Originally published on Patreon
So the Wonder Girl annual is a bit of a weird one. It's story is split all over the place, and with four different artists working on the book it never manages to feel like a coherent whole.
The issue begin strong enough, with the best part of the issue, with a history for Jerry the Pegasus. Jerry has been Yara's partner since her solo series, but we've had relatively little info about him. Here we get a pretty dark and sad backstory for him that makes it so that you'll never really look at him the same way again.
The rest of the issue sees Yara head to a festival to try and find Joao, one of the guys that she was flirty with in her series. Unfortunately for her, since they last saw each other he's gotten himself a girlfriend. However, Yara's amazon sisters recognise the woman as The Cuca, an evil magic being.
The Cuca reveals herself to the group and a fight ensues. Meanwhile, monster begin to attack the amazon city of Akahim, which might be connected with The Cuca. We also get flashbacks to The Cuca's origin, and how she became cursed.
There's really about four different things happening in this issue, and whilst Jerry's story is nicely kept to one side as a prologue, the other three intercut with each other at multiple points, jumping from narrative to narrative. Each segment also has its own artist, and you end up changing between three different artists too.
The biggest problem is, none of the stories here feel particularly interesting. It feels a lot like this issue is trying to tidy up hanging plot threads from the previous Wonder Girl run, but there's not really much let to do that for. We didn't know where Jerry came from, but he didn't really need an origin. Joao and Yara were flirty with each other and then we never saw him again, but I didn't really need to see him again as he brought little to the series. And The Cuca was featured in maybe a panel or two in one issue and made a vague threat-like thing, so she's back now, but I'd honestly forgotten about her.
Yara is an interesting and fun character, but I think she needs her world to be better built. This issue shows off that the supporting cast that surround her aren't really that well defined, nor interesting. Her intro series was pretty short, and since then she's been in parts of other peoples stories. It feels like she needs to be the focus a bit more.
Hopefully Yara will be back again, and that we'll keep seeing more from her as she's a character I really do like; but this issue doesn't really do much to show her off.
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