the tenth issue of Wonder Woman: Agent of Peace. Veteran writer Marv Wolfman pits Dr. Psycho against Wonder Woman in a one-shot story drawn by José Luis and inker Jonas Trindade. Wolfman and company cleverly manage the business of bringing Wonder Woman into and out of an impossibly complicated trap in 16 concise pages. 

Wonder Woman has broken into a facility to steal advanced tech. The police are there to stop her, but they don’t have much hope of doing so. She’s acting severely out of character, but she isn’t exactly bothering to explain herself. Dr. Psycho isn’t giving her any time to do so. She’s only got just enough time to get the tech to Psycho so that he can give her the location of the two kids who are about to be crushed to death by a speeding train. After that, he’s got a few other errands for her to run with a few other innocents’ lives hanging in the balance. 

Wolfman is adept at delivering a quick story, but things feel a bit rushed in this issues’ 16 pages. It’s fun, though. The sudden rush of resolution hits like a buzzer out of nowhere at issue’s end. Nevertheless, Wolfman makes entertaining work of staging Wonder Woman in a Houdini escape act of a story where she pulls herself out of danger at the last possible moment. The villain is villainous. The hero is heroic. It’s a classic-style superhero story from a man who has written so many classic superhero stories. 

For 16 pages, Wonder Woman alternates between being in a blinding hurry and being in anguish of some sort. It would be a challenge for any artist to articulate this kind of story with the type of impact it needs what with the plot being so relentlessly percussive. Still, Luis and Trindade do a respectable job of bringing the peril to the page with a dramatic sense of perspective and an explosive delivery of physical action. Luis and Tridnade shoot the narrative across the page. Diana goes from motionlessness to bat-out-of-hell flight in the blink of a panel a few times this brief issue. (It happens about once every three pages or so.) This might feel repetitious in less accomplished hands. Luis and Trindade manage to make it feel exhilarating every single time.  

Since his first work for DC back in the late 1960s, Wolfman has written a great many superhero stories, including Crisis on Infinite Earths. A towering figure of the Bronze and Copper ages, Wolfman has the kind of experience that allows him to smartly tell a simple 16-page story that introduces a reasonably novel conflict and resolution. Much like the issue of Agent of Peace that was written by Louise Simonson a few weeks back, it’s nice to see an old master put together a tightly-woven Wonder Woman story.

Grade: A-